Empowering Incarcerated Learners Through Technology Solution | SXSW EDU 2024

[Applause] Molly thank you if you haven't met Molly before she is a Force for good in this space and we're all so delighted to be here um contributing to this panel um so we're going to start with uh some introductions and then it'll come back to me as moderator and I'm going to ask our panelists a set of questions about technology in the higher education and prison space follow up with a few more questions and then we will turn to you to answer your questions um so my name is Cappy Hill um I'm an economist I've spent most of my career in higher education institutions starting in the economics department at Williams college going on to be Provost at Williams and then spent a decade as president of Vasser college for the last eight years I've been the managing director of Ithaca SNR and Ithaca SNR is an organ a nonprofit organization that's committed to increasing access to knowledge and improving American higher education postsecondary attainment across all of higher education including in the higher education in prison space um I'm going to turn it to Ved to say hello and then pass it down just a few sentences on who you are and then we'll come back and do some more on our work cool thank you uh my name is bed price I am the executive director at the alliance for higher education and prison uh we're our work is focused on supporting the entire field of higher ed prison through supporting quality practice making resources more visible and accessible to the field and we also act as an intermediary and convener for the field so bringing you know different stakeholders and different parts of the community in relationship with each other and um sharing resources sharing ideas and yeah thanks thanks hi I'm Jessica hickin I'm CTO and co-founder at unlock Labs at unlock Labs we're a tech nonprofit trying to build build a better justice system from the inside out what that means for us is that we train and Empower Justice involved technologists to build open source technology with a focus on making Corrections evidence-based and data driven my name is Rob I work at Cornell University where I direct our prison education program Gaby all right back to me and first slide please uh so one of the things that uh the parent organization of itha SNR is responsible for is J store so I'd love to see a show of hands how many of you use J store in your educational Journeys um fantastic uh I I certainly know that having taught in college for almost 40 years I could create some really strong sylli using the material that's on J store one of the things that we've done over the last few years is work to get J store into prisons across the country and the first slide just gives you an idea of the success that we're having um we're getting J store into state prisons almost two more than two-thirds of them in different formats but increasingly using technology uh as as a means of accessing those materials of course getting J store into prisons isn't enough we have to make it really usable in the classroom and elsewhere and that's still a a work in progress so next slide please um we did a a survey recently of uh educational uh folks in involved with in higher education in prisons and basically what this slide just says is that almost 60% of those respondents and again it was not a completely random National survey but are basically saying that um Learners in the prison space do not have adequate access to technology so we have a lot more work to do um and this panel is going to fill you in on what they're doing to make that work work bringing best practices in the use of technology to the higher education and prison space uh so that in fact Learners can take advantage of the education where they're there many of you who are in the room presumably know that pel was reinstated uh this year which is great that gives access to resources federal grants to incarcerated Learners who are eligible um and that creates a financial incentive for institutions to offer programs in the prison space but again that's not enough we need access to great resources so that the quality of what students are getting uh is is is really valuable to them as as they go through their educational Journey so next slide please and I'm going to turn it over to V to talk more about the alliance thanks copy I was you know as I was looking at that slide I was thinking 60% I was about 60% don't have access to technology I was just thinking like I bet 15 years ago that number would have been like 95% so it's changed significantly over the years and yeah so I'll get to that piece but um you know our organization kind of like I said we're an organization that provides resources to the field we convene the field uh we help put people in relationship with each other um and we do a little bit of research and we do a little bit of development um in terms of making resources accessible so what you'll see here on the slide is um a couple of a couple of project areas that we have one is the prison education uh book connection we partner with Norton which is a publisher to provide brand new academic books to thousands of incarcerated Learners across the US so um I think in the last iteration we put out we gave out around 4500 brand new academic books and we 5,000 thank you Susie um 5,000 books and we all know how expensive college books are and there are limitations to how much pel covers as a that relates to college so it's one of the really cool projects that we were able to do in partnership with Norton um you'll also see rchp which is a recent development of a of a platform that is for the field where all of the resources that we gather can live in one place um I get you know 100 emails a week asking about different things like mou student handbooks um various things and so I was like let's put together a platform where all of this stuff can and where everybody can access it so it's a platform that's open source meaning anybody can upload their resources documents things of this nature it's also a place where people can connect um share information as well another big project that we had is the national directory um this was done started in 2019 and this was kind of the first of its kind it was a project that allowed the field to see its breadth and depth how big and vast it actually was prior to the National directory there wasn't really information there wasn't really any information um available on how many programs there are across the US who's doing what what types of degrees are available and how many facilities things of this nature and so uh the most recent iteration it surfac that there are and this is