May Newsletter
What makes for a great college or high school experience? Interesting and engaging classes are certainly part of it, but school - at any level - is so much more than the courses you take. Campus activities and student leadership opportunities, afterschool programs, study-groups, and peer tutoring programs are essential to ensure student engagement and success and a key part of school and college campuses across the country. Yet, they remain exceedingly rare inside carceral spaces, despite the great need. What is more, there is a dearth of research on how best practices tested on traditional campuses may be adapted to carceral spaces.
To address this gap, in January 2024, the Petey Greene Program created the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice and Equity, a new division in the organization with the ambitious goal to advance the field of carceral and reentry education by conducting research research and pilot program evaluations that demonstrate the need and effectiveness of tutoring, college readiness, and other holistic student support programs behind and beyond bars.
The Center is now wrapping up its first, exciting semester. Over the past few months, we have created a new survey to better capture the voices of our students, while piloting and evaluating several innovative programs - from a series of hands-on science demonstrations for incarcerated youth in DC to a tutor training program behind bars. We have a lot to look forward to in the second part of the year: a national fellowship program for system-impacted scholars, a new English Language Learning pilot and more extensive research on language learning in carceral spaces are just a few examples of what we have in stock for the summer and fall.
Join us in this journey to reimagine carceral and reentry spaces, to ensure that system-impacted learners and scholars have access to high-quality, evidence based educational programs and individualized support services.
Chiara Benetollo, Executive Director of the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice and Equity
Catch Up on “Beyond the US: Incarceration and Educational Justice”
The Puttkammer Center is partnering with Incarceration Nations Network to host a series of webinars featuring INN’s Global Freedom Fellows, who are activists, organizers, and educators in the movement to reimagine criminal legal systems around the world.
In our first webinar on May 14th, we looked into the impact of the carceral state on women, featuring insights from panelists from Zambia, Brazil, and Trinidad. We learned how incarceration affects women around the world, and how women, including trans-women, are fighting against unjust criminal legal systems.
Science Unlocked: Science Demonstrations for Incarcerated Youth
System-impacted youth have poorer educational outcomes than their peers, particularly in STEM courses. Science is best taught through hands-on experiments, yet most science curricula within prisons do not include these learning opportunities.
To address the lack of hands-on science education in carceral facilities, we collaborated with two long-term PGP volunteers, Anagha Krishnan and Hannah Dada, to develop Science Unlocked, a series of monthly hands-on science demonstrations offered to students at a youth correctional facility in DC. This semester, students as young as 12 years old extracted the DNA from strawberries, learned to code through play-based computer activities, and created their own speakers leveraging the power of magnetism. The Puttkammer Center collaborates with the PGP staff in DC and with community volunteers to evaluate the impact of Science Unlocked, proving-out the effectiveness of this model.
The Petey Greene Program is HIRING!
We are hiring for multiple positions across our regions! We are looking for an Executive Director of Development, Volunteer Engagement Coordinator (NYC), and Volunteer Engagement Coordinator (Pittsburgh) to join our team. If you think you are a good fit, apply today, or share the positions with a potential candidate!
Tutor Training Inside Correctional Facilities
In April, we piloted a new training program for incarcerated people serving as peer tutors inside their facilities. Almost thirty incarcerated scholars attended our training at SCI-Greene, in Pennsylvania, with astounding results: in pre-/post- surveys, the tutors’ confidence in achieving the goals they set for themselves increased by 19%, and their confidence in supporting others in achieving their goals increased by 11%. Over the summer, we will replicate this program at FCI Fort Dix (NJ). This training enables us to collaborate with incarcerated scholars, supporting and elevating self-organized learning communities that already exist inside prisons and jails. Starting from the fall, incarcerated tutors will join non-incarcerated tutors to support College Bridge program students during regular tutoring sessions. In addition, formally trained incarcerated tutors will be able to continue supporting their peers outside of regular tutoring sessions, serving as mentors and stewards of education inside carceral facilities, while ensuring that tutoring services can continue even during lock-downs and other program disruptions.