Factually! with Adam Conover - College Behind Bars with Max Kenner and Sebastian Yoon

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

The Bard Prison Initiative is a revolutionary program that provides a rigorous college education to men and women in prison. In one of our most power episodes ever, BPI’s founder Max Kenner and recent graduate Sebastian Yoon join Adam this week to discuss how lifechanging the program is, and how it proves that every person deserves an education, no matter the circumstances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, but okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And here's a question. What is prison for? Like, seriously, think about it. What is it and why do we have it? People cannot agree on this point. Is it for punishment? Is it for rehabilitation? Or is it for what it increasingly seems to be, which is a way of isolating people we're frightened of far away in tiny boxes so we don't have to think about or look at them. What do you think? Well, here's the thing. No matter what you think about the answer to that question is, I think we can all agree that the last thing we would want from a functioning prison system is for people to get out, then get arrested again, and then go right back into prison.

I think by any metric, that would be a prison system that's failing. Well, unfortunately, that's exactly what's happening in our prison system right now. Despite the fact that we have 2.1 million people in prison, when folks get out, they very quickly, often right again, go right back in. But this problem is not with solutions. There is a clear way to stop prisoners from being trapped in this endless cycle, and it's called education. According to a big study by RAND, inmates who take part in prison education programs have a 43% lower chance of recidivism than those who don't. And prison education is also a good investment. For every dollar we spend on it, we save about five bucks on the cost of imprisonment, and it even makes prison a better place, if you can call it that, because

prisons with college programs have less violence. Educating prisoners really works. Here's the problem, though. Right now, we don't have much education in prison, like, at all. Decades ago, we used to. Decades ago, there actually used to be college programs in lots of prisons across the country. But, you know, people used to say, hey, why should those prisoners get an education when I got to pay for mine? Now, first of all, that completely misunderstands the way financing for education in prison actually worked. But you got to combine that also with the general tough on crime attitude that we had in the 90s, right? People saying, I'll lock them up and throw away the key. Don't give them anything, right? Nothing's too bad for these no good nicks. Well, all that came

to a head when Bill Clinton signed his famous 1994 crime bill. You might have heard about this bill. Wasn't a good bill. Had a lot of bad effects that created the horrible crisis of mass incarceration that we have today. One of the many bad things that it did was that it cut off prisoner access to Pell Grants, which are a major federal financial aid program that prisoners use to fund their education. And as a result, education in prison plummeted. It almost entirely disappeared. And as it did that,

the prison population continued to balloon. This was a terrible counterproductive policy, the legacies of which we are still living with today. But despite that, there are still programs that point the way forward for how prison education can work in this country. And to prove it, I want to tell you about just one of them. It's called the Bard Prison Initiative. Started in 2001, and it enrolls incarcerated adults, around 300 of them in any given year, in a full-time college programs that result in them getting a bachelor's degree

from Bard College. And if the name of that college sounds familiar, you might've heard about it on the show before. It's the college I went to. And I want to be clear, the degree that these folks receive is not some sort of special prison diploma with like a P stamped on it to let you know it's not as good as a regular diploma, okay? They receive a full bachelor's from Bard College, just as good as the one that I have. And the coursework that they take inside, in the prison, is as rigorous. They're taught by the same professors, take the same classes, and are held to the same standards as students on the traditional campus in upstate New York. And when those graduates leave prison, they're supported by a network of staff and alumni

who make sure they stay on the right track. And that's why an astounding 97.5% of Bard Prison Initiative graduates leave prison and don't go back. Now, if you want to see for yourself how incredibly powerful this program is, Bard Prison Initiative has recently been the subject of a documentary by Lynn Novek and Ken Burns

called College Behind Bars, which aired last year on PBS and is out now on Netflix. And look, this documentary is incredible. It will introduce you to these students and their stories. It is riveting. It is heart-rending. It is such an, I cannot recommend it enough. But before you go out and watch it, I want you to listen to this podcast because today we have two of the folks from Bard Prison Initiative who can tell you firsthand how incredibly important this program is and how it proves that education is something that everyone deserves access to, even the folks who we have written off most in society. Today, we've got Max Kenner, the founder and director of the Bard Prison Initiative, and Sebastian Yoon, who is a recent Bard Prison Initiative graduate. Let me

tell you, this conversation is incredible. It's one of my favorites we've ever had on the show. I think you're really going to love it. Please welcome Max and Sebastian. Before we start, I just want to say that we watch you in prisons. Do you really? Your show is pretty big in prisons, yeah. Wait, I don't want to, I want to keep that in the recording.

You and Impractical Jokers are two of my favorite shows. Wait, I want to keep that in the recording. So we're going to start. And Impractical Jokers are two of my favorite shows. Incredible, really? Impractical Jokers, man, they've brought us so much audience. I did not expect Imprisoned, though. That's amazing. Yeah, we love you guys. Have you seen, we did an episode of Adam Ruins Everything on prisons.

Did that air in prison? No, I didn't see that part. Oh, okay. Not that episode, no, okay. I saw that episode. No, no. Maybe they censored a little bit. Well, thank you guys so much for being here, Sebastian and Max. First of all, we're all Bard graduates, right?

All three of us. That's correct. So this is a little mini reunion right here. A little fraternity going on. But, Sebastian, you're specifically a graduate of the Bard Prison Initiative, right? Yes. Tell me a little bit about what that program was like for you. How did you first come across it and what was your experience of it? Well, so I went to prison when I was 16 years old and it took me about five years to realize that there was a program like the Bard Prison Initiative

in New York State because the first three maximum security prisons that I went to did not have BPI functioning in those prisons. So when I was 21, I was transferred to a facility where BPI was operating, and I immediately took the entrance exam, and I was very fortunate to enroll into the program. And I guess from the beginning, I guess I was a little skeptical towards the rigor of the program because it was a program functioning in prison. And when you're an incarcerated individual,

you're skeptical towards any program that functions in prison. Like, how will this program help me? Will this education be dumbed down because we are in prison? Will this education be dumbed down because we are in prison? And from day one, I think my skepticism was annihilated. The professors come in and one of the first things they like to tell the students is that you're not a prisoner in my eyes. You're a student. And I'm going to treat you no different than I do the students at campus.

Yeah. And that's what's so striking to me about the program is that, so obviously I knew about the program before, but having seen the documentary, I was watching it, and I recognize my own professors from my time at Bard, right? A couple of them, Daniel Barthold and a few others. You said ooh? Yeah, he's a top cookie he's a top and he's teaching like you know 19th century german philosophy at least that's what i took with him

um and you know he's like teaching the same stuff in in prison and that's like surprising to people at first it's a little surprising to me um because yeah you expect well at the very least there's going to be some like adjustment, adjustment or some tracking, like, hey, let's get folks up to speed and do the, you know, GRE stuff first or whatever. But Bard takes the opposite approach of, like, hey, you're as capable a student as anybody else, and you're going to receive the same sort of instruction, right?

Mm-hmm. And that's why, I guess, your expectation is you want to meet that expectation because you're so used to being dehumanized in a way that they want you to be dumb they expect you to be dumb and then you enter a program like bpi and they say they teach you how smart you are and they reveal like your potential wow what were some of the just share some experiences like what were some of the classes that you like what was the first class that really stuck with you? I'll start with my favorite class, which was cosmopolitanism, which was taught by Professor Bill Dixon. And I think that class radically changed the way I perceived my position in society and the way I perceived the world. So the class was essentially questioning the notion of a world citizenship whereby we're not limited or delimited by national identities.

We conceive just people as humans, fellow human beings. And it made me question the notion of civic duties and what we do as citizens. And we learned that it is more about just following and obeying laws and paying taxes, but to be active participants in the political process. Now, if you're learning about that in prison, though, it must strike you differently than, you know, a 19 year old who's in upstate New York on a campus, like, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, how did that strike you there? Did you feel like it was any different for you? Oh, I mean, you know, being a student in prison was very difficult because you have to juggle kind of two identities, right?

Yeah. On the one hand, no matter how hard you try, no matter how immersed you get into books and subjects, the walls are always there. Keys are always jangling, and officers are always telling you where to go and when to move and where to move. And sometimes you lose hope. Yeah. And you think that education will be the only way out.

And it takes that education will be the only way out. And it only, it takes that journey. It takes class after class, multiple discussions with peers and professors to realize that education is the way out. And so you latch onto it as if it's a lifeline and that's what we did. Yeah. I can imagine how much that would be certainly the brightest spot of the day, right? No matter how difficult it is,

like that would be, that's what's sort of pulling you through. Well, Max, give us a little detail about the program. Like how many prisons are you operating in now? How many students are you serving? Sure. So the Bard Prison Initiative is about 20 years old, founded in 1999. And one thing that's important to note is that college and prison is not something that's new.

College was, or at least college opportunity, was standard in American criminal punishment, standard in state and federal prisons for at least a generation until the Clinton crime bill annihilated the programs and made people in prison specifically not eligible for Pell Grants. So you had a situation where college was everywhere, and then almost overnight, it was virtually nowhere. So BPI is a program that we founded about 20 years ago to begin to address that problem and begin to fill that vacuum. And today here in New York, we have about 325 full-time students, women and men, spread across six prisons. We call them in our our context, campuses. We have well over 600 alumni.

And we have a network of sister programs in different states, colleges, universities that we have helped build programs along the way, from the University of Notre Dame to Wesleyan in Connecticut, Grinnell, Goucher, states across the country. And what brought you to start the program? I remember being at Bard, and I think you graduated a few years before I did, and the program was just getting started. And people were like, oh, wow, this is really cool. But what made you take that step? So everything we do at BPI happens at the confluence of these two different social crises, and we don't have a language necessarily for talking

about them at once. So it's hard to be pithy, right? But what we do is very much about the crisis of mass incarceration. The term didn't exist 20 years ago. But it's also about the crisis of radical inequity in how we distribute educational opportunity in the United States. So I think as a young person, I grew up in New York City where the politics of crime and punishment were very much in your face in the 1980s and 90s. And it seemed obvious to me that this story of

the investment in this historical scale of the investment in punishment that we're making as a society was a central part of the story of our generation of Americans. Yeah. And no one was really talking about it in a serious way in the way we've started to

as a country in the last, say, five or 10 years. So that was something that I thought a lot about. And as we started talking more about it on campus, you came to realize, again, this is 1998, 1999, 2000, that once you start having those conversations, this was something that was on everyone's mind. And so the program took on a momentum of its own on campus. But that's only half the story, right? The other half of the story is for myself and other undergraduates at Bard, we felt that the education we were benefiting from was such invigorating and intoxicating for us. But the lack of diversity, the general inequity and how that's distributed was also overwhelming. And so the idea, without knowing much about the history at the time, of creating a college program in the prisons was not just an intervention in this crazy prison

system we'd built over a generation or so. It was also the most radical way we could think of to diversify access to the kind of education that we thought was so valuable. Right. I mean, you immediately massively diversify the number of people who are Bard students, the makeup of the student body. And that's one of the most radical things about the program is this is not like, hey, a college is going in, we're tutoring some folks or we're helping some folks get their GEDs or whatever. This is like, no, we're bringing these folks in as full students who receive the same degree and are held at the same standards. And that seems as a project, like it seems so unlikely, right? It seems like the beginning of a movie

where everyone goes like, what are you talking about? This is crazy. You're telling me you're going to put these kids in a class with, well, it's never going to work. And then I think that's why the documentary is so effective, because you have that reaction. Then you see you really you really see it working. But how did how did you know that it would work? Did you have a suspicion that like,

you know, that first leap of faith, right? If we do classes that are this rigorous, how will it be taken? Is it possible to do it in prison? You're obviously proved right, but what was that first leap of faith like? I don't think that, speaking for myself, that I assumed that I knew anything would work or not work or what we were getting into.

I think what we assumed was that the major asset we had, and keep in mind, at this point, speaking for myself, I'm 21 or 22 years old. I'm qualified to do exactly nothing. You know what I mean? But I had an institution behind me. Yeah. And that institution was expert at doing something. And it could assume a posture of some kind of beneficence or altruism and develop a program which was about, you know about providing some kind of legal aid or some kind of reentry preparation for people or something that was special for people in prison that they concocted.

But that wouldn't actually be generous. That wouldn't actually be loving. There's something that Bard does extremely well, and that is teach to the liberal arts and sciences. And if we want to treat people as equals and as people whose futures we care about as much as people we love and actually care about, what we can do as an institution is provide this kind of education. What we can do as an institution is provide this kind of education. And, you know, it was a process of figuring out how that we have in our prison systems, not only to see the incredible racist impact of how criminal justice works in the United States, but also to see the latent bigotry among the leadership of our best and our richest colleges and universities. The basic assumption that Americans or particularly

certain kinds of people from certain kinds of places who don't have certain kinds of, say, primary or secondary educations, either aren't interested or are incapable of doing the kind of intellectual work that we think is valuable. And what the achievements of students like Sebastian and people you see in the film, College Behind Bars, and our whole 20 years of experience at BPI proves is how wrong that is. And the failures of our best universities are a function of their own decision-making,

not the capacity of Americans all across the social strata. Amen. And I believe Bard Prison Initiative is proving that, like in a really direct way, in a profound way. Sebastian, tell me a little bit more about just what it's like to go to BPI. I mean, again, it's an extreme environment, right? Like what is it like balancing your time? What is it like when you walk into that classroom? What is it like when you walk into that classroom?

What is it like when you walk out? Once you become a BPI student, you become a BPI student for life in the sense that everything that you do revolves around the coursework. On average, a course, you'll have about five to six books, including course readers. We're in an environment where they put limitations on how many books you can have in your cell. BPI students, we always break that rule. And sometimes they get in trouble for it. The interesting environment that is created through BPI is that the yard itself, the prison yards,

they change. So you watch these film documentaries about prisons and all you pretty much see is people walking around in circles, playing basketball, getting into fights and whatnot. If you look at a prison in which BPI functions, you see people walking with textbooks. You see groups of individuals in the yard having discussions about philosophy, about math. You see people tutoring one another in writing. And it changes the very outlook of the entire prison system, be it whether you're in the BPI program or whether you're not. Because those who are not in the program see this change and they want to partake. They start asking questions. What are you guys talking about? Or if they're having an argument, they'll say, oh, hey, there's a BPI guy right there.

Let's ask his opinion. It's got your philosophy 101. And how does that, how does it feel? Because I think about my own college experience and so much of the time you're wrestling with the coursework. I remember those days where you have more reading than you can handle and you just try to sort of muddle through. I read 50 pages instead of all 200 and I'll try to make do in class and et cetera. But also that investment in me as a student, I remember feeling very strongly, like that feeling of like, oh, yeah, I can do this. How does it feel doing that from prison?

For me, my greatest inspiration has been my father, whose support has never left me after I went to prison. Being a Korean-American, I often saw other Asian incarcerated individuals whose family members deserted them upon entering prison because they brought shame to the family. Yeah. My dad did the exact opposite and he came to visit me every week. And as I did my essays, as I read 200, 300 pages a day, I told myself that I had to do this for my father, right? I had to do this because I want to go back to society and never return to this shithole. Yeah.