all self-reported data but um that there were around 406 higher education and prison programs across the us being ran through 540 academic institutions and this is an interactive map so you can go on the site you can click on different programs you can see the degrees they're offering you can see the facilities they're in um really good resource and it's estimated that there's probably more like 600 higher education and prison programs across the us somewhere in 600 700 range so we'll we expect an expansion as a result of pel reinstatement as well fantastic Jessica next slide please so I kind of want to do an experiment with everybody to to explain the why of what we do before we explain the how um think back in 1995 and just as a couple anchor points you have an idea of the time we're talking about uh in 1995 Brad Pit was sexiest man alive uh AOL was a thing and OJ was on trial can you place yourself there and remember what was going on for me I remember it well because I was being arrested for the first time in my life at 16 years old now think back to 2021 a couple years ago we were just coming out of the the heart of the pandemic we're all trying to figure out what it meant to have a life after being locked up and I was walking out of prison from that same prison sentence I spent 26 years in incarceration in Missouri's death row prison sometimes that's shocking to people but what should be more shocking is that during that entire 26 years I did not have a sing single formal education experience not a one what's worse is there's no records about anything I did do other than things like sleeping through count and conduct violations but during my 26 years of incarceration I became Department of Labor certified for for animal trainer whatever I'm going to do with that but uh still was learning um I ran programs I taught GED I did all of all of my self- learning and there's not a single record of any of it what should also maybe be surprising is that in this country we spend $187 billion a year on a criminal justice system that has one and only one real mandate prepare people to go home and stay home and we failed to do that at a rate of 83% without the data that I'm talking about without tracking what people are doing without provisioning access to resources where people can learn we can't improve on that that's why every year the only the only number that goes up typically in Corrections is the cost of it even though we've decart rated to some degree we haven't solved the problem people are still going back at that rate of 83% and so unlock Labs is born from my lived experience of sitting in the prison watching the laws change going from life without parole which is what I had as a juvenile to seeing that I would go home one day and realizing how the hell am I going to stay home what am I going to do I want to go home I want to contribute to society I want to have a life I want to pay taxes for crying out loud which I'm still working on that one last couple years I was proud but um I want to be part of society and I have no opportunity to do it and so I worked with partners that were on the outside I worked with the administration and I said look give us access to technology and we will build the systems to educate folks strangely enough in Missouri of all places in this country they said yes and I had a bunch of textbooks as you can see in the picture there that's actually how I learned to code um I had a whole bunch of textbooks and I started writing the first version of would become unlock Ed um it was ugly U but it it proved a point uh I will say that my only reference for doing an LMS for building something of this nature was I'd seen KH Academy and I said let's just build Con Academy for prisons it was audacious I needed more textbooks than I had right there to do it but um eventually I had partners and I had Buy in and we started that process of building a learning management system for Correctional spaces um thankfully I came home and I learned that building an LMS is not the solution to the problem there are plenty of free open source lmss in the world you could deploy open canus you could deploy Blackboard there's many Learning Management systems that can provision education what's missing is two things the technology infrastructure to utilize those Learning Management Systems every University in this country as far as I know has a has a platform they just need the ability to get that platform into the prisons and so that's one of the things that unlock Labs does we we work with either higher end providers or states to try and move policy to to to move past security concerns to deploy that infrastructure um the second thing we realized was beyond just provisioning access to education is the lack of data aggregation going on in the field there are plenty of higher education prisons prison programs that are provisioning education they're going in they're using their chalkboard they're they're teaching people um V just gave a number almost 600 in the country of people doing this work but in isolation there it's hard to get funding it's hard to move policy it's hard to build out a best practices process for what we're doing and so that's where that's where unlock Labs comes in that's the work we're trying to do we started building an open- Source education platform that would allow a user to sign in and access High R content from multiple providers the idea is that you can you can build a comprehensive learner and employability record around a person through a consorti style of Education um you'll notice down there on my slide it says founded by a team of passionate Justice impacted innovators on a mission to revolutionize education right now we are 14 people 70% of us are Justice impacted we trained them while they're on the inside they came home and they're leveraging their lived experience to try and build this platform um the idea is to create a transform of Education ecosystem within Corrections like right now we Warehouse people there's no other way of putting it you throw them in there they spend 26 years they come home you say good luck uh we want to change that there are plenty of people in the world that want to do the work we just want to enable it um and then I referenced in my opening comment about who I am that we want to make Corrections evidence-based and data driven it's a little bit deceptive because what we really want to do is decarcerate through data in this country right now and I'll use my lived experience as example whenever you do access education the first place that you need access to as a correction as a Justice impactor learn that you need that information is when you go see the pro