Late last year I found myself before a crowd of academics at the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison, an annual gathering of colleges offering higher ed in the nation’s many correctional facilities. Stressing the social costs of mass imprisonment, I asked my well-credentialed audience whether and to what extent should today’s activists resort to litigation to effect change. Given the many universities in attendance, hailing from Washington State to Yale. I supposed much leveraging had been done to persuade teetering lawmakers to allow the all-empowering force of higher ed to pierce the penitentiary’s walls. And yet, leveraging support from politicians, I argued, is not an end-all strategy for prison reform, not when political opinions often change with the election cycle. Given this reality, I nudged my audience to at least consider supplementing their activism with litigation, an effort I believe is now possible in light of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Miller v. Alabama. 
 
Decided in 2012, Miller banned life without parole for children, finding that anyone who commits a crime while under the age of 18 must be given a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on rehabilitation.” Representing the first time the Court had ever recognized a constitutional right to rehabilitation, Miller raises serious questions about what States must now do to rehabilitate young offenders. Is more action needed in areas of therapeutic programming and education, in ways that will equip ex-prisoners with the skills necessary to be useful citizens? In other words, do these prisoners now have a legally enforceable right to return to society with an improved chance of staying out of prison? If our answer is yes, perhaps the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is whether Miller’s idea of rehabilitation requires college?
 
An underreported 2014 RAND Corporation Study found higher rates of post-release employment and a 13% drop in recidivism for those who took college classes in prison. Quite surprisingly, the utilitarianism of college for prisoners has not escaped even the most fervent crime-fighters. Allocating 7.5 million in order to pay for college in New York’s prisons, Cyrus Vance, the recently reelected Manhattan DA, put it bluntly: “[i]f we don’t provide an exit strategy for ex-offenders, they are just going to be re-offenders, . . [i]t’s just really common sense.”[i]Of course, this need for “common sense” is far more pressing in today’s economy than it was in 1972, when Basic Educational Opportunity Grants—known as Pell grants—were first made available to prisoners. A Study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce suggests that 65 percent of the 55 million job openings projected over the next decade will require some postsecondary education and training. In the job market, those who’ve broken the law as teens already bear the stigma of a criminal conviction. Compouding that stigma by not giving them the basic education needed to earn a living wage in today’s economy would be a travesty. 

A shifting consensus over the past several years has generated some support for prison college programs, mainly withing the executive branch; indeed, this is most obvious from President Obama’s reinstatement of the Pell program for prisoners. Yet, as I made clear to my Dallas audience, a next President or Governor more concerned with the retributive model of justice can easily roll back these privileges, in much the same way President Clinton and Governor Pataki did in the 1990s. 
 
Given how quickly the political climate can change, prison reform advocates should not take for granted the benevolence of elected officials. If de-incarceration and reducing recidivism are our primary concerns, Miller suggests that litigation may be used to establish concrete, measured, rehabilitative goals in education. It wasn’t until 1982 that Congress determined that functional literacy was required of prisoners—mandating that States offer at least a sixth-grade education to anyone it imprisons. The Clinton Crime Control Act raised the minimum level to the eighth-grade, and the Bureau of Prisons and many States have since raised the requirement to the twelfth-grade. But if the goal is successful reentry, a twelfth-grade education is hardly a precursor for success. 
 
Now that our judiciary is beginning to think about rehabilitation in constitutional terms, I believe that activists should look to judges, not simply politicians, to improve educational standards inside prison. It was only two ago years that Justice Kennedy appeared before Congress and criticized the lack of attention given to correctional institutions:
 
“The corrections system is one of the most overlooked, misunderstood institutions we have in our entire government,” he said. “We have no interest in corrections,” “Nobody looks at it.”[ii]

Well, that is what activists should now be asking the Court to do—take an interest in, and look at corrections.

[i]McKinley, Cuomo Proposes Higher-Education Initiative in New York Prisons, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/11/nyregion/cuomo-proposes-higher-education-initiative-in-new-york-prisons.html, Jan. 10, 2016.

[ii]Editorial Board, Justice Kennedy’s Plea to Congress, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/justice-kennedys-plea-to-congress.html, Apr. 4, 2015.
 
Written By: Darnell Epps. Darnell Epps (dae66@cornell.edu) is a former student of the Cornell Prison Education Program, and currently majors in government at Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences.

(L) Police in Ferguson wearing riot gear walk toward a man with his hands raised on Monday. (R) U.S. soldiers in Mosul, Iraq, search house-by-house for illegal weapons on January 20, 2005.Image: Jeff Roberson/AP, Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images

If you have been keeping an eye on the media over the past month, this is an image you have probably seen circulating the internet. In an unfortunate game, the viewer is asked to distinguish between Iraq (a warzone that has seen over 1.5 million American soldiers, roughly 100,000 deaths, and the destruction of homes, businesses, and families since the United States invaded in 2003) and Ferguson, Missouri (a highly segregated town nestled outside of St. Louis rocked by the recent killing of an unarmed, African-American 18 year-old).

The differences between these two images are few and far between. The automatic weapons, combat gear, army tanks, and camouflage (An aside: The military use of camouflage began in the 19th century with the sole purpose of making our men (and eventually women) in uniform indistinguishable from their surroundings. It was and is a tactic that allows soldiers to discretely approach a target and defeat the enemy. Why camouflage is needed by local police forces in the broad daylight of mid-western America in response to protesters making use of their First Amendment right is beyond me. More on this later.) bring to light an important and alarming trend in America: the militarization of our local, civilian protective forces.

Police officers ride an armored vehicle as they patrol a street in Ferguson Image: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters via CNN.com

If you are like me, it is unlikely that you knew of the Department of Defense 1033 Excess Property Program (DoD 1033) prior to the Ferguson riots. And, if you are like me, it is likely unsurprising  the United States would institute a program where local police forces receive surplus military kit from the Pentagon. DoD 1033 is a 24 year-old program, having been authorized by the Clinton administration in 1990.  The increasing militarization of US police is largely due to this program.  Originally under the 1208 section of the National Defense Authorization Act, the title was changed to 1033 after being reaffirmed in 1996.  According to the Missouri Department of Public Safety website, DoD 1033 is “for use in counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations, and to enhance officer safety”.

Unless I am terribly misinformed, while there have been a few “bad apples” among the protestors (as there always are), the peaceful civilian protesters of Ferguson, Missouri are neither terrorists nor drug lords. They are neither enemies of war nor a threat to the State. Citizens of Ferguson, like many others across the nation are frustrated. They are frustrated with the militarized police state that our cities have turned into. They- we -are disheartened by the normalization of the killings of our young, (and overwhelmingly) people of color. We are alarmed at the overzealousness of our police that make it simple to mistake America in 2014 with the 1950s South or the current Middle East. But, mostly, we-I-am saddened that while the response to the killing of Michael Brown is unique, the circumstances surrounding his death are certainly not.

Let’s keep the conversation going. What are your thoughts?

Rest peacefully, Michael Brown.


Written By: Amber Aspinall, PREP Programming Chair