The US has
more than two million people in prison, a greater percentage of
its population than any other country and disproportionately
people of color. Less well-known is that the vast majority are
nonviolent offenders—and that half are of student age.
“The
prison-industrial complex thus draws off both funds and potential
students from our universities,” said Tony O’Brien, a PSC
activist who was one of 3,000 people at “Critical Resistance
East,” a conference on prisons and society held at Columbia
University March 9-11. The meeting was an outgrowth of a similar
session held at UC-Berkeley in 1998; this fall PSC Secretary
Cecelia McCall and University-Wide Officer Frank Deale spoke at a
related conference in Harlem. Over a dozen PSC members and others
from CUNY took part in “Critical Resistance East,” taking
stock of the many ways in which America’s jails are connected to
its classrooms.
Maria
Elena Torre is a student at the Graduate Center whose doctoral
research is on the rebirth of a college education program in
Bedford Hills, a maximum security women’s prison in New York.
Interviewed after the conference, she spoke about the 1994
suspension of Pell Grants for prisoner higher education, which had
shut down college courses at Bedford Hills. Her collaborative
research team (on which inmates are a majority), directed by the
CUNY social psychologist Michelle Fein, studies the way Bedford
Hills women won the support of the prison administration and
several presidents of women’s colleges. They now take courses
again in a four-year degree program run by a twelve- college
consortium.
But there
is more to this story than a victory against great odds, or a
hunger for education. The new college program comes out of the
private sector, and so is part of a huge shift in public funds in
New York State away from universities and into prisons. Since 1988
there has been a nearly equal trade-off between the increases for
the Department of Correctional Services and the decreases for SUNY
and CUNY. In other words, the de-funding of CUNY has in part been
driven by the prison boom.
Leith
Mullings, a PSC delegate from the Graduate Center, participated in
two conference panels organized by the Black Radical Congress,
which runs a national campaign called “Education not
Incarceration.” She said she was most encouraged by the large
number of young people present—among them Hunter students who
were distributing leaflets for “Teach CUNY” and CUNY graduate
students who have helped organize protests over globalization.
Mullings stressed that the concerns of these social justice
movements overlap with those of a university union such as the PSC,
and argued that this challenges the PSC to expand its horizons. If
our union ignores student and youth organizing on prisons or
sweatshops, she said, we deprive ourselves of an important source
of strength.
Equally
encouraged by this new youth activism were Baruch faculty members
Marilyn Neimark and Alisa Solomon, active on the PSC Finance
Committee and Newspaper Committee, respectively. Neimark noted
that half the prisoners in the U. S. are between the ages of 17
and 25, and thus of student age. With so few jobs available at a
living wage, this was “an allocation of people” as well as
resources, she said, in effect a criminalization of youth
unemployment. Solomon stressed the grassroots character of
Critical Resistance East, the many prisoners and prisoners’
family members who have been stirred to action by this movement
and are taking leadership in it.
PSC
President Barbara Bowen spoke at a panel on prisons and labor
organized by Michael Letwin, president of the legal aid lawyers’
union UAW Local 2325. Letwin
began by asking the overflow crowd of 50-60 people how many had
worked as labor organizers. O’Brien, who is the PSC’s contract
liaison for Queens College, said he was amazed to discover that
although most of the crowd looked to him like undergrads or recent
graduates, almost all had already worked in unions.
Companies
that now use prison labor include Boeing, Eddie Bauer, Microsoft,
TWA and Victoria’s Secret. Organized labor often regards prison
labor simply as competition undercutting union wages, and
therefore urges that it be banned. But most prisoners would rather
be doing productive labor than sitting idle. Bowen spoke about
this contradiction, and suggested that one way to resolve it would
be to support prisoners’ right to form unions. (One panelist
noted that inmates at New York’s Greenhaven prison had raised
this demand in 1999.) Bowen also called on New York state to
invest in educating its young people, not imprisoning them.