board you need to be able to say I did good things and I'm ready to go home but because there's no platform like this in the space because people don't have access to that data the best thing I can do is show up with a bunch of colorful pieces of paper and say please believe me that these these certificates actually mean something um as a result most trolling decisions are um what I call Correctional hulum as people go I have a I have a stomach I feel in my stomach that you may succeed of course that's why we're failing uh and the moment I walk out the door I go to an employer and I say please believe that I have skills I took this higher educ education and prison program um and I I I've dealt with emotional issues I may have had from the trauma I felt from incarceration I can't prove it because again there's no comprehensive of learner and employability Records in this country 70% of States also have what they call earn credit release laws where people can earn time off their sins they could prove I'm ready to go home earlier the problem is that almost every state doesn't use those laws and fact we did some research and found there's roughly 350,000 years worth of time that was supposed to be awarded we don't do it because there's not a single source of Truth and finally when it gets to the evidence-based Corrections like look we are failing at a rate of 83% how do we fix it no clue because we cannot correlate what's going on with what's working despite the fact that in this country we have what we think are static risk uh factors that make people go to prison and when people come home on supervision we have all these quality of life indicators like employment housing things like that this huge black box in the middle says we don't know what you did on the inside so we have no idea how to increase these quality of life things so that's what unlocked is in the space to do and and the last thing I'll I'll note on it before I pass it to Rob is that while we're in the space trying to design this platform we're not trying to be the solvers of this problem we just want to show there's another way of doing it so whether somebody's using unlock Ed whether somebody's using some other platform it should be vendor neutral software agnostics so you can use anything to just provision the education infrastructure to help people go home and stay home wow um always great to be on a panel where you are learning as much as you hopefully are sharing thank you all um so I am here to talk about the work we are doing at the Corno University prison education program one thing on that we would be one of those providers that Ved referenced in the Giant pool across the country I think I hopefully a good one um we operate in four prisons near Cornell University and provide an associates and bachelor's program and aspire to offer a full program which is the challenges the environment so this is what my remarks will be about um and specifically a technological project that we have um for this I need to share two premises though my colleagues here have done a good job of probably bringing up a little bit one of them is um that to understand our work you need to understand that prison is deeply antisocial fairly well covered and probably presumed by most of our audience here um by that the way it impacts collag and pris is when you go into college in prison you're probably there to help um the first thing you find is that the folks who run the prison are going to try to sort of recruit you into a sort of collusion with the way the prison operates is the status quo um some of that's cultural and some of that is by policy so a policy is you can't become personal friends with these folks in prison you can't stay in touch with them when they're in a different prison after they've been in the prison were there in your college program um so that leads to a specific problem to our field losing track of our folks the reason I put the Texas map up here I don't know how many folks are here from Texas today any Texas folks are are some good Texas hands up there um very large states you can be very far away from not only your college but also your community your family and what have you um as an incarcerated person and so these remarks are addressed to I I have not been incarcerated folks that are trying to be helpful from the perspective of a campus or an educator perspective um so we um in a sort of unshakable solidarity fight all those systems to get inside and offer a college program get to the graduation stage and then watch someone get transferred all the way across the state and have the department tell us if you reach out to that person we will ban you from the prison system so what are we to do if we want to have the type of impacts that that Jessica is referencing here um okay so that's premise one the the the sort of fundamental antisocial this and the second one would you also kind of went into so I'll just say a brief thing is that prisons practice bad acts of magic in a way they can make things disappear that we ought to be able to see one is certainly like just the sheer violence of the whole system um it's not like policing on the outside again uh 25 years ago it was rare to have a video of what actually goes on with traffic stops um we are still in that moment inside prison that we are not with on the outside now where people can simply whip out a phone and record something when misdeeds are occurring inside prison that stuff has disappeared from the public eye um and so similarly and this is where we're interested in education um watching our students disappear through policies that are designed to disrupt any kind of social connection with them so telling us we can't follow up with our alumni if they've got remaining time on their sentence say 10 years and are shipped off to the border of Canada in our state New York um how are we supposed to know when they're going to get parole how are we supposed to find out if we can be helpful in re-entry how are we supposed to advocate for them to maintain a sense of that academic identity amongst the 600 programs many of which are in New York um so that they can get to the next college so that they can have information about how to self-navigate Educational Systems that are on the inside um so okay those are maybe some obvious things but now I'll talk about um the work that we're doing and it needs to be said at least once and probably everyone knows this but that that's just that the prisons are um incipit racist classist antisocial and that this is like the antithesis of the folks that try to do this work we are the folks that are like sponges for all the trauma of that system and are just willing