And that kept me going. from the institution's perspective, Adam, you know, we had a lot of trepidation and concern about the idea of doing this documentary, doing the film that became College Behind Bars, and obviously working with Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein, and Ken Burns, the opportunity was a real honor and something to take seriously. But we also knew going into that that typically in the American media, our people are treated with a large degree of contempt and unfairness. and that was in tension with the fact that we also knew that we were experiencing something every day that America needed to see.

Yeah. And we took this leap of faith, and when you watch that documentary, one of the things that makes me most proud, and if any of your listeners decide to go watch it after listening to this podcast, listeners decide to go watch it after listening to this podcast, I would really always encourage viewers to think of that documentary precisely in contrast to all the nonsense that you typically see about people in prison that's broadcast on television, that's on MSNBC in the middle of the night. Everything that's about exaggerating and going out of its way to make incarcerated people look maximally depraved, violent, frightening,

irrational, insane, you know, what have you. And what you see in that documentary is real and happens every day and is what we are capable of as Americans if our institutions, prisons, and colleges and universities live up to their own ideals. Yeah, I mean, it really proves how much the environment and the way that we treat people shapes their self-image and their behavior in such a strong way like um did you did you notice a change sebastian like you said you're moving from prison to prison you

said uh people were uh you know you see people walking around with textbooks but but in terms of like you know deeper behavior how people felt about themselves, your fellow BPI students versus the other places that you were? Yeah. For one, there was an accumulation of confidence. And I was very anxious whenever I met the professors at the early stage because I wasn't used to having contact with outside people. So BPI, in part, helped me kind of stay in touch with society. They reminded me that I'm still part of it

even though I'm behind bars. Yeah. And I think, you know, I went to prison when I was 16, so there was a time when I tried to commit suicide. And that's because I couldn't imagine myself spending 15 years behind bars. And I couldn't see myself supporting my dad after being in prison for all those years. What kind of job would I get after I'm released? after I am released.

And BPI really, and I say this with such sincerity that BPI saved my life. It is the reason I am proud of who I am today and what I have become. And I am forever grateful that the BPI program existed

and what's unfortunate is that I'm just one of the handful of people who had the same opportunity as my peers. One thing, Adam, that I think we do that is different, and I'm someone who has spent my whole adult life in and around what we now call criminal justice reform. But in the effort to fix what we do in criminal justice in the United States, and liberals and progressives are just as guilty of this as conservatives. As conservatives, we too often look at people in prison as people to fix, as people with deficits to address, problems to change.

We look at criminal justice as something we can work to make less bad rather than look at the landscape and see how we can make it better. Yeah. So both from a, you know, a pedagogical perspective in terms of how we relate to remedial education, but also from, you know, if you have to think about our work in a criminal justice context, it's about putting everything that was in the past to the side, getting together in a classroom, in a seminar style, and assuming everybody is capable of doing terrific work and looking at the future, not the past. Yeah. I mean, that's what I love about your work so much is that it connects me to that project. I always felt my own experience at Bard was profound for me. I was not a good student in high school. For whatever reason, Bard had an acceptance program where they look at your application and go, for whatever reason, they were like, oh, we think we see something in this kid. My scores weren't that good. My grades weren't that good, but they let me in, you know? And I fucking flowered in that place, you know, because I went in and they were like, hey, you're as smart as anybody else. You're a scholar. What

do you actually think? Like, what do you think? No, tell me what you think. Like you read fucking Plato and engage with it. And like, what do you think about Plato? Cause you're as good as anyone who's ever written about Plato. Right. And that that was the project i did that for four years and it made me like flower as a person into the into the person that i am and you know i got i got really watching the documentary um but also anytime i think about bard prison initiative it makes me very emotional because I can only imagine to see folks who had a much smaller amount of the opportunities and privileges that I did have that same experience times 100, right? me that, first of all, it's very emotional watching that happen, but it proves that, yeah, like fucking everybody deserves that experience and benefits from that experience. And, you know, Sebastian, you said that, you know, you regret that more people haven't had that experience. I remember the last time I went to Bard and I was walking on campus and I was

like, wow, this was incredible. But what was this? Was this a, was, is this a, uh, an experience that everybody can have access to, or was this a first class seat? You know, a first class seat on a plane is nice because everyone else gets squished in the back. Right. And, and it would be better off if there were no first class seats and everybody had more leg room. You know what I mean? So, so which, which was that? Was, was that like an experience of pure privilege or is that an experience that I can hope everybody would have? And the fact that Bard Prison Initiative is proving that everybody can or at least is worthy of having the experience is so profound. And it connects that personal thing to the reforms that we need to make nationally. It's just I can't say enough about it.

I think BPA believes that everybody has the potential to have higher education behind bars. What we lack is public support and governmental support. Currently, there are about 2.1 million incarcerated individuals in the United States. We have the most prisoners than any other country, despite our supposed devotion to freedom and redemption. You know, every summer in the prison that I was in, there's an application process whereby incarcerated individuals take the entrance exam. And each year we take about 15 to 18 students. But the people who apply for the program are numbers around 200 to 300 a year, which goes to show just how many people crave this opportunity.

