Aileen Baumgartner is director of the college program at Bedford Hills Women’s Correctional Facility in New York. The college program is administered by and accredited by Marymount Manhattan College, and is supported by Bank Street College of Education, Barnard College, Mercy College, and Case University. The college has been in existence since 1997 and since that time has granted over 80 Associates degrees, and 35 Bachelors degrees to the women in the program. Over 200 students participate in the program annually. Aileen will present briefly on some of her reflections about the collaborative nature of the higher education program at Bedford Hills, the funding challenges and solutions they’ve engaged, and the unique role of gender in the formation of the program there.
Carol Estes is cofounder and executive director of University Beyond Bars, a nonprofit educational organization that offers college classes for credit to the men of Washington State Reformatory–at no cost to the inmates or the taxpayers. Through UBB, professors and instructors from area colleges and universities volunteer to teach college classes developed by Ohio University. UBB students study courses ranging from General Psychology to Logic to Pre-Calculus. In the five years since its founding, UBB has granted about 600 hours of college credit and two associates degrees. This year, with the receipt of a substantial grant, UBB is expanding to
the Washington Correctional Center for Women. Estes also served, for the past four years, as the lobbyist for the statewide Quaker policy organization that focuses on criminal justice. She is also an award-winning writer whose work has been syndicated by both the L.A. Times Syndicate and Alternet. She is the former managing editor of YES! magazine and currently a contributing editor there.
Carol Minugh is the Dreamer and Schemer of Gateways for Incarcerated Youth as well as many other programs that are based on Participatory Research across Washington State. Dr. Minugh formed what would become the Gateways program in 1996, when a security officer from Maple Lane School asked for support with the Native Youth. Carol along with the Evergreen Native student group and Evergreen MEChA began discussing with Native and Latino youth about what they wanted to do. Out of these conversations a Native cultural group and Latino cultural group formed that soon multiplied to other cultural groups and eventually developed into a full-time college class with Incarcerated students and Evergreen students in a peer-learning environment. Dr. Minugh earned her doctorate in educational administration from Washington State University and her MPA from Central Washington University. She was the Highlander Chair of the Year in 1995 and spent 3 months at Highlander in Tennessee. She is currently an adviser to the Gateways program and an Emeritus faculty of The Evergreen State College.
Emily Guenther is director of the Grinnell in Prison Program (GPP) at Grinnell College in Iowa. The Grinnell in Prison Program, which offers liberal arts courses at two local prisons, began as a volunteer effort in 2003, and started offering accredited courses in the spring of 2009. GPP is working to establish a regular program in which incarcerated students will complete a first year of college and develop a plan for college after release.
Gillian Knapp and Andrew Nurkin represent New Jersey’s Prison Teaching Initiative, staffed by volunteer faculty, which is teaching college-credit math and English courses in three of the New Jersey state prisons. PTI is founded on a joint agreement by the New Jersey Department of Corrections, Mercer County Community College, and Princeton University to teach courses accredited by MCCC and to develop a degree-granting program, and is staffed by academically qualified volunteers from Princeton University and the surrounding community. Knapp is cofounder with Mark Krumholz of the Princeton Prisons Project, now Prison Teaching Initiative, and currently teaches in and directs its math and science courses. Knapp is a professor in Princeton University’s Department of Astrophysics. Nurkin currently teaches in PTI’s English program and oversees the program at large. Nurkin is Senior Program Coordinator at Princeton University’s Pace Center for Civic Engagement.
Jim Schechter is the Executive Director of the Cornell Prison Education Program – a collaboration between the NYS Department of Corrections, Cornell University, and Cayuga Community College that brings free college education to men incarcerated in a maximum and a medium security facility an hour from Ithaca, NY. Incarcerated students study with Cornell faculty and PhD candidates, earning Cornell credits that transfer towards an associates degree awarded by Cayuga Community College in Auburn, NY. The program now serves 120 men and is supported by some 50 Cornell volunteers each term. Schechter received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Colorado (2004) for research on refugee issues in Sudan supported by Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the U.S. Institute for Peace. In 2005, he arrived at Cornell as a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology. He has since applied his commitment to at-risk communities as director a county jail re-entry program in Ithaca, NY, and manager of a maternal and child healthcare program in Elmira, NY. He returned to Cornell in his present capacity in 2008. When not on campus or at the prison, he parents two boys, spends time cycling in the Finger Lakes surrounding Cornell, and serves on the board of a non-profit devoted to supporting arts in rural communities.
Jody Lewen Executive Director of the Prison University Project at San Quentin, California.
