Bayview Prison: The road to college and beyond

Cheryl Wilkins, a former Bayview inmate who is now academic coordinator of John Jay College’s Prison Reentry Program, briefs a client last week.

By Chris Lombardi


The exterior of the Bayview Correctional Facility, on the corner of West 20th Street and Eleventh Avenue

Kathleen Conway and Marlene Tejada enter the conference room resolutely, their smiles and handshakes confident and their hair just so, Conway sporting a stylish chin-tracing bob, Tejada’s pulled into a neat ponytail. Like any college students, they confide that they haven’t been getting much sleep, and talk about their schedules with a mix of resignation and pride.

“I’ll think, I gotta just finish this reading—it’s 11:30 at night,” said Conway, a 50-year-old administrative assistant with a taste for literature. “Then I look and see: Oh no, it’s 1:00! And I gotta get up at 6 in the morning to get to work on time.”

Tejada, a 28-year-old executive assistant, adds that it’s not easy taking two classes on top of working all day, as she and Conway both do before attending class from 6:00 to 9:00 every night. “Then we have to rush back,” she said, “because the last shower is at 9:30, and then we have to be in our rooms, ready to be counted!”

Those last words and the pair’s loose-fitting green jumpsuits signal that Conway and Tejada are not just college roommates, but inmates at Chelsea’s Bayview Correctional Facility, who also helped establish a Learning Center for Women in Prison (LCWP) at Bayview and are now part of the center’s freshman class, on track for a liberal arts associates’ degree from Bard College.

For Tejada, a college education is all she’s wanted for a long time. “It’s an essential part,” she said, “of changing who I was to who I am.”

Established in 2002, Bayview’s LCWP is part of a national and statewide push for higher education behind bars that is based on solid research showing that college programs prevent recidivism while improving the behavior and attitude of even long-term inmates. Modeled on an already successful and longer-term school at Westchester County’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, LCWP required a lot of hard work and support from Chelseans and New Yorkers in its infancy: Many local academics, for instance, volunteered their time and expertise, while others focused on raising funds from myriad sources, including from the office of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

The first class at Bayview started last year with 15 students, including Tejada and Conway. But all concerned know that this pilot program is just that—a start—both for the women involved and for a national prison system just beginning to tilt in the direction of what works.

Prison education comeback

It was 1984 when Kathleen Conway was first incarcerated at Bedford Hills, a maximum-security facility that is also the mandatory first stop for every woman entering the state prison system, before being transferred to facilities throughout New York. Unlike two-thirds of the 4,000 women currently in New York prisons, Conway had managed to get a high school diploma before being arrested. (Like the other inmates and ex-inmates interviewed for this story, she declined to discuss the circumstances surrounding that arrest.) But when she got to Bedford Hills, which had just started a new college degree program run by Mercy College, Conway was finally ready, she told Chelsea Now, to listen to her mother.

“[My mother] said, ‘Kathy, you gotta keep your mind active. None of us went to college. You’re the last one [with a shot],’” said Conway.

The program at Bedford Hills was then one of 350,000 such programs in prisons around the country, enrolling nearly 10 percent of all inmates nationwide. Started as part of a national prison reform movement that took off after the 1969 Attica prison riot, Bedford Hills’ and other prison schools thrived by making ample use of federal Pell Grants for low-income students. Meanwhile, studies soon documented that these programs were great investments of public monies by being the single best way to prevent recidivism, showing dramatically lower rates of re-arrest and higher rates of employment for college enrollees than for other parolees.

While the exact numbers vary, re-arrest rates for those who had completed a degree program ranged from 1 percent to 26 percent, versus between 55 and 70 percent of the general prison population. One 1987 Massachusetts study of more than 200 inmates serving time for violent crimes—including murder, rape and armed robbery—over a 25-year period found that “college was the only program with a 100 percent success rate: Not a single inmate who earned a college degree had been re-incarcerated for a new crime.” Other studies have confirmed this trend (the higher the level of education, the lower the recidivism): One, done in 1991 in Utah, showed a 3.7 percent re-incarceration rate for inmates holding associate degrees, 5.6 percent for those with bachelor’s degrees, and 0 for the small number with master’s degrees.