Yeah. But because we don't have the support, it's not feasible. And the mission that we are on currently is to revive the Pell Grant so that everybody has the same opportunity that I did so that they could return to society. Not only having improved themselves, but to able to join the workforce, to give back to the economy, to go back to their communities and be a positive factor. But it can't just be about that, right? About rejoining the workforce, rejoining society. It's like the people are worth it, right?

Like you're deserving of that education whether or not. Oh, yeah, essentially, yeah. To us, that's so important, Adam. You know, so often, again, this goes back to the critique that we have sometimes of our colleagues and friends in criminal justice, right? criminal justice, right? When we so often are under pressure to articulate the value of our work in the most instrumental ways, right? We will reduce recidivism or save taxpayer money, or we will, you know, increase public safety or, you know, prepare people for jobs, right? All these ways of talking about other kinds of students in a way people that are wealthy would never talk about the educations of their own children. Right. Right?

It's only other people's children who you talk about their educations in that kind of instrumental and, frankly, condescending kind of way. Yeah. How much support versus pushback do you have in, just say, New York State in the prison system and in terms of higher education? So it's not a static answer, right? I mean, 15 or 20 years ago, if you were me, you would get out of bed in the morning and put your suit on and really get ready for people to be mad. To be mad because of what we did, because what they believed what we did was wrong, was offensive in a kind of moral way and kind of crazy and irrational way. What a waste.

And that has really changed over time. And it's changed over time because in the United States, we've developed a kind of bipartisan, transpartisan national consensus that the way we've gone about criminal justice in the United States over the last couple generations has been an extraordinary waste. Yeah. We also have, you know, started to be perceived differently by the public. You know, of course, you know, Adam, a few years ago, we have this debate team, and the debate team competes against lots of different schools, and a few years ago competed against Harvard and won, and that became a large news story. Went viral.

Went viral, yeah. Some engineers at Google told us it was the ninth most viewed headline in the world that year, 2014 or 15, whatever that was. So that was funny for us, and whatever. It's in the movie. We were lucky. It's in the movie. We were lucky. It's in the documentary. But most importantly, that was still in a phase of life when we were afraid of too much attention. We were used to being resented and we went about a lot of the work almost in secret.

almost in secret. And that headline, prison or bar defeats Harvard, implied a lot of things to the public and actually led to almost no negative blowback to us, precisely because in the United States, we have a trouble differentiating between something being free and something being cheap, right? There's a sense that when you go out of your way to diversify something like access to college, or when you offer something like a higher education for free, that the students aren't doing the work to earn it. That it's being taken for granted or somehow abused. And the symbolism of incarcerated students defeating these entitled and rich and prepared kids from Harvard suggested that that had to be wrong. And the resentment kind of melts away when people relax and realize, oh, actual real work is being done here.

Yeah. It's such a funny dynamic with the way we think about education. We talked about this in an episode a few months back about college debt, that for some reason, we've classified college as something that, you know, primary education,

hey, that's free. Everyone deserves it. In fact, everyone has to go. And if you don't go, you're fucking up, right? Your kids should be taken away if they're not going to school. But college, don't go, you're fucking up, right? Your kids should be taken away if they're not going to school. But college, oh, that's something you have to earn. That's something

you have to pay for. That's something that's supposed to be expensive. That's supposed to be difficult in this way. Not everyone is supposed to get it, despite the fact that that education is as essential to modern life as middle school, high school, and elementary school are. is as essential to modern life as middle school, high school, and elementary school are. Look, Adam, there's no question. And there's no question that the phenomenon that we call mass incarceration now targets young people of color, particularly African American and Hispanic, young men in urban centers in a very particular way. And it's destructive and it's racist.

And we have to do more to address those issues. But we also need, I think, should look at mass incarceration in precisely the context that you're describing. It's the inverse of our feeling about education. Right. In 1998 in New York, we spent twice as much on our public universities and colleges than we did on prisons. And then by 1998, we were doing the opposite. And that figure doesn't even include 300 million of the state budget for more prison construction.

include $300 million of the state budget for more prison construction. So public policy, the negative impacts of bad public policy, always target, in America, African Americans and people of color in the worst way. But over the course of, say, your lifetime or my lifetime or Sebastian's, we also in the United States have developed a cynicism and disregard for young people writ large. We have abandoned a commitment to public college education and replaced that investment with punishment and prisons. Yeah. I mean, let me just put this a little more bluntly because you're putting it into vivid terms for me. But rather than saying, hey, an education is something that benefits everybody,

that anyone, no matter where you come from, it's going to make your life better, it's going to make you a better asset to society, it improves all society, so let's give people access to that, like we have with primary education or say like we did with the GI Bill. We've said, no, no, that's going to be expensive. But instead, the rest of us are going to pay to put people in prison. We're actually going to invest tens of thousands of dollars a year, not into improving those people's lives and giving them the education that anyone would benefit from, but in just keeping them in little And in addition to that, the investment you just described does nothing to address the person who might be a victim of crime. Yeah.

