In spring of 2023 CSSD Graduate Administrative Fellow Tomoki Fukui interviewed Professor Jean Howard, Director of the Prison Education and Social Justice Working Group, and Patrick Anson, Graduate Assistant for the project. This piece is based on that interview and updated to include events undertaken this year.

Over the past three years the Prison Education and Social Justice Working Group at CSSD has worked to prepare students and faculty to teach inside prison and so to expand educational opportunities for incarcerated men and women.

Teaching inside prison presents unique challenges and opportunities. The group has worked to understand this site of work and to prepare classes that will engage and benefit students who attain their degrees by persistence and resilience.

Those who teach inside, the group discovered, will have their materials scrutinized by Department of Corrections officers before they are cleared to be taught; they themselves will undergo background checks and fingerprinting as a condition of work; and they will need to show unfailing politeness to the prison personnel who screen them when they arrive to teach and monitor the movements and actions of both students and faculty inside the facility.

Part of the Working Group’s task, therefore, was simply to understand how to successfully navigate the prison environment as an instructor at a very particular site of work. The group was aided in this task by speaking regularly with those at Columbia’s Center for Justice, like Claudia Rincón, who coordinate instruction inside affiliated prisons. The group also spoke with instructors who have taught inside and so learned from their experience, and it greatly benefited by engaging regularly with formerly incarcerated students who shared with the group what they found to be the most stimulating and helpful courses and teaching strategies that they had encountered while they were part of prison education programs.

Because, for example, courses often meet at night after the students have been busy with other activities and work assignments for much of the day, it’s important to incorporate active elements into a class plan: structured debates, movement exercises, small group activities that engage everyone. The group read a number of articles that theorize the prison classroom, the kinds of learning that flourishes in that environment, and the relationship of prison education initiatives to abolitionist politics.

Because faculty by and large can’t hold office hours and class time is limited to two hours a week, with some of that time often lost to late starts and interruptions by prison officials, it is incredibly helpful to have graduate students accompany faculty into prison classes. Course assistants and faculty can, for example, divide the work of holding one-on-one conferences at the side of the room and leading discussions with the rest of the class; or they can each facilitate a small group discussion or help prepare materials each week to supplement and enliven individual classes or to find essays that will help students with research papers.

Part of the group’s work has involved conversations with the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of the Graduate School to allow a certain number of faculty to count prison teaching as part of their regular course load and to provide modest stipends for graduate students to serve as course facilitators. We are grateful for the enthusiastic support of the Deans and hope these opportunities will be expanded as needed.

In academic year 2023-24, various members of the working group have taught prison courses. Professor Jennifer Middleton, supported by graduate student Nick Ide, taught “Earth: Origin, Evolution, Processes, Future” at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the fall semester. Currently, Professor Alisa Solomon is teaching “Journalism and Public Life” at Sing Sing; Professor Samuel Kelton Roberts is teaching “Histories of Public Health in Communities of Color: The Built Environment in the 20 th Century United States” at Taconic Correctional Facility; and Professor Julie Crawford is teaching “Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise” at Taconic.

In addition, working group member Catherine Suffern, now working as Program Coordinator for the Justice-in-Education Initiative, has updated the comprehensive handbook for faculty and graduate students teaching in prison, and she and Patrick Anson organized a highly successful informational session for graduate students wishing to become course facilitators for prison classes on March 4.

The working group is in its final semester, but the intention is for its members to continue contributing to prison instruction going forward, as well as to helping students returning from prison to continue their education at Columbia or other institutions of higher education. Prison education is an established, if under-recognized, part of Columbia life. As a collectivity, the Prison Education and Social Justice working group is committed to seeing it thrive and evolve.

Edited by Professor Jean Howard, Patrick Anson, and Evan Berk.

Over the 2021-2022 academic year, the Prison Education and Social Justice Curricula working group—comprised of Columbia University faculty, graduate student workers, members of the Justice-in-Education (JIE) initiative, and local prison education workers—has been meeting regularly to develop courses to be taught in prison contexts and to prepare for the challenges involved in this new kind of teaching.

Since 2015, Columbia faculty who want to teach as part of the JIE initiative can offer Columbia courses to students at various city, state, and federal facilities in New York, such as Rikers, MDC Brooklyn, Sing Sing, Taconic, Queenboro, and Edgecomb. Some of our working group participants—including Jean Howard, Kate Suffern, Julie Crawford, Julie Peters, Jeremy Dodd, and Jason Resnikoff—already have experience teaching in prison contexts.

But this was not true of all our participants. Indeed, the majority joined the group with a desire to teach in prisons but without detailed knowledge of what the process entailed. In our initial meetings, we spent time listening to and learning from those who have experience dealing with the unique circumstances of prison education. While we want to offer the same kind of education in prison contexts that we offer on Columbia’s main campuses, it is important to remember that prison education has its own challenges—for instance, there are specific procedures for the clearance of instructors and their syllabi, as well as limited resources in terms of libraries and classroom equipment. To prepare Columbia faculty and graduate instructors for prison education, we hope to codify our learning in the form of a training guide in the coming year.

With the input of formerly incarcerated students and experts in prison education, the group learned about the kinds of classes that students most enjoyed and the disciplines in which there is the greatest need for courses. From our discussion, it became clear that students are eager to engage with the intellectual content of courses from across the whole spectrum of academic disciplines, from Astronomy to Music, from Physics to English. At the moment, more courses are offered in the humanities than in the sciences and social sciences. While Professors Jeremy Dodd (Physics), Jennifer Middleton (Earth Studies), Geraldine Downey (Psychology), and Caroline Marvin (Psychology) have or will be offering courses in these areas, there remains strong demand for courses in biology and chemistry, as well as in sociology, political science, history, economics, and other disciplines.

This is an imbalance we would like to address going forward. One difficulty is the necessity of preliminary mathematics instruction in order take many classes in a discipline such as Astronomy, but a science subgroup, including Professor Marcel Agüeros, is working on a solution to this issue. In terms of the social sciences, we hope in the coming year to recruit more faculty and graduate workers to develop courses in these disciplines for the prison context.

Looking ahead to this summer, fall, and spring, participants in our working group have developed an exciting array of courses that will be taught at a variety of prisons. Professors Jack Halberstam, Tey Meadows, Rebecca Jordan Young, and Mia Florin-Sefton have been designing an introductory-level Gender and Sexuality course, and Mia will be teaching a version of this over the summer. Professor Middleton is teaching an introductory-level Earth Studies course; Professor Frances Negrón-Muntaner is teaching a course on “Latino Culture and the Global City”; Professor Dodd is teaching a course in Physics; Professor Howard is teaching a course on “Shakespeare and Global Adaptations”; Professor Peters is teaching a course on “Law and Literature”; and Professor Marvin is teaching a course in Cognitive Science.

In addition to formalizing training processes, expanding graduate worker involvement in prison education, and broadening course offerings in prisons, we plan in the coming year to continue developing an undergraduate concentration in “Frontiers of Justice,” which will allow undergraduates on Columbia’s main campuses to engage in social justice projects in the local community. We are excited about all of these developments and look forward to the work ahead.

Patrick Anson is a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature. He is writing a part-ethnographic, part-literary-critical dissertation about programs that propose reading groups focused on 20th and 21st century narrative literature as a means to address a range of social problems, from mass incarceration, where a reading group functions as an alternative sentence for people convicted of an offense, to military trauma, where a reading group helps to establish social connections among veterans.

Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, prison literature, and theater history.