Incarcerated Women and High School Students Attend Class Together: ‘We’re All Americans in One Way or Another’
Ms. Magazine, April 14, 2022: Incarcerated Women and High School Students Attend Class Together: ‘We’re All Americans in One Way or Another’
“In fall of 2020, prominent filmmaker Lynn Novick went to her alma mater, exclusive New York City prep school Horace Mann, to showcase her Emmy-nominated documentary series, College Behind Bars. A year later, the documentary—showcasing the Bard College Prison Initiative, which brought in-person learning and education to prison—inspired Horace Mann senior Simon Schackner to create something that appears to have never been done before: a class simultaneously taught to 11 students at his high school and six students at a minimum-security women’s prison in Maine.
“‘I was just amazed by watching the documentary and realized that I feel like my peers and I kind of take our education for granted,’ Schackner told Ms.
“Although classes between incarcerated people and traditional college students have occurred in the United States, such as Tufts’s Inside/Out program, it seems nothing like it has been done at the high school level, creating a potential new movement in education.”
Additional reading:
PBS: Watch College Behind Bars
USA Today, November 21, 2019: 'Undoing a mistake': Ken Burns film looks inside the push to bring college education back to prison
Time, November 6, 2019: ‘This Is a Story of Hope.’ New Documentary Series College Behind Bars Follows Men and Women Working to Gain College Degrees While in Prison