It does nothing to heal an individual or community. It only exists to punish. it only exists to punish. Well, my God, it's really hard for me to find a time to take a break here because this conversation is so wonderful, but we got to take a really quick one. We'll be right back with more about the Bard Prison Initiative. so sebastian i i gotta ask you every bard student does a senior project uh you did a senior project as well uh which look i did a senior project it was hard enough as a college student in upstate new york uh to you know write I think I wrote a hundred page paper

on philosophy of mind. What was yours on? What was your experience of doing it? Okay. So the title of my senior project was the Diasporic Dispersion of Imperial Legacies. Wow. I looked into how Koreans and Korean Americans look at the Japanese colonialism that occurred in the 1950s and how today they revert to these memories, these histories to engage in politics. Americans take colonial history and then apply it and appropriate it into the U.S. context so that they engage. They want to be identified. They want to be recognized as Americans using the Korean experience. But it's a hard thing, right? If you're not white, it's hard to be perceived as an American.

So, for example, during the Japanese colonialism in World War II, there was what this thing called the issue with the comfort woman. So the comfort woman, what the Korean Americans have been doing is trying to erect these statues throughout the United States. But what's interesting is that they've gained the support from women's rights groups and anti-sexual trafficking groups in order to get these monuments, these statues erected into the American landscape to be part of the United States. Wow, that's really fascinating. I mean, I've seen that in Los Angeles, there's a large Korean American community here and

there's been some issues with like pieces of art that too closely resembled the Japanese imperial, one of the military flags and things like that. And that issue has popped up a couple times in ways that I've been aware of, but haven't like really fully understood. So that's like an identity that Korean folks are bringing with them into the American context. Right. They know that they're not white, right? But they're just saying, we want to be accepted as Korean Americans. Yeah. As Korean Americans.

Yeah. How do you go about studying that? I mean, that's a complex issue, right? Oh, yeah, it was hard. What does that look like? My advisor, Professor Kolb, actually, in the beginning, we were even thinking about forgetting this idea entirely because it was very difficult to find the resources. So we resorted to finding articles, news articles from the past. And we even did a survey, an online survey, which the professor assisted me with.

Korean Americans responded to this survey. That's how we formulated this senior project. Got it. What did it mean to you to do this project? I asked what happens to our senior project when we're done with it. And we were told that, so Bard College on Annandale on campus, as you know, they're all in a vault. Yeah. It's the coolest vault ever.

You'll see it in the documentary. And the notion that our senior projects would go into that vault was something that made me want to do my best work. And for a year, I committed my entire like breathing, waking hour to my senior project. And I just wanted to do the best that I could. Yeah. Yeah. That vault, I went to go look at it last time I was at Bard campus. It's like, they put your senior project like in the Bard library. It's in the card catalog or the computer catalog. People, if they look up Korean American Imperial Legacy, it'll come up. People can, I don't think they can check it out, but they can go read it if they want to use it as reference. And it's in there for good.

It's amazing. Right next to all the other students that study at Bard College and Annandale. Yeah. No different. What year are you from Bard? 2017. 2017. Graduated with my BA.

Are you going to be going to reunions? I hope so. I visited a graduation last year for the other students. It was my first time on the Annandale campus. And when I walked in, I told Professor Mellis that I felt like I was at home being around so many BPI and Bard alumni. Oh, man, that's really wonderful. What was it, leaving prison with that degree? How did that compare with what you think it might have been otherwise? And what are you doing now?

So currently I work as a program specialist with the Open Society Foundation's democracy team. OSF is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world. They support and provide grants to organizations and individuals that are committed to social justice reform work. And I honestly believe that if I did not have this degree, I would not have had the opportunity to get that interview in the first place. I needed that interview in order to sit with people who are now my colleagues to show them that I was worthy of this job. But the sad truth of life is that we have to provide this paper first that

says, you know, you have a degree. Honestly, I don't put too much weight in the degree. I think it's the education that's much more important. But, you know, we need that degree. And once I sat in the interview, I was able to them through doing my words and through my actions that I can be with you know many of my colleagues are from like elite colleges and universities that I can work in a space along with them and do the same exact work so I think it's it's what BPI alum do in life is and in their careers is worth dwelling on because we know, for example, that we cannot fully address the crisis of mass incarceration until we have people who are directly impacted by the problem, who intimately know what the problems are at decision-making tables and at decision-making tables with authority. And what happens 10, 15, 20 years after you found an institution like BPI, if you start an institution like BPI, is that there are formerly incarcerated people with the kind of education that Sebastian is describing in decision-making roles in the government of the city of New York, at places like the Ford Foundation or the Open Society Foundation, in human service organizations all across New York City, in

the arts, in business, representing New York City Hall and its relationship with residents of public housing all across New York City. In all these places where typically you have a divide between life experience and expertise. And BPI is about having the courage to bridge that divide and provide or to conjoin a life experience with a level of formal educational expertise that should not be unusual in the United States, but here we are. Yeah, and that's so valuable. And it also comes back to one of the most basic arguments for programs like BPI, which is, look, I mean, there's, you said 2.1 million people in prison. Most of them are going to leave prison eventually, right?

98%. How many? 98%. 98%? Well, inevitably, at least. Wow. And so the question is like, how do you want those folks to be when they come out? Like, do you want them to be able to bring that life experience to bear in a way that's going to improve, you know, the country for everyone? Or do you want, you know, their lives to be worse for the time that they spent?

