Bringing Liberal Arts Education To Prison | Jennifer Berkshire

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Jennifer Berkshire, journalist and host of the education policy podcast Have You Heard? She discusses her experience bringing liberal arts education into prisons with the Boston College Prison Education Program. They explore how reading the Great Books allows inmates to grapple with sincere questions about guilt, innocence, and responsibility, and how serving a life sentence can shape a student’s educational telos. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:01.358)
Folks, welcome back to the Anchored podcast. have returning with us Jennifer Berkshire came on the Anchored podcast a few years ago in kind of a debate fashion as we were talking about her book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School. Had a great discussion there.

Today we're going be discussing something very different. Jennifer has been bringing the great books, great literature into prisons in Boston and has some incredible stories to tell about the power of the liberal arts to change lives. Jennifer writes for the nation, the New Republic.

The Washington Post and other publications. She is a creator and the co-host of the Education Policy Podcast, Have You Heard? And she teaches aspiring podcasters in the journalism program at Boston College and the Labor Studies program at UMass Amherst. Brookshire discovered her passion for storytelling while covering a series of bitter labor battles that racked her native Midwest in the early 1990s. Jennifer, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. Thanks for being with us.

Jennifer Berkshire (01:07.393)
thanks so much for having me. What a treat.

Jeremy Tate (01:10.296)
So I just love the work that you have been doing. I think it is such a powerful story. Going into prisons, I hated school growing up. It felt like a prison. I never got the great books until I kind of discovered it on my own. And I think for a lot of young people, they're

They're painfully bored in school because we've starved them of a lot of these timeless works. You're bringing this in. I'm curious to kind of hear how this started. How long have you been doing this work?

Jennifer Berkshire (01:45.71)
So the program that I work with is the Boston College Prison Education Program, and it started in 2019. And as you know, Boston College is a Catholic college. It's a Jesuit college. And so this infuses everything they do. And so I taught at BC in the journalism program for six years. And one thing that I noticed about those students is that

even though they tended to be very apolitical, that Jesuit spirit of self-inquiry always made the classes a little more interesting. And so that is absolutely what you feel when you go inside the prison to the little, you know, the Boston College Education Program is, it's a single classroom on the, they call it the Shirley campus. This is a medium security prison.

in central Massachusetts, and I'll just set the scene for you a little bit. So you're driving around central Massachusetts, which is a very bucolic part of the state, rolling hills, forests, cows, and then suddenly emerges this enormous facility with tons of barbed wire, brick blocks where the prisoners live.

There's a real prison yard and then there's basically an education unit, which is not the most glamorous spot, but that's where all the education programs are housed. And so the guys who were part of this program, they are in class. They may be taking four, even five classes a semester. And it's a liberal arts program. They are getting a full bachelor's degree in the liberal arts. And so their classes,

lean really heavily towards things like history, literature, philosophy. And then what's been so amazing for me is hearing their stories of how their own lives and their perspectives on their experiences, what's happened to them in the past and what their futures are going to look like have been transformed really, I mean, through what you would call the great books.

Jeremy Tate (03:58.415)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (04:03.124)
It's fantastic. So when you're when you're teaching, mean, what is the setting? How many prisoners are there? Is this the first few times doing this? Was it a feeling of feeling unsafe a bit? Was this was it scary going in the first time?

Jennifer Berkshire (04:03.354)
Okay.

Jennifer Berkshire (04:19.854)
So I really, did not know, I didn't know what to be prepared for. And so I, because I am a journalist, my preparation was to talk to as many people that I could who teach in the program. So I taught, talked to a number of BC faculty who were in the philosophy department, the history department, and all of them said that this was the most rewarding teaching that they had ever done.

And so that really meant something to me, but that still doesn't prepare you for what it's like to show up that first day and to have to like go through the physical experience of getting into the facility. And so if you just think about the most unpleasant TSA experience you've ever had, that's what it's like. So, you know, you're going through a metal detector, you're being patted up and down.

And, you know, like there's, there's kind of a sense that you're, you know, you may be trouble, right? That the, people who run the facility have their, they're, they're keeping an eye on you. They want to make sure you're not bringing anything into the prison. And so we all carry those clear plastic bags so that they can, they can see what we've got. And so like initially like that, going through that, I didn't feel like I was quite prepared.

