Doing Time

by Bell Gale Chevigny

  Back in my cell, for weeks I refused to eat. Styrofoam cups of urine and hot water were hurled at me. Other things happened. There were beatings, shock therapy, intimidation.

  Later, I regained some clarity of mind. But there was a place in my heart where I had died. My life had compressed itself into an unbearable dread of being. The strain had been too much. I had stepped over that line where a human being has lost more than he can bear, where the pain is too intense, and he knows he is changed forever. I was now capable of killing, coldly and without feeling. I was empty, as I have never, before or since, known emptiness. I had no connection to this life.

  But then, the encroaching darkness that began to envelop me forced me to re-form and give birth to myself again in the chaos. I withdrew even deeper into the world of language, cleaving the diamonds of verbs and nouns, plunging into the brilliant light of poetry’s regenerative mystery. Words gave off rings of white energy, radar signals from powers beyond me that infused me with truth. I believed what I wrote, because I wrote what was true. My words did not come from books or textual formulas, but from a deep faith in the voice of my heart.

  I had been steeped in self-loathing and rejected by everyone and everything — society, family, cons, God and demons. But now I had become as the burning ember floating in darkness that descends on a dry leaf and sets flame to forests. The word was the ember and the forest was my life… .

  Writing bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man. I wrote of the emotional butchery of prisons, and my acute gratitude for poetry. Where my blind doubt and spontaneous trust in life met, I discovered empathy and compassion. The power to express myself was a welcome storm rasping at tendril roots, flooding my soul’s cracked dirt. Writing was water that cleansed the wound and fed the parched root of my heart.

  I wrote to sublimate my rage, from a place where all hope is gone, from a madness of having been damaged too much, from a silence of killing rage. I wrote to avenge the betrayals of a lifetime, to purge the bitterness of injustice. I wrote with a deep groan of doom in my blood, bewildered and dumbstruck; from an indestructible love of life, to affirm breath and laughter and the abiding innocence of things. I wrote the way I wept, and danced, and made love.

  1991, Reflections on Albuquerque County Jail, New Mexico and Arizona State Prison-Florence, Arizona

  Pell Grants for Prisoners

  Jon Marc Taylor

  Prisoners are the black sheep of our societal family, and thus discussions of their treatment are relegated to back-room deliberations of how they should be punished. A common opinion is that we are too soft on criminals and that whatever rehabilitation (or lack thereof) they receive is more than they deserve. An example of this disposition was the congressional effort to bar inmate eligibility for Pell Grant higher-education financial assistance. Last year, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed legislation prohibiting offenders from qualifying for such aid. Before surveying this attempt at capitol punishment, a short history of college programs for prisoners is in order.

  Not until 1953, when the University of Southern Illinois matriculated its first class of inmate-students, did higher education enter the nation’s penal institutions. U.S.I.’s radical experiment was slow to take root, for by 1965 there were only twelve Post-Secondary Correctional Education programs in the country. The largest constraint facing these programs was the same as for any type of rehabilitative program — lack of funding.

  In 1965, however, Congress passed Title IV of the Higher Education Act, which contained the Pell Grant program entitling student-prisoners who met certain criteria to receive financial aid for college-level studies. With the implementation of this funding, PSCE opportunities flourished; by 1973 there were 182 programs, by 1976, 237 programs and by 1982 (the last official count), 350 programs offered in 90 percent of the states. Yet with the continued growth of the nation’s correctional population, at most 10 percent of the country’s prisoners were enrolled in PSCE.

  Even so, prison officials could see the effectiveness of these programs. Correctional administrators, facing ever-growing numbers of offenders whom they had to house and control, found that those enrolled in them were easier to manage and better behaved than the average prisoner, provided a calming effect on the rest of the population, and served as positive role models.

  What is more, beginning in the mid-1970s, studies of inmate college students (especially those earning degrees) revealed that they recidivated at much lower rates than nonenrolled prisoners. Between 1974 and 1979, three programs in Alabama, Maryland, and New Jersey reported substantial reductions in offender-students’ recidivism, compared with standard return rates. These reductions ranged from a drop from 57 to 37 percent in one case to a dramatic difference of from 80 to only 10 percent in another program.

  Perhaps the most widely reported evaluation was published in Psychology Today in 1983. The study noted that “recidivism .. . among college classes at New Mexico State Penitentiary between 1967 and 1977 averaged 15.5 percent, while the general population averaged 68 percent recidivism.”

  The positive reports continue into this decade, with the District of Columbia’s Lorton Prison College Program noting a recidivism rate for students of only 6 percent, compared with an average that exceeded 40 percent. In 1991, the New York Department of Correctional Services reported on its four-year study of the state’s PSCE — the second-largest program in the nation. The study found a “statistically significant” difference in the return rates of those who earned degrees and those who did not complete the college program.