I agree with you, Adam. But also, you know, this sounds funny as someone who's spent his whole life working in them, but forget the prisons, right? Yeah. Let's look at the United States and think, acknowledge all the latent talents that we are failing to engage. Yes. Right? Let's look at all the human waste that is out there in the landscape and all our cowardice in engaging people in a full and human way.

And when you do that, the prisons are the first place to look. They are the place where there's the most obvious and most voluminous wasted human potential, but they're hardly the only place. And the cowardice of the leaders of our college universities in having the courage of their own convictions to think, you know, people are supposed to be the smartest folks on the block, right? moments of their lives in different places is an extraordinary deficit. And we can do a lot more in thinking how to do better in education than I think we can do imagining how to do less bad within the prisons. God, I love that because I love that challenge because that makes me think of all the universities. You know, Bard is not a rich college. It's a, it's an expensive college and it's got, you know, some millions, right. But it's not in the, in the higher echelon of, you know, your Harvard's and your Yale's, which have these massive endowments. And like you said, just like

Bard, they are expert at teaching people like teaching liberal arts, sciences, humanities, all those things. Why aren't they spending their money on that? Why not say, Hey, we've got a couple billion in the, I don't know how much these, you know, the big largest ones have, but it's up there. Hey, we got a bit in the bank here and, you know, we can keep having our concerts and our research institutions, but like, let's take it to the people. Let's do what we do. Let's expand what we do rather than keeping it small just for a few. Yes.

We agree. Sebastian, I did want to ask one follow-up question because I think that some people might hear about that senior project and say, okay, well, that's, hey, you know, great academic work of scholarship, but how does studying that sort of thing uh uh prepare you for you know a life uh you know your life going forward right studying the uh korean-american uh you know feelings about the imperial legacy right uh yeah how does that connect i mean for me it was It was the construction of empathy, which I think I lacked as a teenager.

I grew up a very insecure boy. I was often bullied in school for being Asian. And through my senior project and through my courses in anthropology, I studied about other people. Rather than looking at myself, I looked at other people. And I was able to connect the dots and see the humanity that exists between and among us. I think we get so involved in life just about ourselves and people who look like us and who think like us. And for a second, you take a moment in your cell and you look at other people and how they think. And you say, they're just like me.

Even though we have different opinions, they're just like me. Yeah. And it built empathy. And today, it is the reason why I am so passionate about social justice reform work. I want to do more than just something for myself. And I want to help others. And I wake up in the morning truly happy with what I do today. Man. Well, how do we expand this? I'm sure folks listening to this are confident now of the worth of this program and the project.

You know, you're talking about trying to bring back Pell Grants, etc. But do you feel that this model is truly scalable? I mean, right now, BPI is privately funded, right? It's philanthropically funded, correct? Overwhelmingly, yep. And so there's, you know, know to some degree a limit to that model i imagine um how is this something that we can how can we use this model to transform uh criminal justice and education systems sure so if your listeners are interested in calling their representatives in Congress, there is today bipartisan legislation supported by Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, who's very liberal, and Senator Mike Lee from Utah, who's extremely conservative. Legislation to lift the ban on incarcerated people receiving Pell grants. That is the first and most important thing that we can do that would

create the opportunity for programs like these to come back in states all across the country. It's not all we need to do. There will need to continue to be some combination of state, municipal, or philanthropic money to help support those. The Pell Grants aren't quite enough to do this work as well as it should be done, but the work can't be done without it. So that is the first and most important thing. The second is more challenging, and that is convincing our leaders in education to think in more and different ways. But, you know, there have always been people in American life who've taken more advantage of a little educational opportunity than, say, the rest of us, right? All through American history, immigrants have accomplished

more than the rest of us. And throughout the 20th century, veterans of foreign wars transformed the landscape in higher education overwhelmingly for the better. And 80 years ago, the best learning colleges in the United States by far were community colleges here in New York City and Brooklyn and Queens filled with people for whom the Ivy Leagues held a quota. You know, immigrants from Eastern Europe, mostly Jewish folks. And we never, ever talk about it. But no one accomplished more with a little access to education in all of American history than the generation or so of African Americans who experienced emancipation from slavery. Right?

Think of where those communities went from 1865 to 1915 is an extraordinary set of achievements. It's a massive change. And I would propose two things. First of all, that incarcerated people today in the United States are analogous to all of those groups, but also that we as taxpayers and we in higher education need to look and more in different places in how to engage different kind of learners because the way we do college access, the way we do college admission and opportunity in the United States is broken. It is.

Sebastian, do you have any hope or vision for that future? No, I actually wanted to add a third point is that in order to convince the public and these government officials, one way to begin is, I think, the film College Behind Bars. What I really appreciate about this film is that we speak for ourselves. We don't have a narrator talking for us. We don't have newspaper articles talking about us. We are not introduced by our crimes, but by our names and our family backgrounds and us as human beings before you learn about our crimes. It gives the public a chance to see us as human beings before you see us as a criminal. In newspapers, that's all you get.