to continue to like fight against it so what have we done we have developed a um piece of software that goes to criminal justice databases where the states I should say all 50 states we found um publicly post information about everyone in their criminal justice systems um I should say again without their consent so there's all this information online line about where people are at in many cases their physical characteristics probably mainly aimed at shaming folks and permanently stigmatizing them but then when we want to know where someone is so that we can help them with their education or Rehabilitation it's verboten that we even ask we can't even write them a letter and ask them with a postage stamp um so what did we do we created a piece of software that actually um does for folks that know technology data scraping so what that means is we actually pull the information on the students that are enrolled in college programs we provide this tool for free to other college providers in the prison space aimed at mainly just accessing the non-criminal data about our students so that we can keep in touch with them so that they can be alumni like other alumni ever colleges and so that we can advocate for that next step in their Journey so this one other image that's on the screen that you'll see um on the right is an image of an automatic alert that is a result of the synthesis of some of that data that comes from the criminal justice system you see docs info at the bottom there um and it's notice it's not talking about crime it's not talking about the past it's talking about the future it's talking about when people are likely to be released this is an actual email I've anonymized it folks so we're not actually revealing anyone's identity through this but um but we get real alerts like this on our actual alumni who are in the prison system and you see that what this one is I highlighted the the sentence that says redacted was transferred from Auburn prison a prison that we operate in where this person you can see at the top was with us for many years several semesters of college achieved an associates degree in 2019 and now as you can see it's an email alert on the date of this email was moved to another prison which is called Wallkill Wallkill is a place where New York University NYU has a bachelor's degree program so we were able to find this out the week that the person was moved of course the prison didn't tell us they don't even want us to talk so we had to find this out on our own by developing a piece of softare that would help us figure this out so we could reach out to NYU at walkill and say hey you've got a worldclass college student it's been at an Ivy League school Cornell University up here in Auburn and they're ready to go onto their next degree you also see that because the other data points that we're interested in have to do with parole this person has enough time remaining on their sentence that were a bunch of credits accepted from their antecedent associates degree they could finish their bachelor's degree before they're paroled and also you can see that they're from Kings County this person's headed to Brooklyn which is near NYU so there's actually a real possibility for scaffolding support for this student but that information would be completely unavailable to us and actually the prison system would be hostile to us finding out were it not for this technological innovation that we've come up with so what we're doing now is trying to share this with programs throughout the country so that other folks can start to bridge that gap between the in prison classroom and the return to the community and I know my colleagues have a lot more to say about this so I'm going to hand it back to Cappy um that's just just amazing I mean it's it's incredible how much work needs to be done on policy changes on using technology to keep in touch with students so that they don't get lost uh when they move um and also uh keeping track of what uh students are doing or incarcerated um people are doing so that when they get out they have some kind of uh transcript of the skills and credentials that they've gained that can help them when when they are out um from from my perspective I'm always incredibly interested in how many of the issues that higher education on the outside are are similar and different on on the inside um we haven't talked as much about best practices for learning for students in higher education programs we've been talking about uh ancillary ways in which technology can solve just this incredibly long list of problems that are faced in this space but I'd like to turn to higher education and prison programs and the role of technology in those programs um are there ways and and Jessica you've touched on this a bit def definitely with lmss but are there ways in which technology can bring into the prison space best practices from higher education more generally um and I I'll just mention one I do think that access to course material is incredibly important and that's something that should be pretty straightforward to to work out um one maybe I'll come back to a little bit later is uh transfer credits which is an issue in in the prison space on the outside it's also a huge issue with students earning credits that then don't transfer and it it leads to their not being able to complete their degrees so I who would like to start Jessica you want to start I have a couple just a couple examples that I think are are maybe not obvious if you're not in the space and even before you get to transfer credits simply transferring in continuity period for example as as in Rob's in Rob's example of his students yeah this happens everywhere a student is just transferred and it doesn't matter what the progress is it doesn't matter anything else other than the fact that somebody decided a policy said this person needs to go from prison a to prison B and even if Rob was offering a program at that prison I mean it's on the college to figure out a way to transfer all of his information and as soon as they transfer that person to a lower level which typically happens on your way out the door all continuity of learning is lost um the other thing I I'll touch on it's even simpler than that um when's the last time anybody wrote a term paper literally with a pen and paper in prison without technology you do that and if you type it so that dear God your professors can actually read your handwriting which maybe I had that problem once upon a time and you have to change it you have to retype your whole paper and so technology allows people to actually participate in the education process in such a way that the process itself is in a