Jean Trounstine : Education in Prison Works

Image from audaciousideas.org.

So are we listening?
Study proves education in prison works

The largest ever meta-analysis of prison education and its overwhelming positive effect on recidivism was released in August, so what are we going to do about it?

By Jean Trounstine / The Rag Blog / September 16, 2013

It was barely six months ago when I first wrote about the battle to bring back Pell Grants for prisoner education programs across the country. Pell grants are those all-important grants that my college students rely on and that once funded prisoners -- 1 percent of those who received such grants across the country.

Pells were “disappeared” under “progressive” President Bill Clinton in 1994 when he signed an omnibus crime bill that allowed removal of Pells. And with their removal, we punctured college programming in many states.

Back in March, I applauded the work many were doing with little money to bring attention to the need for Pells and the need for education in general for those behind bars. This underscores a well-known fact: the more education a person has, the less likely that person is to be involved in the criminal justice system or to recidivate if they have been incarcerated.

And in Texas, at a time when 1-in-27 adults are in prison, jail, on probation, or parole, that is pretty significant. Education keeps people out of prison and the clearer that becomes, the more likely we are to get others to see we save money by helping to fund the education of those in prison, on probation, and on parole. Pell grants still haven't made it back as a way to fund college education in prison but that doesn’t mean we can’t advocate for their return.

This past August, a report from the Rand Corporation -- apparently "the largest-ever meta-analysis of correctional educational studies" -- found a statistical basis for what some of us have been saying for years. According to Rand, prisoners who "receive general education and vocational training are significantly less likely to return to prison after release and are more likely to find employment than peers who do not receive such opportunities."

The cost is also a major plus for prisons and prisoners: a $1 investment in prison education "reduces incarceration costs by $4 to $5 during the first three years post-release."

Most important is this new piece of data: those who participate in any sort of correctional education program have 43 percent less liklihood of returning to prison than those who do not. Not insignificantly, employment after release was 13 percent higher among those who participated in either academic (or vocational) education programs than those who did not.

Amidst sweltering Texas jail cells and lawsuits over unbearable conditions, Texas recently got some notice for its business education program -- somewhat ironically, in my opinion, called “Prison Entrepreneurship Program. And the Windham School District has always supported correctional educational courses.

But across the country, the kind of education that gives people access to science, the humanities, and social sciences is not given any sort of priority -- no matter how much that education might make prisoners better next-door neighbors. I’d love to see EdX -- free Internet courses offered by such institutions as Harvard and MIT -- offered to prisoners. But who will take the time to develop that program when an "eye for an eye" makes us say, “they did the crime, who cares?”

Several years ago I visited a prison in England and discovered how much some Brits valued education behind bars. They were allowing and encouraging prisoners who were on their way out to apply to colleges while still incarcerated so they'd have some security when they reentered the free world.

One prison I visited also brought in those searching for workers -- i.e. recruiters -- to watch prisoners perform in theatrical productions. After seeing a performance, job counselors interviewed the actors and many were offered jobs upon release. This was one of the most supportive and creative ways I had seen -- anywhere -- to help people land on their feet.

These studies that we do -- Rand's being the latest and perhaps the most comprehensive to date -- are great, but only if prisons and correctional officials actually listen to the results. It's good to hear Attorney General Eric Holder saying that

These findings reinforce the need to become smarter on crime by expanding proven strategies for keeping our communities safe, and ensuring that those who have paid their debts to society have the chance to become productive citizens.

Now let's bring back Pell Grants and make college accessible and affordable for all -- even, and especially, those behind bars who are proving they are more likely to stay out of crime if given books, pens, teachers, and a chance.

[Jean Trounstine is an author/editor of five published books and many articles, professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, and a prison activist. For 10 years, she worked at Framingham Women's Prison and directed eight plays, publishing Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison about that work. She blogs for Boston Magazine and takes apart the criminal justice system brick by brick at jeantrounstine.com where she blogs weekly at "Justice with Jean." Find her contributions to The Rag Blog here.]

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Bob Feldman : More African-Americans Enter Texas Politics, Prisons, 1974-1995

Hoe squad from Texas' Clemens Unit in early 1970s. Photo from Texas Prison Museum.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 14: 1974-1995/1 -- More African-Americans in politics, prison

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 30, 2013

[This is the first section of Part 14 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1970 and 1990 the number of African-Americans who lived in Texas increased from 1.4 million to 2 million, but the percentage of Texas residents who were African-Americans remained at 12 percent. More African-Americans lived in Texas in 1990 than in any other state except for New York and California, and 90 percent of African-Americans in Texas lived in towns and cities by 1990.

Although the percentage of African-Americans in Texas who were registered voters dropped from 83 percent in 1968 to around 65 percent during the 1980s, the number of African-Americans who held political office in Texas increased from 45 in 1971 to 472 in 1992. And even though no African-American was elected to serve as a Governor of Texas or a U.S. Senator from Texas between 1970 and 1995, an African-American, Barbara Jordan, had been elected by 1972 to represent one of Texas’s congressional districts in the House of Representatives.

