Teaching Men Who Will Never Leave Prison

It’s 2018. I am, for the first time, in a classroom at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in Comstock, New York, a men’s maximum-security state prison. There are sixteen students in the class. They are white, Black, Latino. A couple of them are the age of ordinary college kids; most are considerably older. The oldest of all, a man in his seventies, struggles to follow the conversation, using cheap, prison-issued hearing aids. All of these men have demonstrated their ability to work at a college level. A few, indeed, already have college degrees. Some have been incarcerated for thirty years or more and have been reading books all that time.

The course I’m teaching is History of Thought: The Enlightenment, one I’ve already taught twice at Bennington College, in Vermont, which sponsors our program. We begin with Immanuel Kant and Francis Bacon, proceed to Montesquieu and other French lumières, such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot, and end with the Americans: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison. I wanted to start my teaching career at Great Meadow with this subject because our nation was founded on Enlightenment principles, a fact many seem to have forgotten. Tenets like the separation of powers and the wall between church and state are not arbitrary inventions but responses to historical circumstances that we would do well to understand, lest we repeat the same mistakes. After our discussion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of my students, a towering middle-aged Black man, expressed his frustration: “Everyone ought to read all this in high school.” But of course we don’t. The year 2022 saw eighth-grade scores in U.S. history and civics drop to the lowest levels in thirty years.

Great Meadow, which closed last year, housed a significant proportion of men who were serving life sentences, or what is known as “virtual life”: sentences of fifty years or more, so long that if the inmate survives until the release date he will be too old to take much advantage of his freedom.

A man I’ll call Roger, one of our more assiduous students, entered prison at the age of eighteen and is serving a sixty-year sentence; he is now in his late forties. (The names of all students in this piece have been changed.) “For better or worse,” he wrote in an essay, “I am a civilly dead social exile.” Intellectually voracious, Roger reads Michel Foucault and Franz Kafka in his spare time. He has earned two associate’s degrees in prison, but upon his recent transfer to a Connecticut institution he hit a wall. Many states expressly bar lifers, and virtual lifers, from rehabilitation programs, college education, and any opportunity beyond their cells, favoring those who will one day be released into society and might contribute to it.

But for some people, both on the inside and the out, cultivating the life of the mind is less transactional: it fulfills a profound spiritual need, as urgent as a religious vocation is for others. Take Eric, a man in his late sixties who has served some thirty-five years and will never be released. I first encountered him in the Enlightenment course. Officers sometimes fail to let the men out for programs, so Eric had missed the first class, during which I had provided historical background. In the second class, I was giving a quiz to see how much the students had retained; I told Eric that, because he had missed my lecture, he was excused from the quiz. He asked to take it anyway and did better than everyone else, even providing the date (1685) of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes! It turned out he had spent the previous several months perusing the writings of Descartes.

The benefits of education for individual lifers are evident, but I am often asked what good it does for anyone else, much less for society at large. The answer is simple: the college courses create a community, and the culture of that community radiates outward to the larger culture of the prison. “Even outside of class,” Eric wrote, “you’re talking about what you read, your ideas, his views on it, your views on it. It builds a community, and everybody in that community enjoys learning.”

When such a community contains lifers, the influence widens. There are a lot of them: one of seven prisoners in the United States is serving fifty years to life. Among people of color in prisons, the number is one in five. And, as Roger commented, “Lifers are influential in prison. In many ways they are the makers of the ‘prison code’ by which inmates and guards live. . . . So when a lifer chooses a different way of life, and they do so successfully, they weaken the chains of antisocial prison codes. They become beacons of light to the men around them.” The truth of this statement was obvious to me throughout my years at Great Meadow, as I saw lifers like Roger and Eric act as mentors to younger students who were less wholeheartedly committed to the idea of college, suffusing them with their sense of mission.