But then suddenly there you are in the classroom and it feels like a regular classroom. they've over the years, they've, they've done a lot to make it feel as much like a traditional classroom as possible. So there's a lot of BC swag, right? There are, there are Eagles banners. And then the last time that I taught, they had a really impressive new podium that one of my students carved. He runs the woodworking shop.

And so you can feel their level of investment in making this feel as much like a real classroom as possible.

Jeremy Tate (06:28.018)
It's an incredible story. Tell me about the books, the content. What are some of the works you're digging into together?

Jennifer Berkshire (06:38.0)
So first I'll just tell you a little bit about the whole program. there are about 100 faculty who have taught in the program. And competition to teach now is intense because the word gets out about what a rewarding experience this is. Well, why is it so rewarding?

Jeremy Tate (06:57.166)
Wow, okay. It's not a matter of trying to get people to do this. Everybody wants to do this.

Jennifer Berkshire (07:02.104)
No, everybody wants to do it. And the reason that they want to do it is that these, so there's a train going by. Do you want to pause while it goes by? Okay. So the big part of the reason that there's such demand to teach in the program is that the students are engaged at a level that you just don't see with most traditional undergrads.

Jeremy Tate (07:12.495)
you're fine. Can't hear it at all.

Jeremy Tate (07:30.136)
Wow, okay.

Jennifer Berkshire (07:30.736)
And so part of the reason is that most of them are older. I had students who were in their 50s. They absolutely do not have an iPhone. So you're in what is essentially a tech-free zone. They have tablets, but the tablets are essentially disconnected from the outside world. So that's the train.

Jeremy Tate (07:38.368)
I'm guessing they don't have an iPhone if they're in prison. that?

Jeremy Tate (07:56.151)
Okay. Wow. Okay. Yeah, you're good. So this is amazing that because the students in a prison are actually far more focused, far less distracted. That's one of the reasons faculty at Boston College are competing against each other to get the privilege to be part of this program. Is that accurate?

Jennifer Berkshire (07:59.056)
I'm just gonna close the window.

Jennifer Berkshire (08:04.793)
It only takes a minute.

Jennifer Berkshire (08:25.264)
Absolutely. And I know I was initially quite intimidated by the fact that the classes are long. You were at the mercy of the schedule of the prison. And so everything is timed around the movement of the inmates. so, you know, like our class typically starts around one and it runs till 3 30. And I thought, oh my gosh, that's a lot of time.

you know, like, what am I going to do to fill all that time? And all the faculty I talked to said, that's not going to be a problem. Your main challenge is going to be to get students to stop talking because they're like, they're going to come in, they will have done the reading, they will be ready to go. And I absolutely found that to be the case. And then I think what's so impressed me is that the,

don't have the same level of choice that a traditional college student would have. Like my students, I teach at Yale in the fall. And when you look at the number of courses that those students select from, it's incredible. These students in the facility get to pick, you know, there may be nine courses offered. So they have a little bit of choice, but it's very heavily oriented towards the liberal arts and, know,

And so if there and if you need another English class and what's on offer that semester is poetry, you're taking poetry.

Jeremy Tate (09:56.215)
Wow. So the students in this program, and I'm thinking about reading Malcolm X's autobiography, which I thought was so powerful. you know, he says he went to prison with, he could hardly read.

he when he leaves when he graduates when he leaves prison he's lecturing at the Ivy Leagues and the prison guards said you know Malcolm X would read 18 hours a day in prison but he went in and he didn't even have a high school degree are your students are these prisoners did they have some education does it vary are they high school graduates or they drop out what is that like and then how do they do they have to apply to become a student in this program what is that like

Jennifer Berkshire (10:41.858)
So because the class that I've been teaching is called the politics of public education, we spend a lot of time talking about their individual education experiences. And one thing that really surprised me is that for many of them, their own educational journeys were really kind of a mystery to them, right? That they, these are bright guys. They would not be in this program if that weren't the case. But then at some point, something goes off the rails.

Jeremy Tate (11:01.646)
Hmm.

