Education behind bars: Marymount Manhattan College teams with volunteers to keep college hopes alive for incarcerated women

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 24, 2005 by Kendra Hamilton

Of course, there was just one little wrinkle with the program. No single institution had stepped forward to administer it. Thus, volunteers once again stepped forward to create the Center for Redirection Through Education (CENTRED), the nonprofit structure that took care of all the administrative aspects of the program--from scheduling classrooms and ordering textbooks to organizing faculty from eight different institutions to the fund raising.

For five years, CENTRED was highly successful in attracting support and high-profile sponsors such as actress Glenn Close and the (Paul) Newman's Own Foundation. But eventually, the nonprofit's frail ship ran aground against an indisputable reality.

"One of the big challenges of a program like this is that it has no revenue stream," explains Marymount Manhattan's Shaver. "Almost the first thing any donor will ask when you approach them to ask for money is how the money they'll provide will help you to become self-supporting. Let's say you want a physical therapy program and you ask for money to build a building--the question is going to be, 'How can you attract enough students to make this physical therapy program self-supporting?' "Well, in the case of a prison-education program, the answer is that the program is going to depend on donors for all eternity," Shaver explains. While the students do, in fact, pay a token tuition of $5 per semester, they can't begin to shoulder anything close to the full per-person cost of the program. (Marymount plans to operate the program for around $150,000 a year, in contrast to CENTRED's budget, which ballooned to $450,000). "The long and short of it (for CENTRED) was that the sources of funding began to dry up."

But even after CENTRED was forced to fold its tent in 2002, volunteers refused to give up. They formed the Women's Prison Educational Partnership and soldiered on from 2002 to 2004 with an all-volunteer staff.

"It was unbelievable the way they sacrificed for us," says Kecia Pittman, 40, who was class salutatorian when she earned her associates degree and is only a few courses shy of a bachelor's. "They won't tell you how hard they worked, but they were working for free, and there was so much stress."

But there are also rewards, notes Baumgartner. And now that Marymount Manhattan College is taking part of the burden off the shoulders of the staff, Baumgartner and Maher can focus on the thing that keeps them coming back: the women.

"This work is extraordinarily rewarding," Baumgartner says.

Number and Percentage Change for
Female Inmates in State or Federal
Prisons and Local Jails

           % Change from             % Change from
           1999 to 2003      2003    2001 to 2003      2001

Total *        18.16%      176,300        9.37%      161,200
White **       41.98%       76,100       12.41%       67,700
Black **       -1.62%       66,800       -3.88%       69,500
Hispanic       24.12%       28,300       42.21%       19,900

SOURCE: PERCENTAGES DONE BY BIHE USING DATA FROM THE BUREAU OF JUSTICE
STATISTICS--PRISON AND JAIL INMATES AT MIDYEAR 1999, 2001, AND 2003;
HTTP://WWW.OJP.USDOJ.GOV/BJS/JAILS.HTM

* INCLUDES AMERICAN INDIANS, ALASKA NATIVES, ASIAN, NATIVE HAWAIIANS
AND OTHER PACIFIC ISLANDERS. ** EXCLUDES HISPANICS.