Regardless of how one comes to receive it, an education from an institution like Boston University is a tremendous privilege. Like many tremendous privileges, it’s afforded to very few people. What’s not a tremendous privilege, though, is education in general. Education in general is a basic right, and like many basic rights, it’s sadly also afforded to very few people.
True, the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), for example, has done a lot to expand that right. The free, boundlessly enrollable lectures continue to grow in popularity among students and teachers alike, The Daily Free Press reported on Monday, citing a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. More MOOCs mean that, soon enough, anyone with access to an internet connection will have access to the sorts of lectures many students pay heftily to attend in person.
However, according to an op-ed published Saturday in The New York Times, that doesn’t include the more than 2,000 inmates at Attica Correctional Facility in western New York. John J. Lennon, currently serving 28 years to life at Attica, recalls a February 2014 policy proposed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to shift $1 million of the state’s $2.8 billion correction budget (less than half of one-thousandth) into college-level courses for the state’s incarcerated. Backlash ensued, and Cuomo left the program out of his budget.
At the time, Cuomo told reporters that State Senate members had been unwilling to cede public funds for prison inmates’ college courses in an economy where many parents were struggling to pay their own kids’ college tuitions. Of course, that reasoning overlooks the fact that college-level courses in state prisons are not comparable to college courses on university campuses, primarily because state prisons are not university campuses. They are state prisons, where men and women are compelled to live if a court decides. Nobody trolls Allston or strolls the Esplanade. Nobody goes home for the weekend.
Semantics aside, however, the reasoning used to block Cuomo’s program implies something a lot more sinister about what exactly the purpose of incarceration should be. Once a person breaks the law and moves in, what should happen next? Lennon refers to the current “retributive era” of corrections, in which prison is treated, for the most part, as a vehicle of punishment for those who dare make trouble for society. In this system, inmates are lucky to have TVs to watch or — as cleaning up the mess of winter showed — wages to earn, let alone courses to take. Inmates need only come in, wait for their time to come, and then leave. What they do with that time is entirely their problem.
But there’s another way to think about it. The “rehabilitative era” of the early ‘80s, where society took more responsibility for the men and women whose freedom it suspended, saw education among inmates as a top priority. The reasoning was this: giving inmates a purpose behind bars, humanizing them with intellectual debate and art to create, would carry on even as they returned to the world.
“Though I didn’t have much of a sense of self-worth,” Lennon writes about his experience in Attica’s extremely selective education program, “I learned I did have some untapped talent.” Let inmates learn, and they’ll learn that they can.
With MOOCs, that endeavor doesn’t even need a price tag. Enrollment is free, and dispersal costs as much as an Internet subscription and the electricity to run the TVs. It’s not an ideal replacement for the sort of education they would have received under Cuomo’s plan, but its one that, if governments can first agree that education in general is in fact a basic right, should have no challengers. The only thing it might cost is a group of once-hopeless men and women in waiting, and we have plenty of those to spare.
