[B]ennington College has been selected for a national pilot program that helps prison inmates get a college education with federal Pell grants.
Federal education officials say the Second Chance Pell pilot is designed to help inmates “get jobs, support their families and turn their lives around.”
The small liberal arts college in the southwest corner of Vermont is one of 67 higher ed institutions picked by the Obama administration to take part in the $30 million program that will educate 12,000 inmates in 141 state and federal prisons with Pell grants of up to $5,815.
Mariko Silver, the president of Bennington College, said the pilot program will have “a tremendous impact for individuals, their families, and society — and allows us to extend Bennington’s educational philosophy into a world where it is most needed.”
Bennington will serve maximum security inmates from the Great Meadow correctional facility in Comstock, New York, that take part in the Prison Education Initiative at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action.
This past fall, Bennington College began offering an education program with an introduction to college course for inmates at Great Meadow. Since then they have expanded with classes in literature and social sciences in the spring and summer terms.
David Bond, director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action, says there are profound inequalities in the U.S. educational system that can result in “very different experiences for different groups of people.” Bond, who teaches anthropology and environmental studies to students at Bennington and SUNY-Albany, said the students “are capable of performing at the most rigorous, at the highest level found in a college classroom.”
Bond has found that the students in prison are highly motivated. “They are quite capable and they rise to the occasion and often perform better than any student I have ever had.”
The Pell grant, he says, builds on a program already underway through the Prison Education Initiative. Bond and Annabel Davis-Goff, who heads up the initiative, applied to be a part of the pilot program. More than 200 schools competed for the 67 slots that were awarded, said Bond.
The funding for students will allow Bennington to expand into environmental science and policy coursework, as well as computer science — areas the college believes will help prepare inmates for jobs on the outside.
Bond and Davis-Goff are working with a number of colleges and universities that are close to inmates’ home communities to make sure their credits will transfer when they leave prison.
“A great many of these men, if they had been offered a good education when they were children or adolescents, might have had other lives,” Davis-Goff said.
Since the passage of the 1994 crime bill, inmates have been prohibited from receiving Pell grants. The U.S. Department of Education is using their authority to offer pilot programs as an avenue to fund schooling for prisoners.
Bond said a high quality education should be affordable for everyone. “In these trying times, education is not a luxury, it is a necessity, for everyone,” Bond said.
Data has shown that education in particular has an overwhelmingly positive impact on inmates. Post-secondary training saves money and helps strengthen communities, Bond says.
In 2013, the RAND Corporation published a study that found prisoners who took classes were 43 percent less likely to return to prison within a three year window than those who didn’t. RAND also found that the odds of finding a job were better for inmates that had taken classes while in prison. Former prisoners who have been educated are less likely to reoffend, according to the study.
The inmate training program at Bennington College fits in with the school’s overall approach to education. The school, he says, has been about “cultivating the kind of citizens we need and this is a great opportunity for Bennington to extend that philosophy into a place where it is urgently needed.”