Jennifer Berkshire (11:11.684)
And they really, they had a much more varied set of educational experiences than you might expect. think that the, you, what, I think if you asked somebody to guess what the typical inmate education experience is like, it's be like, they went to an urban school. They had, they would think of like a stand and deliver, right? But, but often what I found is the one they, they went to.

many more varied kind of schools than you might imagine. I've had several students who were part of what we call in Boston the Metco program. This is the voluntary one-way busing program where students leave the urban district and take a bus to a more affluent suburban school. A number of them went to those schools and graduated from them. But something happened.

And sometimes it's chaos in the home and that it doesn't matter what's happening at the school. It's not enough to overcome whatever's happening at the home. Sometimes it's just that the lure of the streets is too powerful to compete with even a love of learning. And sometimes it's more like the Malcolm X story. So I had a student this year.

Jeremy Tate (12:25.454)
Hmm.

Jennifer Berkshire (12:34.98)
who grew up in the South, he dropped out of school quite early and he gets to prison, that's a brutal experience. And so he ends up in what they call the hole. That's where, basically you're in solitary confinement and he requests a book. And the book that he gets is, it's a John Grisham book.

And I'm blanking on the title. It's the one, it's set in the South and it involves a rape trial. And he gets completely lost in this book. And I know it's not what you would call a great book, but it sets him on a journey of reading. And that became the subject of his study in our class. And then the final project that these guys do in my class is a TED Talk.

Jeremy Tate (13:19.896)
Hmm.

Jennifer Berkshire (13:29.464)
And so that was the subject of his Ted Talk, how he fell in love with reading, how he then learned about other people who become passionate about reading in prison like Malcolm X, and how he has now become kind of an evangelist for reading. And whenever he has the opportunity to convince another inmate, especially one of the younger guys, pick up a book, he does it. And I just, thought that was so amazing.

Jeremy Tate (13:29.986)
All

Jeremy Tate (13:57.793)
Okay, it's an incredible story. You said these are bright guys. Is it all men?

Jennifer Berkshire (14:04.368)
So this is a men's prison. BC is in the process of trying to expand to the women's prison in Massachusetts. But these are all guys. This is a medium security prison. So some of them are there for long time. I had guys who could have been in there for 30 years or more. Massachusetts recently changed its law.

So now you can't be sentenced to life without parole if you were under 18 when you did the thing that got you into trouble. But I had young guys who were looking at spending their lives in prison. And so you asked about...

Jeremy Tate (14:53.038)
I mean, Jennifer, what is that like talking to someone who's got a life sentence? I mean, is that what you're dealing with?

Jennifer Berkshire (15:01.562)
Well, that was another thing that I think really surprised me about the sorts of discussions that we have is how deeply and sincerely they wrestle with questions about guilt and innocence and responsibility. And I think what's exciting from your point of view is that it's often the great books that help them navigate that.

And so, so I went in expecting that I didn't think that there would be a lot of talk about that, right? Like I, I just sort of assumed that like that would be the last thing people would want to talk about. And instead I found that at least some of them were, they, they were eager to go back and think about how they ended up here. There was a guy in my class last year.

who they called him, his nickname was the professor. And the reason he was the professor was that before there was this BA program, there was a lot of popular education in the facility where prisoners would sort of teach each other. And he did a Ted talk that was just, it was so powerful that we all just sort of sat there blown away. And he started out saying, you know, I have wasted every opportunity that has ever been given to me.

And he goes through and he tells the story of this, basically just this waste of a life. And then it ends. I mean, you would be so thrilled. It ends with the great books. It ends with the lessons that he learned from various philosophers and, and where he's going now. And you just sense that not only is he not the same person who came in as a drug dealer and a hustler.

But he has profoundly impacted the people around him too.

Jeremy Tate (17:01.57)
Wow, it's so beautiful. I remember I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I knew my dad had fought in Vietnam.

And it occurred to me as a little kid to try to get it if he had ever killed someone, not as a murderer, but as a sniper, as a soldier. And I learned that he had, and he shared a little bit of that with me. And I remember thinking of how hard it would be to have a minute away from that. That would impact you in your entire being kind of every minute of...

And so, mean, these are, and for my dad, was a hard conversation to have. I mean, do you get prisoners, do they open up about like the crimes and why they did what they did and does that get emotional? What is that like?