hindrance yeah just um I I think the ability to improve writing when word processing came in was huge I'm old enough to have had to type my papers in graduate school and it was not fun I can tell you that and you certainly didn't revise because there's no way you were going to type it a second time at 2 am um just quickly on the on the transfer issue too this is going to be incredibly important with reinstating pel because if you get if you've used pel to pay for your courses and you get transferred in between uh you're at at you owe that pel money back to the institution and is is a force on the outside for actually creating debts that get students into trouble so that's going to be something that's really important if I can added a thing specifically because we brought up pel and and I'm admittedly not as steeped in the knowledge about pel as some of the rest of my panel but um there are reporting requirements for universities to even access pel um how do you get that information without technology you really have filing cabinets and and manila folders and dear God hopefully you can keep track of your paper but but technology can help solve that if you were automatically tracking in real time what your students are doing what they're participating what their grades are and you have access to that then it becomes much easier to meet those Second Chance P requirements and and hopefully that'll be a motivator for getting some kind of data infrastructure into the prison space which would benefit the the institutions the students and and the prisons as well I think we're certainly suggesting it to them yeah um Ved or fed and then Rob Ved you want to talk about I wanted to say one thing was Bridge from Jessica to Ved um because V V's like the master of thing about how we can use technology to get really connected with folks on the inside um it's really a frontier that I well I'll let him speak to it but I thought was interesting about Jessica's comment is that like to really talk about the importance of technology in prison you have to talk about the things we take so for granted because we're kind of computer obsessed look let grab his phone right now it's the whole way that we live on the outside world is unavailable in prison I mean chiefly in regard to technology it's fine to look your phone um in my classroom I lot of people would have laptops open at Cornell not in prison um they're taking notes they're referencing what I'm talking about they're factchecking me um they're dealing yeah they're okay come on B but but but no they're they're dealing with the fact that I name drop there are all kinds of things that we don't even name in our daily lives that are just the way we live right now word processing I mean that is so fundamental to have to write a term paper you know when we go to college and see a dissertation from the 80s and it's written on a typewriter we don't know the weird art of how to reformat pagination because you had to change something on page 87 of your dissertation people in prison are still figuring out how to fix a broken typewriter from the 80s um at least in New York I know maybe other places they have stuff but so we have to start there I taught a guy how to use a mouse it's a muscular coordination thing to move something with these two fingers and then independently move this finger to click if those skills are lacking when a person is returned from prison there are major major hurdles to being able to coordinate with the way those of us out here are living um but so then I just want to say the second thing which is um and this is where I guess it goes to vet is um the pandemic at least in our case in New York open the possibility of remote videoing into prison um there's a tremendous lism um in in the prison systems I feel maybe not in every state but certainly in New York around the use of the internet and I want to say manufactured and I I almost want to say fictionalized concerns about what will happen if incarcerated people are allowed access to the internet because they're just because people we pathologize folks in prison I mean people on the outside are doing messed up things with the internet like just make no joke about it um but the absence of that is removing an entire epistemology of how Modern Life occurs um search is the epistemology by which we answer basic questions about how to navigate through daily life and so we are actually manufacturing with Jessica's help um we offline versions of how to do things like searching for your own answer using a device so that people can have access to the muscular and cognitive processes that are how we live in 2024 um and it's an added punishment and a disservice to the ostensible mission of justice and prison that those things aren't in place yet um and that we have to be working on it as Outsiders of the system but re instit instituting um higher education and prison programs supported by pel hopefully will allow greater integration of Technology into the educational space so that they'll be kind of a twofer not only will students um get a degree of some sort hopefully uh but they'll learn these technology skills that are just key to surviving um day-to-day life so V you want to jump in yeah I was pulling up my statistics I wasn't checking [Laughter] Instagram so you know part of our mission is supporting quality practice quality education and what that means is finding the best way to preserve what education looks like inside of prisons in relation to what it looks like not inside of a prison so what it looks like on a campus and how can that be mirrored so in the event that somebody is released and they want to continue their education what they received on the inside of a prison isn't starkly different than what they step into a classroom right so um things okay got to get that phone I'm just playing it's all good um hity from inside yeah so connecting to so being able so being trying to do Education Without access to internet without access to things like this is extremely impos is extremely difficult um I can't imagine anybody in here trying or myself trying to do a degree without any access to the internet or access to technology so to kind of pick up on what Rob was speaking to as a result of Co um technology has been become a much more culturally accepted thing inside of prisons in ways that could have never been imagined 20 years ago internet access it departments reviewing policies how to make this stuff accessible while preserving Safety and Security um interest as well so you know with that we started thinking about okay what also became normalized as a result of covid remote work speaking about quality education we think about