Crito's Course Director attends Bard College Prison Initiative's summer residency

Back in 2013, the Bard College Prison Initiative (BPI) was the inspiration (and the proof of concept) for the creation of the Crito Project, and ever since we’ve used the BPI as our regulative ideal for what our work could become, and how it might go about achieving success. It’s safe to say that without BPI, there would have been no Crito Project. Even today, whenever I talk to someone new about what we do, where we’re going, and just what is possible in the field of higher education in prison, I always talk about the BPI.

Until this summer, we relied upon the writing of Bard’s teachers and leaders to gain an insight into what their best practice looks like; in particular Dan Karpowitz’s gripping College in Prison, and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann’s highly-detailed Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison. When BPI suggested we join them for their three week summer residency we naturally jumped at the chance, and were keen to wring every piece of information we could out of the experience!

The residency was an intensive 2+ week series of workshops, and was by some distance the best example of its kind that I have ever attended. From the opening address by BPI’s founder, Max Kenner, to the frank and enlightnening roundtables with BPI alumni, the breadth of specialist knowledge and experience on offer was overwhelming. I came away from the event not only with answers to questions I’d been sitting on for nearly a decade, but with a sense of collegiate belonging; a new set of coordinates that placed what we are doing in the east of England in its wider landscape, both geographically and historically.

The Crito Project now has a new set of goals concerning pedagogy, institutional development, fundraising, curriculum development and its admissions process, all informed by what I take to be the most successful prison-university partnership in history, and we could not be more grateful for how the experience informed our charity’s horizons.

Massive thanks to Megan Callaghan, Delia Mellis, Jessica Neptune and Max Kenner in particular for the organisational effort and sheer force of will that they collectively put into the summer residency. Long may it continue to shine its light of inspirational best practice for advocates & teachers in the field.