Alan Singer visited Green Haven Correctional Facility, north of Néw York City, which is a maximum security prison for people who have committed serious felonies. He and a colleague went to teach a course on the history of slavery. They found the men eager to learn, but they discovered that federal and state policies have withdrawn funding of educational programs in prison.

He writes:

“Until the mid-1990s, access to college classes was much more available to prison inmates. However, President Clinton signed legislation that denied prisoners federal Pell grants they could use to pay college tuition expenses and New York State Governor George Pataki made prison inmates ineligible for New York’s Tuition Assistance Program.

“The Federal Bureau of Prisons currently has a program known as the Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer (TRULINCS) that allows prisoners in the federal system access to e-mail and facilitates online education. However nearly all states prohibit Internet use by inmates. Limiting access to technology severely blocks educational opportunity. According to the 2013 “Handbook for Families and Friends of New York State DOCCS Offenders,” prisoners in New York State Correctional Institutions do not have access to either email or the Internet, which locks them out of online college classes.

“New York State now provides remedial programs such as preparation for high school equivalency exams and English language instruction but college degree programs are only available at selected facilities through privately funded partnerships with local colleges. The largest and one of the most successful is the Bard (College) Prison Initiative (BPI), which is part of the national Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. However, BPI offers only 60 courses a semester enrolling about 275 male and female prisoners in six New York State prisons and there are over 50,000 men and women in New York State prisons.

“In February 2014, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a new statewide initiative to give incarcerated individuals the opportunity to earn a college degree through state funded college classes at ten state prisons. The Governor’s office estimated the college program would cost only $1 million, a tiny fraction of the corrections agency’s operating budget of $2.8 billion. However six weeks later when the state budget was approved, Cuomo announced that the initiative had been dropped. Cuomo backed off even though a recent RAND Corporation found that inmates who participated in education programs while incarcerated had much lower odds of returning to prison and a Siena College poll found that 53 percent of voters supported the governor’s proposal. The Rand study also documented the benefits of computer-assisted learning and showed that inmates who participated in correctional education programs had a 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison after release than those who did not.

“The euphemistically named Green Haven Correctional Facility that is not really designed to “correct” anybody is the last stop on the school-to-prison pipeline for most of these men. Many of them were warehoused in failing schools and crime-ridden housing projects until they were ready to be incarcerated. These men made bad decisions and they did very bad things when they were young, but they are no longer the men that they were.

“They were thoughtful and intelligent during our discussions and should be treated as human being, not “tucked away into a corner of obscurity” with little hope for their rest of their lives. Andrew Cuomo, who is seeking reelection as Governor of New York and places political considerations above all else should be publicly chastised for offering the possibility of a higher education and then squashing it.”