Jennifer Berkshire (17:55.13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Very, very, and for me it's been really eye-opening because just, you know, this was a whole new world to me. And so one thing that I've really come to appreciate is that, like, they, part of what knocks them off track, because typically, you know, like, these were good students. Some of them went, you know, they went to, you know, like specialized schools. There were kids who had gone to private schools. It didn't matter. But then at a certain point,

they start to perceive themselves a particular way. And having people around them perceive them that way becomes really important because you're there, you're in this class and you're looking at this guy and the guy is really sharp. Like he's one of the best students that you've ever had. And you're thinking, how in the world did he end up in a situation where he shot somebody in the parking lot of a nightclub because the guy stepped on his foot?

Like, how did that happen? The level of stupidity and then a lot of what we do is peel back the layers. Like, how did you come to think of yourself as that person? And who are you thinking about yourself as now? And I have to say that for a number of them, religion plays a major part in this. There's a sizable chunk who convert to Islam, which is that's a,

Jeremy Tate (19:21.461)
Okay.

Jennifer Berkshire (19:27.01)
a fairly typical prison story, but there's a lot of prayer groups. And I think that sort of then fits in with the more intellectually rigorous readings that they're doing.

Jeremy Tate (19:30.04)
Thanks.

Jeremy Tate (19:44.367)
And tell me a bit more about that. You're teaching a class that is not a great books focus, but you said for some, thinking through their pain and their story, the great books have been helpful. What are some of other courses they're taking as part of this program?

Jennifer Berkshire (20:04.468)
Well, we haven't mentioned yet that so one of the things that makes the BC program really unique is that the students who are released from prison, who are still working on their degrees, they then go to campus. And so there are now 15 gentlemen who have been released from prison who are on campus.

Jennifer Berkshire (20:31.32)
Is this okay? Okay. And so why am I telling you that?

can't remember what I was, so you just wanted to know how their lives had been impacted.

Jeremy Tate (20:47.756)
So with the other courses that they're taking as part of this program, and are there kind of options in the degrees that they're pursuing here?

Jennifer Berkshire (20:50.351)
Yeah

Jennifer Berkshire (20:58.274)
Yeah, so the guys who are getting their degrees while they're in prison are all getting a bachelor's in applied liberal arts. But then the ones who are released from prison and are on campus, they then have the freedom to major in whatever they want. And so the podcasts that I shared with you, those were interviews with guys who've been released from prison.

And what really stood out to me was when I asked them about the classes that had had the biggest impact on them while they were inside, they all mentioned philosophy. They all mentioned the great books classes, which I thought was so cool. And I had a student in my class and he was very focused on learning as much as he possibly could about business. And this is pretty typical.

of traditional undergrads as well, right? Like the kids I had at BC, they were primarily not there to study philosophy or the great books. They were there because they were looking ahead and they wanted to make money. And often their parents were right there too, leaning on them to major in something that was going to be lucrative, right? I know you love history, young Jeremy.

but why not study accounting and then maybe minor in history? And so when I interviewed the guys who were on campus, all of them had stories about these philosophy classes that had really just had caused them to rethink where they'd been and where they were going. And they particularly love a class called the examine life with

Jeremy Tate (22:50.488)
Hmm.

Jennifer Berkshire (22:51.9)
a nun, she looms very large, even though she's a small person, Sister Jean, and you know, they went into it feeling a little, you know, like, another religion class. Do I really want to take this? And she, she guided them through the story of Ignatius of Loyola. And, you know, and what had happened to him and how, you know, up, up until the point of his

Jeremy Tate (22:55.015)
Jennifer Berkshire (23:19.012)
He was hit by a literal cannonball and he spends many months convalescing. He has a conversion. But prior to that, he loved the worldly pleasures just the way that many of these students did. And so again and again, you hear those kinds of stories where they actually are able to relate their own life experiences to these, you know, like classical philosophers.

It opens up their sense of what's possible, but it also, I think, really helps them make sense of their own lives. And that's what I find so powerful about the program.

Jeremy Tate (24:00.347)
I read years ago that states would look at graduation rates from high school in prison building and construction and future plans. And that there was that, it was that predictable, the correlation between education and prison. And here you are.