what are some of the components to make education quality when you look at a vast majority of curriculums one of those things are work learning opportunities high impact learning practices internships fellowships apprenticeships right the mechanism that allows you to see what your education means and practice and that's something that's been missing forever inside of prison spaces so thinking about it right what does this mean this means that now the conversation can be had around people who are incarcerated participating in remote work opportunities internships things of this nature another caveat is that with pelan statement the incarcerated population is also now eligible for federal work study dollars right so that opens up the conversation for employment and work we know that on average people are released from prison with less than $150 to their name that's even after doing 10 15 20 years in prison $150 yeah but they're working the whole time probably getting paid 60 cents an hour the average money that somebody goes into a prison with less than $150 right I'm going to pull these stats back up just to give some framing 85% of incarcerated people have either a high school diploma or less 85% of almost 1.5 million people 75% of formally incarcerated people are still unemployed a year after being released recidivism rate for people released from prison 70% in those 5 years so I started thinking about the the economic piece of this right what is the purpose of Education it's to help people get careers I think it helps you rationalize and and think about your worldview and think about all these other things but essentially we all go to school did anybody not go to school to get a job in here uh okay I didn't think so so so for me I was thinking okay these people are doing all this time and they're being released with zero dollars no work history and what if somebody gets a bachelor's degree and they still have 10 years left on their sentence what if somebody gets a master's degree and they still have 15 years left on their sentence what is the return on investment not just for the government not just for the state but for the person for the economy for the student that's what I'm starting to think about and so said hm we should start thinking about remote work for incarcerated people to to connect that education that the government's dumping lots of money into and making sure this actualized and that people who are incarcerated have an opportunity to use that so they can have a better re-entry an easier re-entry going into employment right I worked on Direct Services I worked on re-entry I worked in housing and worked with thousands of people coming home with no skills no education no money and we were tasked as a nonprofit with a little bit of budget to mitigate all this stuff when in 20 years this person doing time could have developed all of these skills and come home with not just a skill set but some money so now since remote work is a is a potential thing to look at I see this as a trojan horse I see education as an opportunity to open up the doors for like how we can think about mass incarceration imagine if you know there's 600,000 people are released from prison and um state and federal facilities per year it's like 50,000 people a month imagine if an imagine the burden and I use that term loosely imagine the burden that puts on re-entries re-entry centers nonprofits social services and all these other agencies that are on the outside trying to figure out how to help people go you look at a homeless shelter I worked in homeless shelter over 70% of those people have been in prison in the last 3 years and I think that's a kind of an naal Trend that floats in between 50 and 70% of people who are experiencing homelessness have been incarcerated so imagine this imagine a world where people come home imagine a world where people have the opportunity to work remotely during incarceration using that education they got accumulate some money and come home with 10 15 20 $50,000 right imagine the burd imagine the burden that would be relieved from state state budgets to address this stuff right these people would have autonomy over their own re-entry they could pay for their own housing pay for their own transportation pay for their own basic needs and it doesn't build in a dependency on systems for somebody to uplift themselves they come home empowered so I think this is just you know kind of groundbreaking and I think this is something that can really change the future of how we look at incarceration but it also allows education to be used and practical sense so just you know as a side our we have a program area called education in action and this is concerned with helping create work learning opportunities for people during incarceration paid work learning opportunities the real goal is to use this program area to lay the foundation for what remote work could look like for people who are incarcerated so we're using education as the entry point because that's a very legitimate entry point in educa and part of quality education we know internships and fellowships are part of that so anyways we're using that as an entry point for talking about employment during incarceration so people can come home with money they don't have to go beg a parole officer or a nonprofit for some help to get housed because people are being released straight into homelessness um so with education action we have a we you know we kind of spearheading this initiative around employing people during incarceration through internships and fellowships we've been working with Main Department of Corrections to do this and hopefully set some precedent for models across the US for a national conversation so we have two currently incarcerated fellows on our staff that we pay $25 an hour um what I'm talking about is kind of like historical stuff um this isn't forced labor these aren't people who are being forced to work for 60 cents an hour and if they don't then they get all of their privileges taken away like phone calls commissary all of these things this is full-blown employment um so our goal with this is to work with organizations and departments Departments of Corrections across the US to examine how this can be done and create more opportunities for employers to come into this space in a non- exploitative manner um to give people the opportunity to use their education during incarceration to actualize it and so it'll have a bigger and a a more broad impact on what that education means because without using that education it kind of just and you're just you know you're like yeah I have five degrees and you can you don't do anything with it though so