College in Prison: Reading in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Few college-prison outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different. Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI’s development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions—the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary—College in Prison makes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.

 

Daniel B. Karpowitz is the Director of Policy and Academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and a Lecturer in Law and the Humanities at Bard College. Karpowitz has served as a faculty member, director, and leader of BPI since 2001. Karpowitz was the co-founder of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, an organization dedicated to supporting college-in-prison programs throughout the country. He was a Soros Justice Fellow at the Open Society Institute. Karpowitz holds a J.D. with Honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a Public Interest Law Fellow. He also earned a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania.