Bennington College Prison Education Initiative
The Prison Education Initiative (PEI) brings Bennington College faculty to Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum-security men's prison in Comstock, New York. Our mission is threefold:
- to provide a quality liberal arts undergraduate education to incarcerated students
- to support lifelong learning in men and women serving life sentences
- to foster transformative conversations around prison reform in America
Since PEI’s inception in 2015, the program has served more than 100 students at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, offering courses in literature, philosophy, social research, history of thought, architecture, political theory, social psychology, math, computer programming, drawing, Latin, and U.S. and world history.
Interviews with Class of '22 Graduates
PEI celebrated its first graduation at Great Meadow eight years after the program launched; eleven students were awarded their Bennington College Associate of Arts degrees. Here are a few of their stories:
Recent News
Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) hosted a conference on The Future of Higher Education in Prison on April 28-29, the ninth convening that forms part of the College’s Incarceration in America initiative, a project established formally in 2014 to address the fact that the U.S. prison population has increased 400% in the past forty years.
The Department of Education announced today that Bennington College was among the colleges and universities selected from a competitive national pool to participate in the Second Chance Pell pilot program.
Now in its second term, the Prison Education Initiative launched by Bennington College in 2015 will enroll 29 prisoners at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York, in classes this spring.
Contact
pei@bennington.edu
802-440-4727