um yeah we've worked with a few employers um unlock Labs as one of them um helping get placement for people who are incarcerated um and various you know it's I think we've only worked with like six or seven employers right now but everybody who's got in placement who's currently incarcerated is getting paid over $25 an hour this is never this was really kind of unheard of in American history so um you know I'm kind of a Visionary and I see a world where you know thousands of people who are incarcerated will have the opportunity to work one day and they'll come home with enough money to help themselves get on their feet and they relieve some of that work that re-entry services and and government services have to do so they can focus on the people who need more intensive care and these people who are who don't need that don't have to go beg for it they come home with this right and so I can pause there um Jessica I know you we worked with you on some of this work as well so yeah thank you let me just jump in with one thing this is a really good example of how this is consistent with higher education on the outside something like 85% of students who are going on to college say they're going to college because they want to get a job and have a living when they get out um and best practices now are internships and fellowships and work experience to help with that transition to the workforce so I think this is like really brilliant Jessica can I say one more piece sure about this I love the orientation towards career in Workforce now because for the longest time this field of higher education and prison has been seen as Savior work to go in here and transform people's souls and and things of this nature when it hasn't really been focused on setting people up for careers and transforming one's conditions it's been focused on this premise that people in here are bad not really paying light to the fact that the conditions that these people came from are egregious and bad right and so this is you know kind of a piece that can talk to that but I'll pause yeah thank you Jessica I just kind of want to touch basis on another thing that uh uh um surfaces from this panel specifically is the the way that we try and work together to solve these problems as V mentioned you know their their their program um we were probably some of the fairly early Partners in this program we were the first partner in this program and as a result of that partnership I have two people that currently work on my team who are incarcerated in the main Department of Corrections working on this education platform to Hope extend education to everybody so people who are to your term about like considered bad or part or in need of saving are in fact working day in and day out trying to help the next person you know so we're so they're earning they're helping themselves they're they're being paid 35 an hour they're also paying taxes this year which is not fun for them but you know it's a big change between being a burden on the taxpayer versus they're paying taxes um actually about an hour ago they demoed the new version of the product and and so people who are incarcerated who had this access to education are now working contributing to solving the problems that they live and at the same time we're still working on figuring out how to do this well but you know we're trying to help Rob with his technology in in New York to increase access to education it's a working working work in progress um but this whole thing is there's a lot of good ideas about how we move education forward we need to be talking about how we do it together and of course I have to say with Molly coming along sorry Molly going to talk about you but when funders have come along and helped all three of us find each other and work together I think we can really make a difference in this space we have about 10 minutes left um it's a little hard to see up here but if anybody has a question um please come to the mic um and while we wait to see whether anybody would like to follow up on something I'm going to ask everybody one more thing which is if you could if you could do one one thing um different from what you've already talked about what would you do or one thing that you don't want to have happen and the one thing I'm going to say that I don't want to have happen and again this goes to higher education on the outside pure online learning there's no evidence that it works so I I really hope that that doesn't end up um moving into this space so one thing one more thing you'd want or not want uh I would I would welcome the the prisons that I work in to shut down there's a weird paradoxes in this work folk but like one of the things that's always ironic when we try to project scalability of this work is there's also this desire to really see decarceration and a different Paradigm for how we think about what we do in America when harm is done that prison has not been a good return on investment like this has been the worst thing we could have done with regard to Crime with regard to security with regard to institutional racism with regard to inequality economic inequality so decarceration put us out of business I appreciate the mic drop especially since you you essentially stole mine what I would not like to see and we talk about making things evidence-based and data driven and it's very easy to to go from that to oh we can do this thing that we're doing now better and the fact of the matter is we need to have a department of social services that deals with people who have who have crimes and and and deals with how do we get the services that people need not how do we more effective ly punish in a way that makes people behave and so yeah thanks for stealing mine Rob I thought we were friends buddy I'd like to see a preservation of inperson teaching and learning um I know technology is going to make its way into the space and I think it can be a complement to the work but I wouldn't want technology to replace inperson teaching in a place that's already hyper isolated and removed from um socialization the need for socialization so I'd love to see uh iners um teaching remain yeah um commenting just something on one of Rob's points um I I think an issue that we talk a lot about in our work is thinking about greater Economic Opportunity for low-income students coming from low-income families and that that would contribute to less income inequality Across America it's kind of an indirect way of getting at some of the things that you're talking about but growing up in extreme poverty is is not often a pathway to great success and it translates into terrible K through2 education systems um so I'm I'm with