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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.
Jackson, a construction worker in his previous life, had a life-changing experience when he enrolled in Annabel’s course Origins of the English Novel, and read Chaucer, a little Rabelais, “Don Quixote,” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” After the class, he decided to focus on the eighteenth-century novel, devouring works by Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, Fanny Burney, and Tobias Smollett. In a tutorial with Annabel, he worked his way through all fifteen hundred pages of Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa.” During the pandemic, he read independently, but looked forward to a return to the classroom. “I pray you will do another class containing the classics,” he wrote. “The ones that taste like really good pudding and not metallic modernity.” Jackson’s aspiration is to become a writer. “If I had known when I was young that this world existed,” he confided to me, “my life would have been completely different.”
Another student with a remarkable capacity for work was Liam, who was of Irish descent, and had been reincarcerated on a parole violation. He had learned enough Russian from another inmate to read “War and Peace” in both the original and the translation, side by side, when we offered a class on it. He had first read the novel in English twenty-five years earlier, while in solitary confinement. In the vacuum of the cell, he wrote Annabel, “the characters and scenes in the book, aristocratic drawing rooms and battlefields, so vividly rendered by Tolstoy, so rich and detailed and colorful, seemed realer than my own life, which was a drab, monotonous blur.” The prospect of revisiting Tolstoy’s classic in a P.E.I. class filled him with joy. “Dangling before me is the dazzling prospect of reading Tolstoy’s great novel in the original,” he wrote. “I view this as nothing less than cosmic grace.”
For those of us who taught literature at Great Meadow, there was the question of which literary works to include in our curricula. Not only which were “important” by the standards of literary history, but which would most enrich the inmates’ inner lives and foster communication among them. Annabel included authors who wrote of traumatic situations: Primo Levi, Chinua Achebe, Sebastian Barry. I leaned toward thinkers who would stretch the students’ brains to the maximum, and whose ideas could be applied to current events: Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, David Hume. Lisa Fox Martin, a former N.Y.U. and Brooklyn College classicist, undertook to teach Homer. The first course she offered, on the Iliad, was pertinent to our population’s “lived experience,” as the saying goes: the violence, the gang-style warfare, the masculinity, both real and performative, and the devastation wrought on families and communities by all of the above. The students recognized the situations and characters immediately. But, to my surprise, they found Lisa’s next offering, on the Odyssey, even more applicable to their lives. Like Odysseus, they were all on a journey, a quest to reach their real homes or to find a spiritual center that would serve instead. “Prison is like Hades to a degree,” one of the class members, Mike, observed. “It’s full of sad souls with their sorrowful stories full of anguish and regret.” Above all, Mike, a former street hustler intent on changing his life, was taken with Homer’s idea of nostos, or homecoming, for which all the denizens of Great Meadow shared an overpowering longing.
Readers familiar with the culture wars on college campuses might wonder whether we got pushback for any of the books we assigned, from either the left or the right. No. The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did not reject anything on our list. I later learned that Machiavelli’s “The Prince” had something of a cult following in Great Meadow, among wannabe Big Men who looked to it for tips on how to gain power. If I had known this ahead of time, I might not have assigned the book in my Renaissance class, but I did, and DOCCS made no objection. Among the students, what might broadly be described as concern over political correctness simply did not exist. They were open-minded and eager to tackle whatever we gave them. Annabel had given up assigning Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” at Bennington several years before; though that novel is one of the most potent anti-colonialist works in English literature, Conrad’s message is perhaps too subtly delivered for current college students, conveyed in the voice of a narrator who does not choose his words according to twenty-first-century sensitivities. This was not a problem at Great Meadow, whose denizens were older and far more experienced.