Prison education initiatives remained a potent weapon against recidivism before the tough-on-crime wave of the early 1990s, when the new Republican Congress in 1994 blocked the incarcerated from receiving Pell Grants, claiming they were “coddling” prisoners and a waste of taxpayer funds. Most states, like New York under a new governor named George Pataki, followed suit. Within three years, only eight prison college programs remained in the whole country. “In nearly every case,” wrote Kenneth Mentor, of the University of North Carolina, in 1998, “the individual’s education abruptly ended as funds were denied.”

The Mercy College program that had welcomed Kathleen Conway at Bedford Hills closed in 1995. But a few years later, that prison community mobilized to revive the program, with help from such disparate supporters as inmate Kathy Boudin, longtime volunteer Thea Jackson, actress Glenn Close and playwright Eve Ensler, along with academics from Teachers College-Columbia, NYU and Marymount Manhattan College, the latter of which agreed to host the new, privately funded program.

By 2001, the New York State Department of Corrections (DOCS) coordinated and published “Changing Minds: The Impact of Higher Education in a Maximum Security Prison,” which showed a 7 percent re-incarceration rate for Bedford Hills’ inmate college graduates, versus 30 percent for those without college. Elsewhere in the state, private alternatives to Pell Grants emerged, including Sing Sing’s Hudson Link, developed by current DOCS Commissioner Brian Fischer and Bayview’s current superintendent, Catherine Cook.

Exhibit A...B and C

At Bedford Hills, one of the first new students was Cheryl Wilkins, who would go on to help bring college to Bayview before being released last year. A striking woman with reddish braids and a wide smile, Wilkins spoke to Chelsea Now last week from her office as academic coordinator of John Jay College’s Prison Reentry Program, which matches ex-offenders with college and employment resources.

Wilkins arrived in Bedford Hills in 1997, just as the “buzz” about the new college program was intensifying. Asked to describe her life before then, Wilkins spoke mostly about growing up in the South Bronx, in a housing project where shots rang out every night.

“I saw no way out—I was into the street life,” Wilkins said. “The culture in my neighborhood was running the street.” All around her, she remembers, many of her classmates were being cared for by drug-abusing siblings. That environment, she said with a droll smile, was hardly conducive to wanting to complete high school.

Motivated by the college program at Bedford Hills, Wilkins got her GED at age 20 and was admitted to the first Marymount class set up for the inmates. She had two in-prison jobs then: one in the print shop and one helping set up the nascent college program, from fixing computers to running the copier. Eventually, she went on to join Bedford Hills’ Student Advisory Board with her fellow inmate Boudin and others; now she sees all her fellow 2001 graduates as little siblings and rattles off their achievements.

“One works at [the homeless shelter] Samaritan Village. One’s involved with Women’s Prison Association. Every single one is giving back in some way,” she said.

By the time she was transferred to Bayview in 2003, Wilkins already had a B.A. in sociology and was happy to help out the nascent LCWP Student Advisory Board at that prison. Already on it were fellow Bedford Hills veterans Kathleen Conway, who had come down to Bayview the previous year to await her parole hearing, and Marlene Tejada, who had survived a childhood resembling Wilkins’, though in Bedford-Stuyvesant, before landing at Rikers Island after “something happened.” At Rikers, she passed her GED exam right away and, at Bedford Hills, passed a legal research class that convinced her college was in her future.

Graduates in the making

The LCWP, now in its fifth year, was created by Bayview’s Community Advisory Board, which over the years has included notables like State Senator Thomas Duane and several of his aides, including Cecile Scott; NYU Anthropology Professor Angela Zito; Barbara Brancaccio, a former executive director of the prisoner-reentry nonprofit group Womencare; and An Trotter, who now runs the Executive Education M.A. program at Columbia University.

