Helping Bayview’s inmates find their way to college

Volume One, Issue 32, April 27 - May 3, 2007

On the Record

<<Chelsea Now photo by Kate Weiman
An Trotter

By Chris Lombardi

An Trotter’s sleek office at Columbia University’s Office of Executive Education is pretty far from Chelsea’s Bayview Correctional Facility, literally and metaphorically. But Trotter has spent more than 15 years working at Bayview and, as co-founder of the prison’s Learning Center for Women in Prison, was a driving force behind its new college program in partnership with Bard College. She sat down with Chelsea Now recently and talked about why she went to volunteer there, about the college program and about the institution she calls “more like a public junior high school than anything else.”

How did you first got involved with inmate education and Bayview?

I became involved with Bayview in 1992, through the New York Junior League. Bayview opened in 1978, and the Junior League had just handed off a program they had been running at Rikers [Island] since the mid 1960s, so they came in [to Bayview to run tutoring and other workshops for women]. In 1992, I was assigned to a program called “New Lease on Life” that does financial skills for women, and I got hooked.

Tell us more about that—about getting hooked.

I used to be a dancer, and that first year there was a woman in the class who wanted to be a dancer, and so we bonded about that…. She had been pregnant three times, and every time her boyfriend beat her until she lost the baby. But it wasn’t until she had been incarcerated for a year and a half that she recognized that as abuse.

That really had an impact on me—as you can tell, since it’s been 15 years. I was really overwhelmed with the fact that for so many women, entering the prison system is their first contact with the health care system—really since birth. That includes access to mental health services.

I was asked to join the prison’s Community Advisory Board. This coincided, in 1994, with the time when the federal government eliminated Pell grants for prisoners, and so did most state tuition aid programs, including New York with its TAP Program. So, they cut off all the financial aid for prisoners, and all the prison college programs that had been in place since Attica, when the riots actually sent the opposite signal to the public and prison officials: that you’ve got to start providing services for prisoners. And that included Mercy College’s bachelor’s degree in behavioral sciences [at Bayview].

So, when did you decide to start this program?

It was the women who came to us [in 2000]. There was this [privately funded] college program at Bedford Hills, and what was happening was that there were women who had enrolled in that program who then, sometimes in the middle of the term, had been pulled out of college and sent to facilities that had no college, like Bayview. They came to us and said, “Can you help us bring college back to Bayview? We can’t go out and solicit funding; can you help us?” So, we started the Learning Center.

Before we landed Bard, we ran 17 non-credit classes and were working with a network of college professors in New York City who were volunteering their time. We had [Brian Maguire] from the White Box Gallery…he ran painting classes and painted the women’s portraits. We had Angela Zito, who runs the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, who taught a class in anthropology of religion. The women who took the class—first, even though many had taken college classes in the Bedford Hills program or elsewhere, they said it was the most difficult class they’d ever taken. And a group of women who took that class then came to the Community Advisory Board and said, “We’re forming a student government.” They’d really been galvanized.

How did you come to choose Bard for the degree program?

We looked for a long time. We really wanted a quality institution, and we felt some of the colleges who approached us were almost predatory, feeding off the students just to get their financial aid. We talked to Sarah Lawrence and to Marymount Manhattan College, which runs the program at Bedford Hills. But Bard has two programs in prisons, they’d established great relationships with the Department of Corrections in Albany, and they seemed to have a program that was sustainable.

How does it work?
We have our first class of 15 women, who started last fall and took two classes, one in sociology and one in critical writing skills. Eleven of them completed the term; four were transferred [to another prison] or were released. The rest are continuing this spring with four classes. One mini-class I think you’ll find interesting: There’s a journalist from Zimbabwe, Geoffrey Nyarota, who’d been running newspapers there. He’ll be teaching a course in Media and Democracy.

Speaking of which, it can’t be easy, getting the free flow of ideas inside a correctional institution.

All the material has to be cleared by a security officer. Every book, every handout, has to be read and cleared by a security officer. Every piece of equipment has to be sent up to Sing Sing and cleaned before it can be installed at Bayview. Every visiting author, every teacher, has to be prepared thoroughly, so there wouldn’t be a security problem,

There’s a new deputy superintendent of programs [at the prison] who’s been making some changes in the security procedures, and a lot of the volunteers [like Trotter earlier, or the volunteer tutors] were kind of unsettled. It’s now tighter, much tighter. I think it has to do with making things more uniform, and Bayview has been—I don’t want to say lax, but there are ways in which we’re different.

There was a new deputy superintendent of security who walked into the kitchen, and he noticed that the [aluminum] can lids, they were just throwing them in the trash, and he freaked out. In men’s prisons, any lid like that is secured immediately, because it could lead to razor fights. In Bayview, they’d been throwing out can lids for 29 years and never had a lid be used as a weapon. A lot of the time, it feels a lot more like a public high school, a public junior high school, than anything else.

Talk a little about the changes you’ve seen in the women you’ve worked with at Bayview.

We just had a woman leave in March, named Vanessa, who had been incarcerated for 17 years, and who went on to become president of our student governing board. The four women who took our not-for-credit classes and have been released, they’re all in professional positions: Vanessa is an executive assistant, one [Cheryl Wilkins, featured in last week’s issue of Chelsea Now] is at John Jay College [working as coordinator of the school’s Prisoner Reentry Program], one’s at a housing agency. I don’t remember where the last one is working, but it’s also as an executive assistant.

Most people who leave prison end up in either telemarketing or fast-food. The women we’ve worked with have a better sense of their options, and higher aspirations for themselves.

You’ve gotten good support from the community, starting with State Senator Tom Duane. He wants to bring government funding back to prison college programs, too.

There are numerous studies showing that a college education cuts the person’s chances of returning to prison from 60 percent to less than 10 percent. Some say it goes from 55 percent to 11 percent. And the direct cost of college for students, when the college is waiving the fees, is about $2,000 a year, maybe $5,000 overall, while the price of incarceration is much higher. A seven-year sentence in New York State costs $560,000, while enrolling a woman in college is between $2,000 and 3,000 a year,

I’d say the community support we’ve gotten, all the responses to our requests for funding, show how people know it’s just common sense. We got $20,000 from Quinn’s office, and also funding from [Pennsylvania’s former Republican Sen.] Rick Santorum’s foundation. Now, any project that gets funding from both Quinn and Santorum, you know the support is broad.

How about local groups and agencies?

We’ve really only worked with White Box Art Gallery, so far. There is an initiative to bring gallery representation onto the community advisory board.

When I first came onto the advisory board, we were talking about working on the work-release program, but then the college opportunity came up, and we just went for it. But we’d like to improve the kinds of jobs these women get, how much they’re trained. It would be nice to make connections with places like Chelsea Piers, or the local market, or some of the galleries, that might be interested in hiring someone motivated. That’s the next challenge, I think.