By 1985, 15 African-Americans had been elected to sit in the Texas state legislature, and by 1990 there were 12 African-American mayors and 138 African-American city council members in various cities and towns in Texas. In Austin, the first African-American man to sit on the Austin City Council since the 1880s -- Berl Handcox -- had been elected in 1971.

The first African-American mayor of Dallas, former Texas Secretary of State Ron Kirk (who later became the U.S. Trade Ambassador in the Democratic Obama Administration), was elected in 1995. In addition, between 1990 and 1992, an African-American woman named Marguerite Ross Barnett was the president of the University of Houston, and in 1991 the birthday of Martin Luther King was made a state holiday in Texas.

Yet between 1960 and 1984, the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had decreased from 15,000 to 5,000, and as late as 1993 “the University of Texas at Austin could count only 52 African-Americans among its faculty of 2,300 -- about 2 percent,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. In addition, “in Austin , expansion of the University of Texas into an African-American community displaced people into more crowded neighborhoods” between 1974 and 1995, according to the same book.

Around 30 percent of all African-Americans who lived in Texas in 1990 still lived in poverty; and in 1987, the U.S. Equal Opportunities Commission office in Dallas still received 5,800 complaints of racial discrimination from African-Americans who lived in Texas.

Of the 37,532 people locked inside state and federal prisons in Texas in 1985, 36 percent were African-American prisoners; and 29 percent of all the imprisoned people in Texas who were executed by the State of Texas in the 1980s and early 1990s were African-Americans. Historically, “261 of 316 men executed by Texas between 1924 and 1995 were black,” according to Black Texans.

In addition, while 9 percent of college students in Texas were African-American in 1993, between 1985 and 1991 the percentage of people locked inside Texas prisons who were African-American had increased from 36 to 41 percent. And in 1990, 40 percent of all African-American families in Texas were now headed by women.

The total number of people imprisoned in state and federal prisons in Texas increased from 16,833 to 127,766 (including 7,935 female prisoners) between 1974 and 1995; and, between 1991 and 1996, Texas -- whose imprisoned population grew by 156 percent during these five years -- was the state with the highest percentage increase in the number of people incarcerated during this historical period.

In the 1980 Ruiz v. Estelle court decision, “the entire state prison system” of Texas “was declared unconstitutional on overcrowding and conditions,” according to the ACLU National Prison Project’s 1995 “Status Report: State Prisons and the Courts;” and, in 1996, Texas -- with an incarceration rate of 686 prisoners per every 100,000 residents -- was the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the United States.

Between 1970 and 1985, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 250,000 to 436,000 and “from 1980 to 1990, Austin’s Jewish-affiliated population more than doubled, from 2,100 to 5,000,” according to an essay by Cathy Schechter, titled “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell,’” that appeared in Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth Roseman’s book Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas.

By 1988, around 90,000 people of Jewish religious background now lived in Texas, according to the www.texasalmanac.com website, and of the nearly 17 million people who lived in Texas in 1990, around 108,000 were now of Jewish religious background.

Despite the continued presence of local anti-war movement activists in Austin in the 1980s, “Lockheed Austin Division [LAD] was formed in August 1981 by Lockheed Missiles & Space Companies to develop military tactical support programs and systems” in Austin;” and the programs under development at LAD in the 1980s fell “under two general headings of command and control systems and target location systems,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

The same book also revealed that “the equipment developed through these programs [was] used to provide military commanders with current information on the location of military units within their operating area”“employment reached 2,000 by July 1984” and a year later the number of LAD employees: had “risen to 2,500.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Jean Trounstine : Texas Calls it 'Ad Seg' but Prisoners Call It Torture

Image of life in solitary via Buried Alive in Texas Prisons.

Solitary confinement:
Texas calls it 'Ad Seg' but
prisoners call it torture

A recent conference on solitary confinement at Harvard University prompted prisoners at Between the Bars to tell their side of the story. Here’s what they say about being caged within a cage.

By Jean Trounstine /The Rag Blog / March 19, 2013

This past February 25th, a panel of experts on solitary confinement converged at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss the horrendous practice in our U.S. prisons that many call “cruel and unusual punishment.”

While the panel detailed the disastrous effects such isolation causes, the legal challenges through the years and the “judicial and institutional apathy” towards our 80,000 people in solitary confinement nationwide -- as of 2012, 8,100 of those in Texas alone -- what was most intriguing to me was the response to the panel by the real experts -- prisoners.

You can read their words at Between the Bars, which describes itself as “a weblog platform for people in prison, through which the 1% of Americans who are in prison can tell their stories.” Prisoners from across the country have created over 5,000 documents for BTB since the site began in 2008. Before the panel was held, Massachusetts Institute of Technology whiz kid Charlie Tarr and assistants, Carl McLaren and Benjamin Sugar, who maintain the site, put out a call to hundreds of prisoners telling them about the conference.

