Hamilton College Prison Expert Comments on Obama’s NAACP Speech & Prison Visit Hamilton College Professor Doran Larson is an expert on prison life and is a strong advocate for prison reform. He has:· taught creative writing inside Attica Correctional Facility for the last decade and additional classes at the Mohawk Correctional Facility near Utica
· He launched, with several other partner organizations, college programs for inmates at both prisons
· He teaches a prison writing course at Hamilton in which he brings students into the Mohawk Correctional Facility to meet with his prison class.
· He has visited 26 prisons, 14 of which are in Europe.
· He has witnessed, documented and spoken and written about the experiences of prisoners in this country and many other nations, comparing outcomes for both the incarcerated and their keepers.
· Larson edited a new book, Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America that contains 71 essays written by prisoners from across the U.S. He solicited and received more than 800 essays which are now being placed onto Hamilton’s digital media archive. This work is the largest book-length collection of essays by currently incarcerated men and women ever published; it presents the American prison population as our fourth-largest civic community.
· His essays on prison writing and prison issues have been published in The Atlantic and The Chronicle of Higher Education among other major publications.
Larson is vocal about the need for reform in sentencing guidelines and in the criminal justice system and for a new focus on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment in our prisons. Should you want an expert comment on prison reform, Hamilton College Professor Doran Larson can be reached at: [email protected]315-790-2550
Here are some of Larson’s comments related to the President’s remarks at the NAACP conference in Philadelphia on July 14, 2015 on the criminal justice system:
The President's remarks are well taken. But nothing he said is news to imprisoned people, who know the problems that stretch from the street to courts to the cell block. We would do well to listen to what they have been telling us for decades about what's wrong, what it will take to fix the problems, and to discover in their ideas and experience just how rich an untapped mine of human, social, and moral capital lies wasting inside our prisons.
Testimony by prisoners across the nation confirms the research: higher education is the most reliable and cost-effective means of seeing that formerly incarcerated people do not come back to prison.
The President is certainly right to say that those who want to change their lives while in prison should be given the means to do so; but he, like others, grossly under-represents the percentage of the prison population that wants to make such change. It is not just some prisoners but the majority that long for higher education and meaningful job training. This is the broad consensus among imprisoned writers from Maine to California, from Alaska to Florida. As one practical step, restoration of federal, Pell tuition support eligibility would revive a prison higher education network that existed for over twenty years until 1994.
Voices from prison tell us over and over that prison practices are so deeply inhumane and irrationally vengeful that anger at the system overfills the mental space wherein convicted people might find a place to reflect and reassess the choices that brought them to prison.
Sentencing reform and reducing populations is the first step to making prisons into places where restoration and rehabilitation can occur. The next step, as prisoners have testified for as long as prisons have existed, is meaningful oversight of staff and practices that currently make our prisons into institutions of debilitation.
Prison witnesses can tell the stories that reach from birth to crime to imprisonment. These stories make clear that criminal justice reform is everyone's responsibility: from the communities where crime and excess policing have become concentrated, to lawmakers, and to average citizens whose sidewalks and schools and water systems are financed by the taxes paid by those employed in criminal justice, which is now the nation's third largest employer.
Doran Larson related materials:
Public radio interview with one of his prison students
Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America
Incarceration’s Witness edX course:
The Atlantic – “Why Scandinavian Prisons are Superior”
Digital Humanities archive of letters from prison
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