Age and crime and went to prison or jail. This film, I think it reveals humanity and gives the public an opportunity to say, here are two sides. After watching the film, after learning about these individuals, then make your judgment, but not before. And one thing I like to tell people is that after I watched this film, the feeling that I always get is that I want to be a better individual. I think Sebastian makes an extraordinarily important point, and I challenge really any of your listeners to point to another document in American media,

something that's been on national television or the like, that provides incarcerated people with nearly this much time just to speak for themselves. Yeah. nearly this much time just to speak for themselves. Yeah. That is, again, you compare that to the other ways people in prison are represented in American media. And it represents a radical departure and one that I think is overdue and worth celebrating.

Yeah, I mean, this kind of media is so powerful. We had the host of Ear Hustle, a wonderful podcast recorded in San Quentin State Prison here in California, which also gives incarcerated folks the chance to speak that way. And that chance to engage with people one-on-one with a class of people who, design, we sort of isolate, um, the rest of the country isolates and like, doesn't want to hear from, or, uh, or at least doesn't hear from on a regular basis that can be so powerful because it's that thing of once you hear somebody's story, uh, you engage with them as a person and you, you sort of lose your ability in most cases to, you know, default back to your snap judgment,

to your like snap, to dismiss them out of hand once you've heard the story. Have you found as, I mean, the film came out on PBS a few months ago. It's on Netflix now. Have you noticed any like change since the film come out? Has there been more interest? Has it opened any doors for you in terms of policy, et cetera? First of all, obviously many more people know about the work that we do than did before. The film is now up on Netflix and Amazon Prime, so many more people are seeing it and experiencing it in a firsthand kind of way. We are grateful for all the new supporters we have and financial benefits that some of that attention has got. important thing is that we take advantage of this moment of bipartisan consensus in criminal justice

and restore Pell Grant eligibility so that we can, you know, it's not transform prisons into something they never were, restore prisons to what they were, which was bad and tough and punitive back in 1993 and 92. But just making them give people some opportunity to make good on their time and invest in their and their community's futures. Yeah. I mean, things haven't gotten better since we eliminated Pell Grants in prison in 1993. So it hasn't, it certainly hasn't solved any of our problems. I mean, Adam, it doesn't make sense that the national recidivism rate is over 60% within the first three years of post-release.

60%? It just makes no sense. Makes no sense. And Bard Prison Initiative students' recidivism rate is under 4%, and 85% of them find a job within two months of release. Within two months? Within two months. And now the Bar Prison Initiative also, it has reentry as well, right, in terms of programs that it offers.

Like it helps, which is a big problem in our prison system generally is the lack of reentry programs. That people are just like sort of, all right, here you are in the corner with maybe a bus ticket or something like that, or the proverbial bus ticket. We do, and we do a lot of work here in New York City. But I think in this context, the most important thing to emphasize is that in the prisons, we build human relationships and human capacity and communities of people who are invested in one another. And those human connections are much more valuable than any of the programs we offer, which are, you know, we do a lot to work with our former students in helping make sure that they finish college if they haven't done that already, or in helping cultivate their careers. But the biggest advantage a person has from leaving prison,

if you've been a BPI student, is the relationships you have with other people, most importantly, fellow students. Yeah. Well, let's bring this home. Sebastian, I thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. What do you most want people to know about what your experience has been and, you know, how do you want their impressions of, you know, incarcerated folks, criminal justice to change in education? When I went to prison at the age of 16, I was put in a very dark place, a lonely place, a place of hopelessness and this education it again I said it earlier but it saved my life and today I am doing something I'm proud of and I am looked

on by my peers, my colleagues and my family as someone who is on the right path someone who is supporting them as opposed to being supported all the time. And if I could say something to the public, it's that we have to just for a second imagine 2.1 million human beings being warehoused in our prisons.

We don't think about them because they are behind walls. You don't see them. think about them because they are behind walls. You don't see them. And so all you know is that they get sent there and then you just forget about them. But they are brothers, they are sisters, they are mothers, fathers, sons and daughters in prisons currently. Imagine if your son or your parent went to prison. How would you want them to return to society? Would you want to improve their chances? If we can invest just $1 in higher education in prisons, it would save society $4 to $5.

Just think about it for a second. Yeah. I don't think you can make a stronger case for this program than that thanks for having us thank you so much for being here and for the work that you

do and for sharing it with us I can't express how much I think this program means. So thank you both. Your fellow alumnus. Thank you for having us, Adam.

It's a thrill to be here. I love you guys. Yeah. The fact that the fact that we're fellow alumni is, Hey man, it's, it's, uh, was really incredible to get here and talk to you. I love you guys. Yeah, the fact that we're fellow alumni is, hey man, it was really incredible to get here and talk to you. Just a bar student to bar student, you know what I mean?

Man, we used to watch you in prison all the time. And it ruins everything. Thank you, folks. Thank you so much. Well, I got to thank once again, Max and Sebastian for coming on the show. I think you can probably understand why at the top I said, this is one of the most powerful episodes we've ever done. It meant so much to me to be able to do it.

And I hope it meant as much to you to listen to it. The documentary, One More Time, is called College Behind Bars. You can see it on Netflix or on PBS on their app or on demand. And that is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineer, Brett Morris, our researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song. I'm Adam Conover. You can follow me on Twitter or wherever else you like at Adam Conover. My website's adamconover.net for new tour dates and such. And until next week, we'll see you on Factually. Thanks so much for listening. I don't know anything.

That was a HateGum Podcast.