Written by Maximilian Dunham
The Past, Present, Prison initiative here at Colorado College is attempting to educate students and citizens about mass incarceration on a global, national, and regional scale. Carol Neel, History Professor at CC, founded the program in 2014. A three-year grant was awarded to the program that year by Tori Winkler Thomas, a CC alum from the class of 1969.
Neel brought her 2015 Block 3 course, History 110, to Cañon City to research the history of the many prisons in the area.
The Past, Present, Prison initiative has created a website to showcase their research. “The website is the product of students’ primary source research in Cañon City,” said Neel.
CC junior Caleigh Cassidy and sophomore Keenan Wright assisted Neel in repackaging the research and designing the website. It now includes an interactive timeline of prison education in the U.S. up to present times, as well as information about the origins of mass incarceration.
Aside from disseminating educational material through the web publication, Neel has brought many speakers to campus to talk to students and the local community about issues regarding the current prison system. She has also been at work with the Colorado Department of Corrections since 2014 in an attempt to supply tertiary education to prisons in the area.
“Funding for tertiary education, that is undergraduate education in prisons, fell through in the 1990s. So other than our initiative, all of the possibilities for incarcerated persons to study for associate or bachelor degrees in Colorado now are courses which are taught by employees of the Department of Corrections,” said Neel. “What we want to do is to bring the traditional liberal arts opportunity to people your age.”
After working with the Colorado Department of Corrections for multiple years, starting in January 2017 the program will actually begin to teach a basic humanities course at the Youthful Offenders Prison, a medium security prison in Pueblo.
“Our long-term hope is that this program expands and we are eventually able to make further contributions in tertiary education and eventually get CC students involved,” said Neel.
According to Neel, the program is inspired by the likes of Wesleyan and Bard College, where undergraduate students are able to tutor and get involved with tertiary education within prisons.
“Our initial vision was to be able to pursue something like that, but the Colorado Department of Corrections has been quite conservative about that,” said Neel.
The main reason work with the Department of Corrections has been slow moving is due to an event that occurred four years ago, according to Neel.
“The Director of the Department of Corrections in Colorado was assassinated at his home in Colorado Springs by a gang member who was released in error on parole and it seems to have worked as the agent of in-prison gangs,” said Neel. “So the Department of Corrections has safety concerns, [which] might be a mild way of putting it.”
Despite these setbacks, Neel has not seen a lack of support from students at CC.
“The students are very inspired and engaged in wanting to do this. It’s really their energy and commitment to remediating mass incarceration that inspires this entire thing. That’s why the history department got this grant,” said Neel.
One such student is Abe Mamet, a senior at CC who believes we need to pay more attention to our prison system.
“Prisons matter because the people within them matter. I care, because as a citizen of the United States who loves this country, I want to make it a better place,” said Mamet.
He got involved in the Prison Project his sophomore year when his brother was running the program. Since then, Mamet has become an activist for issues in the prison system. Although he does not have any personal goals related to these issues, he dreams of prison reform.
Among other things, he hopes “that solitary confinement will end, that the death penalty will itself, die, so that many innocent people will get released.”