About the Bard Prison Initiative

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) is restoring higher-education to the prisons of New York. For over twenty years, college-in-prison programs slashed rates of reincarceration from 60% to less than 15%. They spread higher-education among the most isolated communities and were the most cost-effective form of public correctional spending. Despite these facts, funding for prison colleges was eliminated in 1995, at the peak of the 'tough on crime' frenzy in American electoral politics. Within that year some 350 such programs closed nationwide, ending the presence of the most affordable and transformative programs in American criminal justice.

In the past twenty years America's prison population has increased exponentially, draining precious resources from other social institutions. Hardest hit have been state and community colleges. New York's prison budget now exceeds its budget for higher education. These trends have had the gravest impact on those communities most entangled in the criminal justice system and most isolated from educational opportunity. Nationwide, there are now more African American men held in prison than enrolled in college.

BPI offers college inside three long-term, maximum-security prisons and two transitional medium-security prisons. Between these five prison campuses the Initiative now enrolls nearly 200 women and men fulltime in a rigorous and diverse liberal arts curriculum, offering both associate and bachelor degrees.

The existence of the Bard Prison Initiative also has a profound effect on the intellectual life of the Bard College campus. Each week, roughly forty campus students visit regional prisons as volunteers. They facilitate a wide variety of pre-college opportunities from GED mentoring to courses in theology and workshops in the arts. These on-campus students now enroll in a range of classes related to their experiences with BPI. A number of Bard/BPI alumni have gone on to organize similar volunteer programs across the country. The Initiative draws on increasing student volunteerism and integrates it with the study of America's social and civic institutions.

Established after the demise of publicly supported prison education in 1995, BPI is one of only a handful of existing programs of its kind left in the United States.

"Maximum Security Education" Click here to view the CBS News 60 Minutes feature on the Bard Prison Initiative, aired on April 15, 2007