you intervening there as well Jessica do you had another sure I'm not sure if we should be bothered that nobody has questions of us but uh I will say just to touch on because this has been mentioned a few times and I want to I want to lift it up that you know for all the actuaries in the space and the people who are you know the millions and millions of dollars are dumped into trying to figure out why people um um commit crimes the number one response is always something antisocial it's always because they were not part of the social construct so to the point of the need for continuing to do hyperd education and using Technologies as support I mean if we reach the point where we say well we can just throw people in a box and throw some technology at of them and all of a sudden they're going to be better then we're we're ignoring all the research that's been done this that's exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing exactly and the response to Co in many higher education institutions was to realize the incredible value of being in person and so very while it while we learned some things one of the things we learned was we wanted to go back to the classroom so we have some questions here that'd be great hi um I actually work in a K12 environment but we support our juvenile court community schools and so we are really trying to bring opportunities to our students that will help them get jobs when they exit the juvenile Community Court schools and some of those those opportunities are droning and careers in Esports and and just really kind of those different types of careers but the the problem we face every time we try to bring this up is bringing the technology into the um into juvenile hall and my question is have you had any success in just bringing this almost unconventional um technology because we always get hit with the security and we can't even get get Google in there right now because they can communicate with with people and so let alone you know Minecraft or or rocket League you know and start talking about the jobs in those careers and drones is completely out of the question but we know that th There's jobs in droning if they could get certified so I mean I can just say that I think it's it's a very very new topic in landscape technology has never been even thought about being something that would be in a prison space so I think it's new but I think the good starting point is I mean you can connect with me after but working with other Doc's that have Forward Thinking it departments that have already examined these policies that have done the firewall work that have revised their policies that have um you know whitelisted websites have built out entire infrastructures to support internet access and I think that's a good starting point happy to talk to you after but I think that's kind of the what we're starting with now is trying to connect people who are behind the curve with lots of people who are already doing this work really well that would be great thank you yeah if I could just share one example um I I believe it's called Rule 23A in New York City um related to this is um and this on the re-entry side so after folks are in prison um is that it has to be occupational relevance from the conviction so you can't discriminate against someone from uh running a cash register for a speeding T you can't so the idea is if you get into a thing with um a DUI and someone gets hurt maybe then it's going to be a there's a reason that Uber might not want you to be a driver afterwards but you can um it's actually illegal in the city of New York not in the state um for an employer to discriminate against a person if there's no occupational relevance to the thing that they were incarcerated for and we've um supported our students as they've returned to New York City in challenging employers and have had 100% success rate of saying my issue has nothing to do with this job you're actually violating New York City law in doing this what we haven't yet done is gotten that to the point where it's in any way in in proximity to folks that are still under the custody of the state in juvenile or uh or in Adult Correctional Facilities to my knowledge but that's the direction that one might see policy go thank you I I think we have time just for one more question um youly ask afterward two if you go quick hi thank you um I was interested in your discussion about the antisocial policies that exist uh I work for the engineering school at NYU and so when I think of higher ed I think of us as very social when it comes to research and policy work and advocacy and stuff like that but maybe not so much on the academic side I think my question is for Rob you know can you talk a little bit about how you do partner and what we could do better as institutions in the same state or even nationally thank you um I think all could probably answer this too but I would say the major thing we do is just kind of Institution IED code switching I mean we go in there and say the text that we need to say to get through the orientation to be in a Department of Corrections operating as an official program and then the second you get into the classroom look we all know this from the schools we grew up with right like you know if the principal walks through the school the teacher acts different the students act different um that's not some crime that's not some kind of weird secret rule it's it's like a known code of of behavior if your if your parent is in the room you just change the code you operate with so um we will use the language of the Department of Corrections and and go along with their rules in order to operate in the prison system um and then I can be at a conference and say I find that antisocial and harmful to our students and our students know that better than anyone I mean that's the other thing is we mainly learn from them um where the harm is being done which is an extension of the harm that has sensibly led us to be in the prison system in the first place so others might have other things to say about that but I would say it's just a kind of double Consciousness that's always been part of social justice work and in this case in a classroom in prism um I think we are just about out of time I want to remind everybody that copies of the slides are at the back of the room and all of our contact information is on those slides and we'd all be very happy to follow up on any of the issues uh that came up in today's session and I'm sorry we ran out of time for more questions but I'd like you to thank our panelist for this [Applause] great [Applause] [Music] Def

2024-03-16 04:49

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