Higher Education in Prisons Program
The AYCGL Higher Education in Prisons Program provides support to Morehouse faculty who teach humanities courses to incarcerated men and women in Georgia prisons. The AYCGL provides participating faculty—i.e., Prison Education Faculty Teaching Affiliates—with a stipend, training, and textbook allowance. Primary community partners include Common Good Atlanta, Georgia Coalition of Higher Education in Prisons, and the JAMII Sisterhood’s "Project Freedom."
AYC-HEP Faculty Teaching Affiliates:
Over the past several years, fifteen members of the faculty at Morehouse College have taught, or are scheduled to teach in prisons as AYC-HEP Faculty Teaching Affiliates. In past three years, the program has offered humanities courses and college-preparatory seminars as well as hosting book clubs to over 180 incarcerated students at facilities at Metro Reentry in Dekalb County, Burruss Correctional in Forsyth County, and the Downtown Reentry Program in Fulton County.
AYC-HEP Student Ambassadors:
In 2022, the AYCGL announced its first cohort of Higher Education in Prison (HEP) Student Ambassadors. This program is designed to complement the Andrew Young Center’s prison education programming. HEP Student Ambassadors provide support to Faculty Teaching Affiliates, both in prisons and jails, but they also work on campus at Morehouse to raise awareness on criminal justice issues, the value of prison education, and the impact of mass incarceration on our communities.
Vital Statistics:
Georgia has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world: 968 per 100,000 citizens. Nationally, the USA has incarceration rates of 664 per 100,000 citizens. The racial and ethnic makeup of the incarcerated population is disproportionate to the extreme: Black citizens are twice as likely as Latinos and thrice as likely as whites to end up behind bars in Georgia prisons. For a profile of incarceration rates in Georgia, see here. The benefits of higher education in prison are compelling. As a case in point, access to higher education drastically reduces recidivism rates: National rates of recidivism in the US are 76.6%; for those who receive college-level education, the rate drops significantly to 13.7%. For those students who complete the cycle of humanities courses associated with Common Good Atlanta, which began in 2008, recidivism rates are below 1%. Prison education is intrinsically valuable because it honors the human dignity of the incarcerated person and because it provides a restorative path to psychosocial transformation.
AYC-HEP Co-curricular Programming: The AYCGL sponsored the first of two panel discussions on COLLEGE BEHIND BARS in Fall 2021: here. One of the panelists from the first panel, Mr. Giovannie Hernandez, was featured in the Netflix documentary. Mr. Hernandez was also interviewed by Mr. Jedediah Grady in More Conversations podcast: here. We convened a second panel discussion, in-person, focused on ‘the challenges of reentry’ in March 2022 (see video here). Three of the panelists in March were featured in the COLLEGE BEHIND BARS documentary, namely, Mr. Rodney Spivey-Jones, Mr. Jule Hall, and Mr. Dyjuan Tatro; additional panelists included Ms. Pamela Winn, President of GACHEP, Ms. Kareemah Hanifa (IMAN-Atlanta), and one of our students from Morehouse, Mr. Calvin Bell III. Morehouse is hosting a conference titled BEYOND BARS SOUTH in March 2023 (see here).
Scholar-in-Residency Program (2022/2023):
Mr. Rodney Spivey-Jones was a founding member of the BPI Debate Union, which made international news for beating the Harvard Debate Team in 2015. His senior project, “Messianic Black Bodies,” a featured storyline in the documentary, was edited to include current events and published as “Black Disfigurement and the American Hieroglyphics of Race.” During his on-campus visit to Morehouse, Mr. Spivey-Jones met with AYC-HEP faculty affiliates and student ambassadors, delivered the Psychology Department Gaffney Lecture, conducted research in the AUC library, and provided a Crown Forum talk titled, “A Conversation about Black Bodies” (see here). Mr. Spivey-Jones also participated in a “Talk Back” session with Oprah Winfrey Scholars and recorded an episode of the AYCGL student podcast, More Conversations, with an AYC-HEP Student Ambassador, Mr. Calvin Bell III (see here).
Recent faculty blog entries describing the AYCGL Prison Education Program can be found here (2020) and here (2021), here (2022), and here (2023).
For more information about the AYCGL Higher Education in Prisons Program, contact kipton.jensen@morehouse.edu.