  Today it costs $25,000 annually to incarcerate an individual, whereas one year of PSCE programming can be purchased for $2,500. In other words, for only 10 percent of the cost of a single year of imprisonment, an offender can enroll for two semesters of postsec-ondary education. If such education is continued for two to four years, society more than likely will receive ex-offenders whose chances of recidivating are in the low double- or single-digit range, compared with a national recidivism range of 50 to 70 percent.

  Besides providing substantial savings by reducing the costly rate of recidivism, prison college programs produce educated workers for the economy. Studies in New York and Ohio in the early 1980s, at the height of the Reagan recession, revealed that PSCE graduates were employed in substantially higher numbers than other parolees in the area (60 to 75 percent compared with only 40 percent), suggesting that the education earned by the offenders favorably influenced employers’ decisions in hiring them and offset the social stigma attached to their ex-con status. Parolee unemployment is a prime contributor to recidivism, so any program that enhances an ex-offender’s employability is of benefit to the community.

  The Corrections Program of the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico, has had great success in turning around its inmate-students. Examples include a graduate who went on to become a physician, another who became a vice president of an international company, and others who became personnel directors and teachers. A former death-row inmate rose to the directorship of a state corrections industry department.

  These success stories give added emphasis to the words of former Chief justice Warren Burger: “We must accept the reality that to confine offenders behind walls without trying to change them is an expensive folly with short-term benefits — winning battles while losing the war.”

  On July 30,1991, Senator Jesse Helms rose to introduce Amendment 938, which read: “No person incarcerated in a federal or state penal institution shall receive any funds appropriated to carry out subpart 1 of part A of Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965.” Helms fulminated that “American taxpayers are being forced to pay taxes to provide free college tuitions for prisoners at a time when so many law-abiding, taxpaying citizens are struggling to find enough money to send their children to college.”

  The Helms Amendment was grounded in two assumptions: (1) that a significant diversion of grants from needy young people to prisoners is occurring, resulting in a
large percentage of traditional students failing to receive aid; and (2) that inmate-students are not “needy.” Both are false. Only 1.2 percent of the total number of Pell Grants issued went to prisoners. By any stretch of the imagination, this is not a significant diversion of funds.

  As for prisoners not being “needy,” a 1986 Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin noted that 60 percent of prison inmates had earned less than $10,000 the year previous to their incarcerations. In other words, they would have been below the poverty line and thus eligible for educational financial aid had they not been imprisoned.

  With African-Americans, Latinos, and other minorities composing 55 percent of our country’s prison population, and with 60 percent of inmates coming from the lowest economic levels of society and 41 percent having less than a ninth-grade education, compared with 16 percent of the nation’s adult population, there can be little doubt that student-prisoners are “needy.” “If you want to educate black men, if you want co reclaim the talent out there,” observes Robert Powell, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Shaw University in North Carolina, “you have to go into the prison.” The sad reality in the United States today is that PSCK is one of the few remaining means by which minority youth can receive a college education.

  The same day Amendment 938 was introduced, it passed the Senate by a floor vote of 60 to 38 and was attached to an appropriations bill. Helms later attached his amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act. By then, the legislative action had shifted to the floor of the House.

  On March 26, 1992, Representative Thomas Coleman and Representative Bart Gordon presented a joint amendment that would prohibit “any individual who is incarcerated in any Federal or State penal institution” from qualifying for Pell Grant assistance. The basic argument propelling the measure was the same as the one Senator Helms had promulgated the previous July. Many “facts” and “figures” were bandied about during proponents’ orations over the issue, most of them inaccurate.

  Representative Coleman, for example, claimed 100,000 prisoners received Pell Grants. This figure would mean that one out of every eight inmates in the nation is a college student! Such a notion is preposterous. In 1982, researcher John Littlefield and Bruce Wolford estimated that 27,000 inmate-students were enrolled in 359 prison college programs, representing less than 4 percent of the national penal population. Another study conducted the same year reported that PSCE funding was arranged through a myriad of sources, but Pell Grants were the primary tuitional financing for 37 percent of the inmate-students. Even with prison populations doubling in the interim, projecting a matching increase of inmate-students and guesstjmattng a doubling in the percentage of Pell Grant use by this population, a reasonable assumption is that fewer than 40,000 offenders received federal higher-education assistance in 1991.

  During the House debate, Representative Steve Gunderson tossed more false facts into the mix. He stated that only 3.1 million students out of 6.3 million applicants received Pell Grants, and that this imbalance of aid “to the most needy of students among us” could be substantially corrected by barring inmate eligibility.

  Actually, 3.6 million students receive Pell Grants, not 3.1 million. Furthermore, the Senate’s version of the Higher Education Reauthorization Act significantly increased the appropriation Jot the Pell Grant program, enabling an additional 600,000 students to receive aid. The increased funding of the program wiJl raise the family income ceiling from the current $30,000 to $50,000, with grant maximums raised as well, from $2,400 to $3,700 and eventually $4,500 by 1999. Ironically, Senator Helms cast the only dissenting vote against the very program he was so concerned about the year before.

