Advocates from across the country came to Morningside Heights on Saturday to call for a national movement to fundamentally rethink the country’s prison system.
A symposium at Riverside Church drew Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Teachers College professor Marc Lamont Hill, among others, to discuss everything from ways to address racism to changes to programs for ex-offenders.
Panelists focused on the reintegration process—being able to find a job, provide for one’s family, and acquire an education—as opposed to focusing only on avoiding recidivism, which is a relapse into criminal behavior after incarceration.
“You have these people trying to remake their lives, and people say, ‘Well, thank God you haven’t gone back to prison,’” said Rossana Rosado, publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario La Prensa. “What kind of measure of success is that?”
“We measure success by how someone can be connected with their family, when someone gets their first paycheck and they don’t want to cash it because it’s such a source of pride, when they pay taxes for the first time,” Rosado said. Many panelists acknowledged that the economic downturn has made it even more difficult for ex-offenders to become reintegrated that way.
The event was sponsored by the Think Outside the Cell Foundation, and sought to open new doors for ex-offenders after they leave prison, something many speakers said revolved around educational opportunity.
Jeff Henderson, an ex-offender now known as a Food Network personality and bestselling author, said that the problems faced by ex-offenders are multi-generational and will only be solved when institutions “educate around the children who are left behind when their parents go to prison.”
“They’re the ones who become what they see, what they hear, what they experience as they grow up. That’s the next generation,” Henderson said.
Panelists agreed that education of ex-offenders at the university level is an important goal, though it is seldom realized because universities reject many applicants with criminal records.
“Two-thirds of the schools in America do background checks, which are built on the assumption that they will make campuses safer,” said Alan Rosenthal, co-director of Justice Strategies, an initiative of the advocacy organization Center for Community Alternatives. “There is not a shred of empirical evidence to prove that. In fact, my hypothesis is that if an offender has gotten into a university and invests in education, invests in themselves, invests in a vision for themselves, they’re the safest person on campus.”
“If I were to go to Columbia University tonight, I’m sure I could arrest a lot of people for public urination. But no one considers that a crime,” Lamont Hill said. “Yet, that convicted drug user who is trying to get into, say, Columbia University, they cannot, partly because of concerns about having criminals on campus.”
Pazia Miller, BC ’14, said that it was “eye-opening” to hear what life can be like after incarceration. “You have little access to public housing, no right to vote, and unemployment is high,” she said.
Anup Desai, volunteer coordinator for Think Outside the Cell, said that those difficulties made being an activist for ex-offenders rights appealing to him.
“The community is only as strong as its weakest link. If our weakest links are in prison, let’s fix that first,” he said. “If a student like that goes to Columbia, then that can change a whole community.”
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