Looking back on the years that Bennington’s Prison Education Initiative was at Great Meadow, from 2015 to 2024, it’s clear to my colleagues and I that the most important and original work we did was to develop a method and a style of curriculum that was beneficial to students serving long sentences. We didn’t know this was going to happen when the program began. P.E.I. grew out of Bennington’s Incarceration in America program, created by the anthropologist David Bond and the novelist and memoirist Annabel Davis-Goff, who until recently served as a literature instructor at the college. Bennington, which opened in 1932, has long been known for its liberal, experimental educational style: instructors create their curricula quite independently of the administration; students design their own academic programs, or “plans”; and classes are taught in an informal seminar style. P.E.I. reflected all of these facets of a Bennington education, although we leaned in a more canonical direction, pursuing, at least in the study of literature, what might even be called a “great books” path.

I had not realized how unfamiliar our classroom style would be to many of our students, particularly those who had been incarcerated for many years. At the first session Stuart attended, the students read part of a text, and then Annabel asked them for their ideas on the passage. “I sat in bewildered silence,” Stuart, a lifer who had been at Great Meadow for decades, recalled in an essay. “There was a noticeable pause before the first student offered a tentative statement. This led to a spirited discussion guided by the professor. I now realize that that moment seemed so long because I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance. . . . This was caused by my disbelief that someone thought my ideas and opinions mattered.”

If a program like ours was to succeed, we would have to balance mutual respect and informality. I was expecting this to be a challenge, but it came naturally. We made a practice of avoiding first names, calling our students Mr. Jones, for example. The men told me they valued this mark of respect, one of the few they were ever accorded in a prison environment. This act of formality did not prevent an easy atmosphere from developing in our classrooms; there were frequent bursts of laughter. Our students knew they were among friends; some said that our classrooms were the only places where they felt they could speak freely. The comfort level they developed with us shone forth in the correspondence we received from them during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we worked together through snail-mail correspondence courses. “Well,” a student I’ll call Jackson wrote to Annabel at the time, “I anticipate that I will read Gide because you said he’s out of fashion, spend more time with Tristram Shandy, and any more suggestions?” His next note gave an update: “I devoured two novels by André Gide, The Immoralist and Lafcadio’s Adventures.” He was currently reading “A Moveable Feast,” “Pale Fire,” Anton Chekhov’s plays, and the H. G. Wells trifecta: “The War of the Worlds,” “The Time Machine,” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

As this note indicates, many of our students moved far beyond the official curriculum. We were accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education to award graduates of our program a Bennington associate’s degree and, just before Great Meadow closed, a bachelor’s degree. Nine of our students received an associate’s degree, an achievement of which they were very proud. But this milestone did not pause their studies. The challenge for us as teachers was to develop a series of classes that would keep our long-term students moving steadily forward but still be attractive to other students at the undergraduate level.

There was no science lab at Great Meadow, but Betsy Sherman, a biology professor emerita at Bennington, offered a popular course in evolution. Teachers could not use the internet in classes, which ruled out many teaching aids, such as explanatory videos, but the students were no less diligent and curious. Many of them eagerly enrolled in William Eric Waters’s class on African American literature, in addition to correspondence courses during the pandemic on the Nat Turner slave rebellion and the 1791 Haitian revolution. David Bond offered a class called The Atlantic World, much of which involved the history of slavery and the slave trade. It’s a subject many of the students thought they knew well, but it turned out they had a lot to learn about the complex interactions of the various players. One member of the group began the program as a white supremacist, but he changed his ideas after participating in David’s class discussions. The Atlantic World became one of our foundational courses.

With students serving long prison terms, we could give works of literature more intense treatment than they usually get in a conventional academic setting. In a typical college Shakespeare course, for instance, the class might zip through as many as nine plays in a semester. At Great Meadow, it was fine if we read only three plays in the same period, but went into them far more deeply. Students were particularly responsive to “Macbeth,” for its dark and nightmarish qualities, and to “King Lear,” for the beauty of its speeches, which many of them memorized.