While I’ve written about Between the Bars before (see "Behind Bars and Blogging for Human Rights"), this time prisoners were asked to share their experience with solitary confinement through their blogs. Documents were posted online where anyone could post a response. The responses were then mailed to the prisoners who have a chance to reply. The circle continues: prisoners’ thoughts get voice; they have access to the online world; they become part of the conversation.

Texas prisoner, Guy S. Alexander, described his recent stay at the Allen B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston before his sentence of death was overturned in May 2012. Polunsky, he wrote, takes away “more of your dignity than anything... mental and long-term isolation of human contact... We had no television, or group recs, no contact visits ….a small narrow window at the top back of the cells... they made a day feel horrible… the so called paranoid rules.”

Alexander, who was in solitary at Polunsky for 12 years, is now in the Harris County Jail, close to his home in Houston. But he is still “in a cell 24 hours a day and it's bad, they don't even have air here… no circulation vents... I do have a TV and it helps, but a person needs input, friends to write and see and talk to.” On his profile page, Alexander wrote “I’m locked up but my soul and heart aren’t. I’m lonely and alone… an open book, not a monster.”

Jeremy Pinson, who made substantial threats against the government, is housed in a Colorado federal prison in solitary confinement in spite of the fact that he was diagnosed as mentally ill -- which he writes about in his over 77 blogs. Sadly, this is not uncommon. According to Solitary Watch, as of 2012, more than 2,000 Texas prisoners in Ad Seg were diagnosed with a “serious mental illness or a developmental disability.”

Obviously bright, obviously tormented, Pinson wrote:

For 943 days I have eaten meals alone. For 943 days I have watched men's minds break down in a painfully slow process. First they become eccentric. Then they become antisocial and belligerent. Next comes anger and they lash out at their captors only to be pepper sprayed and beaten into submission. Next comes despair as they realize that they are utterly helpless. For many the next step involves a noose, a bottle of pills, or a razor blade. For a few their misery ends in death. For 943 days I have wanted to and even tried to die... How many shattered minds, bodies and souls will it take before this practice, this cruelty, this barbaric evil is ended?

About solitary-confinement, Pinson wrote a series of questions for the panel, which included: Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who has extensively researched the psychological effects of solitary confinement; Professor Jules Lobel, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Mikail DeVeaux, himself a former prisoner who experienced solitary and who is now executive director and founder of Citizens Against Recidivism, an NYC advocacy group; and Bobby Dellelo, an activist working for the American Friends Service Committee who spent five years in solitary -- or what he calls the “monster factory” -- at Walpole Prison in Massachusetts.

Hopefully, Pinson will receive responses to questions such as “Why do civil rights groups allow mentally ill inmates to be kept in solitary confinement?” and “How can individual inmates in solitary effectively challenge their abuse and that which they witness?”

L. Samuel Capers, a prisoner on Death Row in California’s San Quentin Prison, wrote of the smell of the ocean so close to their walls as “torture... We look at dirty tan brick walls, razor wire and guns all day. We breathe in frustration, we eat anger, we walk in despair.” He asked in his blog why so few people know what solitary can do to prisoners, “especially when they are returned back to society without the proper psychological treatment.”

This past September, Grits for Breakfast reported on the perils of reentry following solitary. The Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee was told that in 2011, 878 prisoners who'd been locked in Ad Seg “were released directly to the streets without parole supervision of any type after finishing out their full sentence.” Another “469 were paroled directly” from Ad Seg.

While parole has proven to be more successful than direct release to the streets, under the best of situations it still is a recipe for disaster to send someone who has lived in solitary directly to the free world. Without time in lower security where he or she can do programs, prepare a home plan, and try to get job leads, a person is almost bound to return to captivity.

A Wisconsin prisoner, La Ron McKinley-Bey, an artist on BTB who has his artwork posted online, theorized what many others have written about -- that prison rehab is difficult when over 2.5 million people crowd our prisons. He wrote about people going to solitary as “those who couldn't adapt or conform to the structured demands of the prison environment,” and pointed out why we’ve confined so many to solitary:

Prison officials, having given up on the concept of rehabilitation, without resources or experience on how to effectively treat the mentally ill or the drug addicted, consigned many to languish in solitary confinement with the rest of the undesirables, and to add more chaos to that environment.

While excellent websites like Solitary Watch take apart the destructive practices in prisons that these prisoners have lived through (See "Texas Lockdown: Solitary Confinement in the Lonestar State"), it is the voices of those behind bars that give us the truest picture of a practice that we must work to change, the cage within the cage.

[Jean Trounstine is an author/editor of five published books and many articles, professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, and a prison activist. For 10 years, she worked at Framingham Women's Prison and directed eight plays, publishing Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison about that work. She blogs for Boston Magazine and takes apart the criminal justice system brick by brick at jeantrounstine.com where she blogs weekly at "Justice with Jean." Find her contributions to The Rag Blog here.]

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