Jennifer Berkshire (24:07.3)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (24:24.172)
going into prisons and often giving these students, these people the education they never received, which is a beautiful thing. I'm wondering if we could talk a bit about the kind of future of work and the conversations you're having around work in prisons. I'm actually optimistic, Jennifer, about the way AI is potentially impacting education and that education I think has been wrongly aimed for a long time now.

young people at college and career readiness. That's the goal of education, college and career readiness, where most generations, the point of education was always the cultivation of virtue or the formation of the soul. The liberal arts are about liberating, freeing people from their own captivity, proclivities. And here, what an extraordinary setting.

for education designed to free people in a prison. I wonder if you can talk about that aspect, what we call the telos, the goal, the aim of education. If you've got a life sentence, the point of education is not career readiness, right? Can you speak into that?

Jennifer Berkshire (25:39.664)
Okay.

Jennifer Berkshire (25:45.644)
Yeah. So first of all, I should tell you that I spent much of the summer writing an essay that'll be out in a few weeks. It's for a magazine that your listeners will never have heard of called The Baffler, but it's entirely about what you were just talking about, about the, know, the mistaken focus on college and career readiness. And the essay actually ends with AI eliminating all the jobs and then, you know, opening up the possibility that

we can finally embrace a vision of learning for the sake of learning. So I'm eager to share it with you. You will find that it's written with my customary left slant, but I still think you'll find the argument interesting.

Jeremy Tate (26:20.824)
Hmm, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Tate (26:29.454)
Hey, okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, but in terms of that, I mean, I think it's one of the paradoxes of truly liberal education.

in that it's not aimed at creating great employees or worker bees, but it actually does by humanizing people, creating people that are, I think of St. John's College just right down the road here. no majors, great books. They're reading and discussing philosophy. And somehow from that, we love to hire Johnnys. They make great employees, right? Because they've learned how to talk through difficult things with people that are not

Jennifer Berkshire (26:46.426)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (27:12.706)
like them and maybe are coming from a different place in a different worldview. Yeah, I'm wondering if you can speak into that and you know when you're again working with someone who's got a life sentence they they're kind of free in some ways from thinking through what they're doing with you in terms of the job they might get from them.

Jennifer Berkshire (27:36.782)
It's so true. the prison education equivalent of what you've just been talking about is this whole justification for having prisoners continue their education behind bars has been that it reduces recidivism. It pays off for the taxpayer. And so that has meant that historically the favorite programs are really vocational, right?

The best thing you can do is teach one of these guys to weld because then he can support himself when he gets out of prison and he'll be less likely to recidivate. And so you end up with this very, it's an even narrower vision than what we were just talking about, right? Where you're just, you're going through K-12, you're going to college and you're always thinking about that workplace prize at the end. And so this program,

was really started, and I have to give a shout out to the guy who runs the program, his name is Patrick Conway. And this was, you know, like this was his dissertation that making the case that we had, we were looking at these programs all wrong and that prisoners were actually the kinds of students who stand to benefit the most from the liberal arts. And so you really see that because for exactly the sorts of

reasons that you're talking about, right? That when we're sitting around that, we're sitting around in our little education room, for the most part, they're not thinking about what's gonna deliver the most bang for the buck when they get their degree. Now that's not to say that the, because you know like,

a number of them are transitioning to campus, like they are thinking about, you know, like you would probably be a little bit disappointed if you saw how quickly the liberal arts focus transitions to something like, say, cybersecurity. But I think your larger point is absolutely right, that there is this, you know, especially for

Jeremy Tate (29:36.27)
Sure, yeah.

Jeremy Tate (29:49.144)
Yeah, yeah

Jennifer Berkshire (29:59.202)
gentlemen who have no prospect of being released. Their conception of time, I had a guest come this year, a journalist friend, and her takeaway from spending an afternoon with my students was like, these really are the last real students in the world. This is the last place where you see learning for the sake of learning.

other than St. John's, of course.

Jeremy Tate (30:30.03)
Jennifer Birch here. It is such important work that you're doing. Thank you. Thank you for bringing this story. It's just so encouraging. Come back again on the Anchor Podcast. Love to have you and we'll talk soon.

Jennifer Berkshire (30:45.614)
Thanks so much for having me.