Johanna Foster holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Rutgers University with a concentration in Gender Studies (2000), an MA in Applied Sociology/Social Policy from The American University (1994), and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies/Women’s Studies also from The American University (1992). Her areas of expertise include the intersections of structural inequalities, feminist theories, the sociology of identity and inequalities, critical analyses of mass incarceration, and a particular emphasis on gender and prisons. She has taught undergraduate sociology and women’s studies at a range of academic institutions over the past 15 years, from private four-year schools to urban community colleges, and has spent almost a decade teaching college courses inside correctional facilities in the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area. Dr. Foster has also worked for many years to restore higher education to prison communities, and is the co-founder, with Gina Shea, of College Connections (Taconic Correctional Facility, Bedford Hills, NY). She currently serves as the Director of the College Bound Consortium, a pilot program administered by Drew University in partnership with Raritan Valley Community College to offer a joint AA/BA degree program for students at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, New Jersey’s only state prison for women.
Julie Weiss is a policy associate with the College and Community Fellowship (CCF). CCF is dedicated to helping women achieve college and graduate school degrees after their release from prison. She organizes their Education from the Inside Out Coalition – a nonpartisan collaborative of criminal justice and education advocates, led by both CCF and The Fortune Society’s David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy. Their mission is to remove barriers to higher education funding facing students in prisons and after their release, both in New York State and nationwide. Previously, she worked as a consultant for the Osborne Association, an organization devoted to providing opportunities for criminal justice involved individuals in order to help them transform their lives. She worked on their New York State Initiative for Children with Incarcerated Parents, and authored a report that built the case for counting and tracking these children in order to identify the areas in both New York city and state agencies where their needs and rights could be better identified and addressed. She also developed a strengths-based, self-administered assessment tool in order to enable these agencies to identify the areas where the needs and rights of these children could be better identified and addressed. Prior to that, she worked as an assistant to the Chief Consultant of the California Senate Select Committee on Corrections.
Kaia Stern is Director of the Prison Studies Project at Harvard University and will be teaching in the Departments of Sociology and African and African American Studies during 2010-11. Her work focuses on transformative justice, human rights and education in prison. Kaia has taught at Boston University, Emory University, New York Theological Seminary, and the University of California as well as inside Norfolk, Framingham, and Sing Sing prisons. Kaia’s contribution to the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, Boston University’s Prison Education Program, National Institute of Corrections’ Norval Morris Project, Vera Institute of Justice, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, Kings County District Attorney’s Office, Open Society Institute’s After Prison Initiative, and Interfaith Justice Project at The Riverside Church has facilitated work with numerous schools and prisons in various states for the last sixteen years. She is ordained as an interfaith minister, holds a doctorate in religion from Emory University, and a master’s of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.
Kenneth Parker: I am the Director of the Saint Louis University College-in-Prison Program (SLU-CIPP). We recently received a grant from the Hearst Foundation to fund a pilot associate of arts degree at the state prison in Bonne Terre, MO. I am eager to connect with others around the country and learn more about their work. We have developed an excellent working relationship with the MODOC administrators, and the SLU administrations is solidly behind this mission driven project. My hope is that the coordinator of our research team, Mary Gould, will also be able to attend.
Kirsten Coe is a biology instructor with the Cornell Prison Education Program in Ithaca, NY – a collaboration between Cornell University, the NYS Department of Corrections, and Cayuga Community College that offers a full liberal arts curriculum and grants associates degrees to inmates incarcerated in a maximum and medium security facility in Upstate NY. A 5th year PhD candidate studying plant physiological ecology, Kirsten is interested in pursuing green initiatives in prisons, both inside and outside the classroom. In addition to developing and teaching the first general ecology course held at Auburn Correctional Facility, Kirsten now seeks to initiate a sustainable agriculture project within the prison grounds that will serve as a source of produce for the facility as well as a teaching tool used with future coursework.
Kyes Stevens, Director of Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project.
Lori Pompa is Founder and National Director of The Inside-Out Center at Temple University, National Headquarters of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Lori has been going in and out of prisons and jails since 1985, as a volunteer, social worker, and educator. She worked with the Pennsylvania Prison Society (PPS) for seven years, directing an alternative to incarceration program, and served on the PPS Board of Directors for 10 years. In 1993, she joined the Criminal Justice faculty at Temple University. She has taught more than 100 courses, predominantly in the area of corrections, and employs an experiential learning methodology in all of her teaching. She served as Director of Experiential Learning for Temple’s College of Liberal Arts from 2000 until 2003. Since beginning at Temple, she has taken more than 12,000 students into prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities, through tours and other exchanges. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, founded in 1997, creates opportunities for social change through dialogue-based college classes, involving those inside and those outside of our nation’s correctional facilities. As a 2003 Soros Justice Senior Fellow, she collaborated with others on both sides of prison walls to develop Inside-Out into a national model of transformative pedagogy. By the end of summer 2010, there will be 250 instructors from 35 states who will have been trained in the Inside-Out approach; more than 250 Inside-Out classes have been offered so far in 20 different disciplines at colleges and universities in 25 states.
