March 2022 Newsletter
Lynne Sullivan speaks with acclaimed photographer Zora J Murff
As part of the Prison Nation exhibit at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, PGP Massachusetts and Rhode Island Regional Manager Lynne Sullivan, artist Zora J Murff, and Wellesley College student Ana Luisa McCullough discussed questions of representation, agency and memory raised by “Corrections,” Murff’s series of photographs of incarcerated youth. Murff, who also works as a social worker at a youth detention facility, is a critically acclaimed photographer based in Arkansas who explores issues of race and representation in his work.
We’re hiring a volunteer coordinator in the Philadelphia area!
Join the PGP team as an AmeriCorps VISTA Fellow in the Philly area. The volunteer coordinator recruits, trains and manages university students and members of the community to serve as volunteer tutors, while collecting data for program improvement and evaluation. The evaluation of these programs will also inform our programming in Pittsburgh, and while the position is primarily focused on the greater Philadelphia area, the fellow may support our work in Pittsburgh as well. This one year position is an AmeriCorps VISTA Fellowship sponsored by the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development. Fellowship runs 8/1/22-8/1/23. Interviews are being held on a rolling basis until the position is filled, so we encourage you to apply soon!
Please join us for the second of our spring Justice Education Series webinar on April 7 at 6pm EDT. In this event you will learn from Romarilyn Ralston, Program Director of Project Rebound, Alexa Garza and Rabia Qutab, Justice Fellows for the Education Trust, and moderator Kimberly Haven, Policy Lead for From Prison Cells to PhDs, about what’s needed to increase educational access for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women.
We at the Petey Greene Program envision a world in which all incarcerated people have access to high-quality academic programs. This is why we are concerned that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women are often denied access to quality vocational and educational programs that assist them and their families in living sustainable lives post-incarceration. Panelists will discuss why, in Kimberly Haven’s words, women and girls remain “correctional afterthoughts” although incarceration rates for women and girls have increased sevenfold since the early 1980s. They will also point us to the gender-focused and gender-informed research priorities, policies, initiatives, perspectives, and practices necessary to increase educational programming for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and girls.
Writing, critical thinking and meta-cognitive skills are especially important for success in higher education programs. During the 2020-2021 academic year, the PGP piloted a College Bridge writing course in partnership with the Washington D.C. Department of Corrections at the D.C. Jail. At the end of the pilot course, a student described being challenged by the course materials: “Each week the material surprisingly became more interesting. I enjoyed the diversity of the assignments. It was as if we were at an amusement park and each assignment was a different roller coaster of genres. For example: we journeyed from Emerson, Malcom X, O'Brien, Baldwin, Tolentino, and finally Akhmatova. Wow! I get excited from recounting the experiences. Weekly, I was encouraged to open my mind, think conceptually, and challenge myself to be my best.”
After a twenty-six year ban, Pell Grants will be accessible to incarcerated learners who want to pursue higher education beginning in July, 2023. The restoration of Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated people has the potential to dramatically increase their access to college programs. However, research shows that many incarcerated students lack some of the crucial literacy and numeracy skills that are necessary to succeed in college. The Petey Greene Program (PGP) is dedicated to partnering with incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated learners to bridge that gap by offering college readiness programs.
The success of the pilot program led the PGP to expand our College Bridge course offerings. We continue to offer the college writing course in Washington, D.C. and have piloted courses in at the Boston Pre-Release Center in Massachusetts and FCI Fort Dix in New Jersey. These writing courses are taught by faculty and graduate students who were recruited from the PGP’s higher education partners, including the University of Maryland, Dartmouth College, and Rutgers University. Students in the course also receive one-on-one support from PGP tutors who are trained in writing pedagogy.
The College Bridge writing program is designed to prepare students for college coursework, but the PGP is also mindful that the students we serve may have a variety of educational goals. At FCI Fort Dix, instructors Amanda Harris and Jennie Snow surveyed students and found that while some wanted to pursue higher education, other students had different goals related to improving their writing skills. Some wished to write creatively, while others used writing to advocate for themselves and wanted to write more effective letters of appeal. The realization that students came to the course with a range of goals led the instructors to modify course assignments so that they better serve students’ needs. Amanda and Jennie included an argument-based, op-ed assignment to help serve students working on their argumentative and advocacy-focused writing skills. The course culminates in a traditional final writing assignment, but as the instructors explain, they structured it to allow students to hone different skills: “a literary analysis capstone assessment based on [Ursula] Le Guin’s Sci-Fi novella, The Word for World is Forest [...]will have two tracks that allow students the space to focus on examining the creative elements of the text or presenting an argument based on the text.”
