Part-1 on Bard Prison Initiative
(Part-2)
Excerpt from transcript
MAX KENNER, Bard Prison Initiative: We get the best 15 students at each place, each year. And, typically, you have roughly 10 applicants per spot.
PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): Forget SATs or GPAs. Some of these guys never even started high school, much less finished it. The key criterion for admission, how badly do they want it, determined by an essay and interview.
MAX KENNER: Those students that are most intellectually ambitious, that are most curious are so often the same people as children who dropped out of conventional school the youngest.
MIGUEL MUNOZ-LABOY, Columbia University: How many people will you do in your survey?
MAN: I would think about what would be a representative number. If it was a large study, I would need maybe one percent of the population maybe. I don't know. I will have to figure that out.
PAUL SOLMAN: The courses within these walls are nearly identical to those without.
MIGUEL MUNOZ-LABOY: So, what is the decision-making process?
PAUL SOLMAN: Professor Miguel Munoz-Laboy teaches the same class to these inmates at Woodbourne Correctional Facility that he teaches to grad students at Columbia University School of Public Health. Yes, he acknowledges there is a difference. The students at Woodbourne are better.
MIGUEL MUNOZ-LABOY: It's incredible. I have never had a student who reads everything, every page that I assign. And they do.
NOTE: Later in the transcript it's commented that, "Admittedly, this is a captive audience, with study periods that last all day. But they sure do use them." Prison convicts are not distracted by outside social activities.
This is much the same experience I had in my Navy carrier with long deployments at sea (with fighter and helo squadrons aboard carriers and destroyers) where there are not daily social distractions, so study was easier.
Also, excerpts from transcript
PAUL SOLMAN: With 2.3 million prisoners, one in 100 adults, the U.S. locks up the most people anywhere in the world, and at the world's highest rate. Repressive China comes in a distant second, with 1.6 million inmates, closer to one in 1,000.
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PAUL SOLMAN: Bard practices what so many academics preach; not vocational, but liberal education, like Max Kenner got at Bard.
MAX KENNER: Our belief is that a liberal education prepares people to find work wherever the jobs may be. You give them job training for job X, job X disappears, you have nothing. You give someone the opportunity to think critically and to understand the context in which they're looking for work, they go where the jobs are to be found.
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PAUL SOLMAN: What the Bard prison program tries to do, redirect the impulses that put these men away while maximizing the rationality they will need when they get out.
One such graduate is Anthony Cardenales, who has come back to speak to those still working on their degrees and their sentences.
ANTHONY CARDENALES (Bard Prison Program grad): Bard is here for a reason.
PAUL SOLMAN: But can Bard actually place a self-described stick-up artist, who did years in here for homicide, in a meaningful, well-paying job?
ANTHONY CARDENALES: I don't care what state the economy is in. If one person is successful, then so can I be successful.
PAUL SOLMAN: In other words, is that pep talk poppycock? Or are Bard grads getting real jobs?
ANTHONY CARDENALES: Is it difficult? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not.
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