Margaret Quern Atkins is the Project Manager of the Partnership for Religion and Education in Prisons (PREP) for Drew University and recently served as the Coordinator for the “Counting the Costs” Initiative lead by the former Majority Leader Watson Coleman. Margaret facilitates classes at Northern State Prison in Newark, NJ; Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in Staten Island, NY; and Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, NJ. These classes include both “outside” students and “inside” students in a joint learning environment. Margaret also serves as an Advisor for the “College Bound Consortium” which is designing and implementing an AA and BA degree program inside NJ facilities. Having worked as a professional faith-based Community Organizer in Camden, Margaret brings her organizing training into everything she executes. In September ‘08, Margaret was asked to organize and coordinate Majority Leader Watson Coleman’s initiative to conduct eight community-based public hearings across the State. The “Counting the Costs” Hearings explored the consequences of mass incarceration and the challenges of reentry/reintegration, involved over 1500 participants, and resulted in the passage of three new pieces of comprehensive legislation pertaining to incarceration and re-entry in New Jersey, January ‘10.
Mark Krumholz is currently establishing the University of California – Santa Cruz Project for Inmate Education, which will offer accredited UC Santa Cruz extension classes to jail inmates in Santa Cruz County, CA starting in summer 2010. Prior to this he was the founding director of the Princeton Prisons Project at Princeton University, a partnership between Princeton University and Mercer County Community College that provides accredited courses at both men’s and women’s prisons in New Jersey. He also taught with the Prison University Project. He holds a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley, and is currently a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
Mary L. Cohen completed her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate of philosophy in music education from the University of Kansas. Her general research area is choral singing and well-being with particular emphasis on music programs in prison contexts. She founded the Oakdale Community Choir, a mixed group of male prisoners incarcerated at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center and female and male community members from the region including university students and faculty. She has implemented both writing and songwriting components with this choir and continues to explore the roles of such activities in the lives of people who are incarcerated. She also researches and facilitates group improvisation, examines the roles of movement theories in learning and improvising, and investigates historical and philosophical research inquiries.
Patricia Aceves formerly of the Partnership for Safer Communities program through St. Cloud State University. Dr. Aceves has over 10 years of experience in one of the longest-running college-in-prison programs in the country at St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Rebecca Ginsburg Executive Director of the Education Justice Project of the University of Illinois at Danville Correctional Center. Co-founder of Illinois’ only upper-division program in prison, Professor Ginsburg taught via the Prison University Project before coming to Illinois. Today the Education Justice Project has over 80 enrolled students, 2 resource rooms, and a fleet of tutors and teachers delivering University of Illinois education at the Danville Correctional Center.
Samantha Franks has been working with Gateways for Incarcerated Youth for the past three years. She began as a student and volunteer for the program at The Evergreen State College and moved into a staff position funded by AmeriCorps in 2008. Samantha Coordinated two programs with Gateways; a one-on-one mentoring program and the eight cultural groups that Gateways supports at two juvenile maximum-security facilities in Washington. Franks earned her bachelors degree in Political Science and Fine Arts at The Evergreen State College and is currently on a tour across the country to gather information about Youth Detention Centers and other programs that exist to gain a better understanding of cultural and educational needs in these systems.
Sean Pica serves as Executive Director of the Hudson Link, a privately sponsored college program accredited by Mercy College. Sean Pica comes from, and continues to give back to, the opportunity of higher education in prison. Having taken advantage of all the programs available to him, from RTA through college, a Master of Theology degree and, upon release, a Master of Social Work from Hunter College, he now serves as the Executive Director of Hudson Link, which operates the Bachelors Program at Sing Sing Correctional Center in New York.
Simone Weil Davis serves on the U.S. national steering committee for Inside-Out and is a co-facilitator of the Instructor Training Institutes. A professor of American literature, American Studies and Gender Studies who has taught at Mount Holyoke College, New York University and Long Island University, Simone will be visiting faculty at U of T’s Centre for the Study of the United States during 2010-2011. While her first book, Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s (Duke UP 2000), treated the interplay between commodity culture and gendered subjectivity in the U.S., her work in progress, Raising the Jailhouse Roof: Women, Writing and Incarceration, looks not at commercial but at carceral impacts on expressivity.
Tony Zaragoza Dr. Tony Zaragoza has been involved with Gateways for Incarcerated Youth at The Evergreen State College since 2005. Tony applies theories of popular education combined with political economy by facilitating a unique classroom that includes students from Evergreen and from the juvenile incarcerating institutions of Green Hill and Maple Lane Schools. This is an interactive educational exchange for college credit between students at an institution of higher education and a correctional institution is rare and powerful and speaks to the visionary and creative thinking of Tony and his students. Has worked in class on the subjects of Political Economy (esp. Political Economy of Racism), Chicana/o Studies, Popular Education, Social Movements, Labor History, Technology Studies (esp. Labor Replacement), History and Political Economy of the Northwest, Radio Production, and Independent Media at Evergreen. Tony grew up in the mill towns of Hammond, Gary and East Chicago, Indiana and earned his bachelors at Indiana University and his Masters and Doctorate in American Studies at Washington State University.