They took the plunge in 2002 after being approached by Bayview inmates who had started their education at Bedford Hills. First, the LCWP Student Advisory Board organized non-credit classes such as the painting course run by Irish artist Brian Maguire and sponsored by the White Box Gallery (featured in Chelsea Now’s Feb. 9 issue). They also began to raise funds, including $2,000 in seed money from Quinn’s office. Next, they “auditioned” various colleges and chose Bard College, whose Prison Initiative had already been running classes at Eastern and Green Haven Correctional Facilities, in Ulster and Dutchess Counties, respectively. In the summer of 2005, the LCWP board ran an intensive summer writing program to get a pool of 200 applicants ready for college—it didn’t matter that most hadn’t finished high school and that some would need years of tutoring before passing the GED exam, mirroring New York’s female prison population as a whole. Finally, the applicants had to apply to Bard as any prospects would, with five essays, a timed essay exam and an interview.

“At the interview they ask you, ‘Do you realize it’s class five nights a week?’” Conway said last week. “I guess a lot of people don’t realize.”

Of the 15 students who entered with the first class last year, five have left, either because of prison transfer or parole. The 10 remaining work at their day jobs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., fitting in appointments, study time and dinner before 6 p.m., when class begins each weeknight. The classes themselves are rigorous and can seem bewildering to the inmates. Take the current global history class, taught by NYU’s Joshua Humphrey, who uses the Socratic method. “I never saw anyone teach like that before,” said Conway.

Though it will be years before the LCWP holds a graduation, the program is already having a salutary effect on the prison, according to Brancaccio, who left the LCWP board last year to become New York’s deputy mayor for communications. GED graduation rates have increased, and college has become the “cool” thing to do. Nationally and statewide, the salutary effect of higher education in prisons is also well documented, improving countless lives.

“If you talk to corrections officers, you’ll find that they prefer to have college programs in their prisons,” said State Senator Thomas Duane, who was on Bayview’s advisory board before he became an elected official. “Where there’s college, there are fewer discipline problems.”

The 2001 “Changing Minds” study notes that at Bedford Hills, minor incidents of “disrespect” were less likely to escalate after college was established, and inmates’ relationship to their children also improved. Duane said he admires the Bard program but that it’s no substitute for the return of federal and state aid for such programs. “It’s very clear that education is an important part of reentry, and that the further along an inmate gets in their education, the less likely they are to re-offend,” he said.

Asked by Chelsea Now about the future, Conway and Tejada first spoke of wanting to deepen and expand the LCWP program with better computer equipment, more volunteers to do Internet research and bigger classrooms. As secretary and president of the student advisory board, taking the program to the next level is their job, they stressed—and a crucial one at that.

“It’s so important, this ability to transform the personal into the community,” said Brancaccio. “So many treatment programs are so confessional. Inmates start out telling their secrets, about what happened to them. But there [at LCWP], they make a contribution,” she said, adding, “I hope that gets played out in their professional lives.”

About her future, Conway said she looks forward to job hunting with a degree on her resumé, while Tejada said she wants to build on her experience at Bedford Hills, where she worked as a paralegal helping inmates with immigration problems. Now, Tejada said, she wants to get a masters’ degree in nonprofit management and start a nonprofit agency for immigrant families, combining the discipline she experienced in the college program and the empathy absorbed from her own life lessons, just like fellow board member Cheryl Wilkins.

“You can use your past as an asset,” said Wilkins, who just this past weekend went up to Taconic Correctional Facility, in Westchester County, to help “change the culture” of that prison. She told inmates there what she tells everyone: “At John Jay, I facilitate groups. I teach. I mentor. I raise money. I go to school. I run an office. And all of it,” she finished triumphantly, “I first did when at Bedford Hills.”