  The Coleman Gordon Amendment easily passed, 351 to 39, and was sent to a joint House-Senate conference, whose duty it was to resolve the differences between it and the Senate’s version.

  Meanwhile, outside Congress, opposition to the Helms and Coleman-Gordon amendments was gathering. On July 31, 1991, the day after Senator Helms introduced his amendment, a one-page alert, headlined HELMS AMENDMENT WOULD DROP INCARCERATED PELL GRANT PROGRAMS, went out over the national Post-Secondary e-mail network. The bulletin briefly explained the proposition and included some of the debate’s highlights.

  This rapid notification of the impending disaster facing Post-Secondary Correctional Education galvanized a wide array of institutions, organizations, and individuals. College presidents and university deans, professional associations and political action committees, friends and family of prisoners as well as prisoners themselves— all organized campaigns and lobbied Congress to vote against the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners.

  In September 1991, the fourteen universities and nine private colleges that compose New York’s Inmate Higher Education Program (IHEP) convened their semiannual conference with the Pell Grant crisis as the main item on the agenda. Tbey agreed to form a political action committee to oppose the amendments.

  The newly formed PAC collected information and disseminated it both within and outside the New York IHEP association. It also cooperated with other concerned organizations, including Educators for Social Responsibility, the Fortune Society, Literacy Volunteers, Minorities in Corrections, the National Education Association, the NAACP, the New York State Correctional Association, the Coalition for Criminal Justice, PEN, the Urban League, and Wilmington College. Additionally, the PAC” contacted the offices of representatives who sat on the joint congressional committees and provided extensive PSCE data.

  Another group active in the fight was the Correctional Education Association. Founded in 1946 by Austin McCormick, the man who established correctional education as a fundamental part of prison reform in the 1930s, the CEA is the only professional association ded icated to serving educators and administratots who provide services to students in correctional settings. Steven Steures, the CEA executive director and legislative network chairman, organized the association’s extensive response.

  Also active was Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE), which was founded in Texas in 1972, was expanded nationally in 1985, and now has more than seven thousand members. The organization’s position is that prisons should be used only for those who absolutely must be incarcerated and should have all the resources they need to turn prisoners’ lives around. The national office in Washington has extensive contacts with congressional representatives and worked closely with Senator Pell’s staff.

  Across the nation, inmate-students also worked to defeat their funding exclusion. On some prison-college campuses, such as in New York State, the faculty and institution staff organized the students’ reaction, while on others the students themselves marshaled their response.

  The men enrolled in Ball State University’s extension program at the Indiana State Reformatory were such a self-motivated group. Members of the prison’s debate team utilized the semester’s various speech and communications classes, which had enrolled over 70 percent of the 13 8-member student body, as a forum to get the word out.

  With the cooperation of the teaching staff, students in the speech classes were allowed to fashion presentations in accordance with the courses’ structures to provide information on the Helms Amendment. These presentations ranged from simple lectures to round-table discussions to mock debates. The students imaginatively employed cost-comparison charts, experts on PSCE, and audience participation as debate judges to bring home the point of the value of PSCE and the seriousness of the legislative threat. Other students wrote letters directly to the state’s representatives, or to friends and relatives urging them to do so.

  The combined efforts of the nation’s colleges and universities, professional associations and political action committees, individual voters, as well as the erudite pleas of the prisoners themselves, effected the defeat of the Helms Amendment in two separate joint committees. The process was repeated against the Coleman-Gordon Amendment.

  In this effort incarcerated persons learned that they were not pow
erless. They could lobby Washington politicians just like any other special interest group. What the men and women who wear numbers on their chests lack in political clout and financial resources, they can make up in cunning and determination to succeed. Across the nation, the motto of prisoners needs to become nee aspera tenant (frightened by no difficulties).

  1993, Indiana State Reformatory Pendleton, Indiana

  Tetrina

  Bedford Hills Writing Workshop

  Six women argue with their lives

  as they write among their dreams

  chasing shadows down streets

  and reaching for words

  like fruit, like stars, words

  to save their lives

  to snatch them from the streets

  defend their dreams

  Don’t we deserve our dreams

  our hard borne words

  labor of our lives?

  We have taken in our streets

  the clash, the color, the broken streets

  and shaped them into dreams

  and then to words

  to change our lives

  six lives held by dreams

  a world of streets, our luminous words

  1996, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility Bedford Hills, New York

  Sestina: Reflections on Writing

  Bedford Hills Writing Workshop

  “Write about something inside that wants to get out — a poem, a bitch, a muse, something tethered.”

  It’s six fifteen on a Wednesday evening. Six women, pens in hand, are gathered around a table. The lesson has come from Hettie Jones, who runs the writing workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. This “inside-out” exercise is only one of the many assignments she has brought us over the nine years the workshop has been in existence. We’ve written about “night,” about “an encounter with a stranger,” about persons, places, and events. We’ve even responded successfully to the challenge to “write a poem that makes no sense.”