"People don't survive 20 years of incarceration with any kind of grace unless they have the discipline to do their reading and writing in the chaos of that place. Forget Harvard. I've already graduated from the toughest school there is."
--Michelle Jones, Ph.D. Student
The practice of giving free education to prisoners might not piss me off if tuition for non-prisoners weren't so ridiculous. I get that incarceration rates are higher for non-whites, a lot of people are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, innocent people get railroaded, etc. I want people to get second chances and be able to turn their lives around. The Harvard faculty may even be right that their role is to judge scholarship, not morals, and I guess as far as our justice system is concerned this woman paid her debt to society.
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It's hard to see funding the education of a convicted murderer, at a time when non-criminals are paying through the nose and going into debt for their education, as anything but a gross misuse of resources. Maybe the problem is that, in George W. Bush's words, the pie is not high enough. But if qualified students have to fight for pie crumbs, I'd rather the non-murderers win the fight.
I guess I'm in the "make the pie bigger" (higher?) camp (I agree with GW Bush? Well, stranger things have happened). I'm sympathetic to those overly burdened with college loans (and would like to see some sort of loan forgiveness program created), but I don't think the solution to that very real problem is to make an at-least-equally-bad problem -- mass incarceration and the difficulty anyone who's been caught up in the system faces in cobbling together a decent post-prison life, even *with* an education -- worse by cutting prison education programs. I'd hope that a nation as resource-rich as the U.S. could work on solving several problems having to do with higher ed at once.
DeleteMs. Jones' crime *was* particularly awful, but so was her life up until that point, and she's had quite a few years to try to find a way to live the best life available to her under the circumstances (including the reality that she can't go back and re-live the first 20 or so years of her life), and she seems to have done a pretty good job of it. She sounds like an outlier in a number of ways, so her story is probably not the example on which to base policy of any kind. That said, I find the argument that she has something to add to conversations about incarceration pretty persuasive, and have no problem with her "taking up" a grad school seat at either NYU or Harvard. The fact that she sounds perfectly happy with being at NYU, rather than arguing that Harvard has somehow done her wrong, strikes me as a point in her favor.
This is just begging for a comment from our resident historian, Angry Archie.
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