In addition to adapting content, the delivery of PGP’s College Bridge program has also been flexible, in order to meet the needs of our students and program partners. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the pilot program was designed to be delivered to students via tablets, an educational technology that is now widely available in many carceral facilities. The program was developed so that it could adapt according to public health restrictions and could be offered fully virtually, or using a blended learning model, where students access course content virtually and receive in-person tutoring support. The PGP’s Spring 2022 lineup of writing courses demonstrate that the College Bridge writing program can be modified to equitably serve students in a variety of settings and public health conditions: in Boston, course instruction took place in-person with virtual tutoring support; in New Jersey, both instruction and tutoring take place in person; in D.C. course delivery and tutoring have remained virtual.
Tutors play an essential role in ensuring that the course meets the students’ individualized needs, fostering their self-confidence and creating meaningful pedagogical connections. A student from the course summed up the positive impact that tutoring had: “My experience has been nothing short of fantastic. [My tutor] showed genuine interest in me as a human being. [She] infused a confidence in me and my writing that made me want to ameliorate my writing while striving to make myself and her proud.
PGP alumna Kat Walden: From volunteer to social justice activist
Kat Walden isn’t just a Petey Greene Program volunteer alumna; she’s also the former Division Manager in Philadelphia. Both experiences were critical in opening her mind to the issues that incarcerated people face daily.
As a senior at Temple University in 2017, Walden was looking for an internship as a capstone assignment for her major, human development and community engagement. While many of her peers were looking for opportunities in education, she had something else in mind.
“College was really tricky in terms of figuring out what it was that I wanted to do,” Walden said. “It felt like things weren’t really calling me, but it was like, ‘Oh, the time has run out.’”
That changed when she found out about the PGP at a fair Temple hosted. After learning what the program was about, she decided to apply and got in. Unlike the typical volunteer, Walden was able to both volunteer as a tutor at various detention centers around Philadelphia and learn about the administrative side of the organization.
As part of the internship, Walden recruited other volunteers and got the PGP certified as a recognized campus club at Temple. Walden quickly found that she enjoyed both working as a tutor and collaborating with and recruiting other volunteers.
“I learned that this is where I wanted to be,” Walden said. “I wanted to learn more… and the Petey Greene Program was my first in-depth experience with getting to see the criminal legal system.”
Before this, Walden said she felt like she was living in a bubble isolated from these issues. The PGP popped that bubble for her. In fact, after she graduated, Walden applied to join the PGP staff and became a Division Manager.
As Division Manager, Walden continued both managing volunteers and serving as a volunteer tutor herself. She also got an even deeper look into the bureaucratic side of the criminal legal system and how organizations working to support people on the inside navigate these systems.
In this new role, she served as the point person for volunteers who were just starting to understand this system themselves. As she worked more with volunteers and incarcerated learners, Walden realized that while she believed in the PGP’s mission to support incarcerated students, she wanted to do even more to advocate for and organize with currently and formerly incarcerated people.
Around this time, Walden learned that New Orleans was the incarceration capital of the country, and she decided to pack up her things and move to the South. While she didn’t have a job lined up, she still made the leap of faith, knowing that there had to be work to be done in the state.
“I thought that maybe there's a job down there, so I moved, knowing that being able to do that, just picking up and going with no job lined up, was itself a privilege and it was important for me to sit with that,” Walden said.
Soon after moving, Walden started working on the Unanimous Jury Coalition, which aimed to support a ballot measure that would require a jury to be unanimous when convicting someone of a crime. It passed in 2018.
After that success, Walden worked in the Education Program of Operation Restoration, which partners with Tulane University to provide a college education to currently incarcerated women. She also worked with the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice to provide tools to and organize with historically marginalized voters and break down ballot measures across the state of Louisiana.
Since January 2021, Walden has served as the membership coordinator for Law for Black Lives, a Black-femme led organization that gives radical lawyers, legal workers and law students a political home to transform the law and build the power of organizing to protect, defend and advance Black Liberation.
“It's been really beautiful to see the way that folks are wanting to show up for movements,” Walden said. “The people within our network are recognizing and understanding that the law is a tool within the toolbox of building movement. It’s powerful to be part of a group that is unapologetic about its values of movement lawyering, abolition, Black Queer feminism, and anti-capitalism.”
In her new role, Walden helps build Law for Black Lives’ membership base and provides a space for advocates and lawyers to work together to strategize against social injustices. Walden said she credits the PGP with opening her eyes to the need for social justice organizations like Law for Black Lives.
“I think the Petey Greene Program was a stepping stone for me to check in with myself and ask myself what my values are, where's my political grounding, what is this work and how do I want to show up,” Walden said. “I honestly don't know what I would be doing if I hadn’t connected with the Petey Greene Program my senior year of college.”