One of the most interesting members of the P.E.I. program was Vincent, a ferociously intelligent man in his mid-thirties who had been a truck driver in civilian life. Vincent was, in many ways, a classic autodidact. He reminded me of other students I’d encountered over the years who, accustomed to being reliably smarter than their teachers, had come to mistrust all intellectual authority and weave their own erratic paths. He was an electrifying presence in class, sparking discussion with unusual insights, some legitimate and others less so. In one session on Samuel Johnson’s essays, I drew a limit when he suggested that Johnson, perhaps the best-read man of the eighteenth century, didn’t understand the meaning of the word “stoicism.” “I’m sure you’re smarter than your other teachers, and I’m sure you’re smarter than I am, but I don’t actually think you’re smarter than Samuel Johnson,” I said. He took such rebuffs with good humor, laughing and moving on to the next mental challenge.
During the isolation of the pandemic, in which Vincent pursued a correspondence course with Annabel on the British regional novel, he had the time to rethink his way of learning. At one point, he misused the word “hypocritical” and Annabel corrected him gently by showing him the Oxford English Dictionary definition for “hypocrisy.” He was very much struck by it:
I can’t say when I learned this word (third grade?), but I can say that as soon as I read your reply, the definition, and your further response, I knew I was wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. I thought, “I have never actually known this word’s definition. Huh . . . A week before that, I would have argued my superiority with words. I was wrong, and I was glad to read this and be so thoroughly humbled.
Vincent sailed through his classes at P.E.I., and began to plan for a possible writing career after his release, a few years down the road. In 2024, he won second prize in a national essay competition on Samuel Beckett, open to every incarcerated person.
In July, 2024, it was announced that Great Meadow would be closing in just a few months. This did not come as a surprise. Prison populations across New York State had been shrinking, owing to a decline in crime rates and in sentences for minor drug offenses. Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan was to consolidate prison populations and shut down the worst facilities. Inmates were reassigned to other facilities; P.E.I. was given some influence over where its students went, as they all wished to continue their studies. Most of the men we taught have ended up in places with academic programs, although many are given little or no access to the classes. Eric has been denied access to college courses, not because he’s a lifer but because he already has a degree. He believes, though, that the work he did with us at Great Meadow has given him an excellent foundation for future independent studies. As I write, he is tackling Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson.”
“Of course Great Meadow should be closed,” Annabel said at the time. “But there are men there who have no other family, friends, community than the men they live close to, work with, and perhaps, more poignantly, study with, who now lose all that and have to begin again somewhere they have no social capital and in some cases quite a lot to fear.” (The latter is particularly true for former gang members, who may come across enemies from a previous life, and for inmates who are particularly vulnerable to staff assault—sex offenders, for example, or those who have attacked police officers.) The closure, she went on, “was hard on those P.E.I. students who were dependent on the program as a safe place to think and talk, and I was aware of friends who would be separated.”
Katherine Meeks, an instructor who taught college courses to New York inmates through the nonprofit Rising Hope, concurs. “I have long thought that the major benefit of our educational programs is less in the knowledge conveyed than in the relationships built, both between teachers and students and among the students themselves,” she wrote Davis-Goff. “Without those kinds of relationships, how can they even see themselves (in a positive light, for once), let alone come to understand others? That is what has the biggest impact on rehabilitation, in my opinion.” In my own opinion, the very decision to join the program, which was not always valued by the prison culture, and which was quite intense, meant that the inmate had already taken a considered step toward rehabilitation.
Greg Mingo, a graduate of P.E.I. who received clemency from then Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2021, after forty years of incarceration, has spent the time since his release engaged in activism on behalf of the incarcerated and the recently released. A co-founder of the Clemency Collective, he has worked with the Innocence Project, Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, and CUNY’s clemency cases. “Out of seventeen people I know that received clemency, fifteen of them were in college or had college degrees at the time,” he said, before leaving Great Meadow. “It makes a huge difference. Not just because you’re trying to attain something, but because it makes a difference in your life for you. You have a sense of accomplishment that nobody can take away from you. You have a sense of dignity that nobody can take away from you.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
