
7 minute read
Brandeis’ Phoenix chapter takes a look at breaking incarceration cycle
MALA BLOMQUIST | MANAGING EDITOR
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, one out of every 100 people in the U.S. is in a prison or jail. Nearly half (47%) of the approximately 1.25 million people in state prisons are parents of minor children and about 19% of those children are age 4 or younger.
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“The majority incarcerated are Black and Hispanic. There is a connection between race and criminal justice,” said Rosalind Kabrhel, associate professor and chair of Legal Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. “There’s an intergenerational harm happening here. If you are a child of an incarcerated parent, the likelihood that you will be incarcerated yourself goes way, way up.”
While a sentence for a crime may technically have a beginning and an end, if someone has a felony conviction, there are collateral consequences they face when released. They are ineligible to vote, serve on a jury or receive public funds like welfare or housing assistance. These contributing factors increase a person’s likelihood of committing a crime again.
Kabrhel discussed these concerns and more during “From Prison to Promise: Breaking the Cycle of Incarceration,” for Brandeis National Committee Phoenix Chapter’s University on Wheels program, on Jan. 9.
“Brandeis University faculty are known for combining innovative teaching and groundbreaking research. Professor Kabrhel is an outstanding example of both,” said Ellen Widoff, co-president of the Brandeis National Committee Phoenix Chapter. “Additionally, her initiatives provide Brandeis students an opportunity to interact and learn together with incarcerated individuals fostering the students’ social justice commitments now and into the future.”
A lawyer since 1999, Kabrhel served as
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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5 an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, pursuing cases under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act and anti-discrimination laws. She has also worked for state and federal legislators — performing political investigations, issue advocacy, due diligence research and legislative drafting.
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After generations of crime policy that led to a doubling of the incarceration rate, President Obama moved away from policies that were focused on incarceration and shifted to more social service efforts to divert people from prison and move them into other ways of atoning for their crimes — like probation and community supervision. Also, his administration chose to address mental health issues in the community instead of waiting until someone is incarcerated to receive those kinds of services. Kabrhel said Obama was the first president to leave office with a lower prison population than when he started.
“When I came to Brandeis, I started volunteering on the Innocence Project in 2008-2009 and was very inspired by that work,” she said. The project works to free innocent people and transform the legal system. She eventually left her law practice to become a full-time professor. She taught courses that included incarcerated youth as guest students and collaborators and she noticed that the experience was transformative for them, for her and the Brandeis students. She said it demonstrated that higher education could play a role and impact people’s experience while they are in prison and when they emerge.
“After I ran that class, two of our English professors approached me, John Plotz and David Sherman, and said, ‘We believe like you do that higher education can have an impact in prisons. We want to be part of something — let’s do something.’”
In 2019, Kabrhel, Plotz and Sherman co-founded the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative (BEJI). According to her bio, “this initiative connects students with opportunities to provide educational services to individuals impacted by incarceration and learn first-hand how higher education can disrupt the cycle of recidivism.”
Kabrhel insisted that BEJI not be housed within the Legal Studies program but be open to all students because “there is a role for everybody to play in relieving some of these collateral consequences for people emerging from prison.”
The professors started thinking about the types of programs they wanted to create and began researching other programs in the prison education community.
The Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College in New York is one of the country’s most well-known prison education programs. Their model is to teach college-accredited courses behind bars so that when a person is released from prison, they could also leave with a college degree.
“They became a model for a lot of prison education programs around the country, including Emerson College in Boston,” said Kabrhel.
Some of the faculty involved with BEJI started teaching through the Emerson program to get experience and to understand the relationship with the Department of Corrections. Since most of these college programs are 14 weeks long, a person must be stably incarcerated for that period to attend. But that’s not where criminal justice policy is moving, said Kabrhel. We’re moving to decarcerate and to have people serve their time in shorter-term facilities like jails or under community supervision.
“Programming in prison has a very good impact on recidivism rates — it decreases the likelihood that people will reoffend,” said Kabrhel. “And educational programming has a big impact. We thought, ‘How can we bring that benefit to more people who are in
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During the pandemic, working with a community partner, Partakers, a nonprofit that works to advance the education of women and men in prison through its College Behind Bars program, BEJI created the Partakers Empowerment Program (PEP). PEP is a 13-week virtual reentry program for individuals emerging from incarceration.
“We lead discussions centered around technology, health and wellness, civic engagement, personal finance, professionalism and education,” said Kabrhel. “We hone in on those critical areas where we see collateral consequences inhibiting peoples’ success.”
These discussions are designed and facilitated by the student team of two graduate students, three undergraduate students and two teaching assistants (TA) with oversight of faculty. The TAs are formerly incarcerated students who successfully completed one PEP cycle.
Kabrhel shared the PEP program’s impact on one of these TAs, Tammy.
Tammy was incarcerated for over 12 years. Kabrhel did not elaborate on her crime, saying, “like most crime, it was related to a sense of desperation at the community that she was in at the time.”
Before her incarceration, Tammy spent
12 years in law enforcement. She was a police officer with a master’s degree in criminal justice administration from Northeastern University.
“She came out with that level of education and that ability but was unable to rejoin law enforcement with a felony conviction,” said Kabrhel. “She was very frustrated because she could not put her level of education or skills to use anywhere because no one would hire her.” the Brandeis students, they strove to help Tammy in any way they could.
They wrote letters to her probation officer to help her get off probation. Daniella, one of the PEP graduate students at the time, knew that Tammy cared about a piece of property in her community whose usage was under debate.
Tammy wanted the property to be developed into a playground, as some
“THERE’S AN INTERGENERATIONAL HARM HAPPENING HERE. IF YOU ARE A CHILD OF AN INCARCERATED PARENT, THE LIKELIHOOD THAT YOU WILL BE INCARCERATED YOURSELF GOES WAY, WAY UP.”
Tammy was excited when she went into a sandwich shop that was hiring and they told her to return the next day. But when she arrived, she was told that they ran a background check and said they could no longer hire her. “I have a master’s degree, I’m a smart person and I can’t get hired to make a sandwich,” Tammy told the PEP team.
Kabrhel said the sense of desperation and frustration was so evident in her voice and she made such an impact on other advocates did. She didn’t want the town to sell it to a private developer. Daniella helped her get in touch with her state representative to facilitate a phone conversation so Tammy could advocate for the playground.
“It seems like a small thing, but it was a big step for Tammy to be able to find her voice and find an outlet to connect and be civically engaged — and make a difference in her own community,” said Kabrhel.
Kabrhel shared that Tammy recently initiated a conversation with the local sheriff about bringing the PEP program to her community. Kabrhel said Tammy was so excited to potentially bring some of what they do at Brandeis to her community, in the western part of Massachusetts, and make a more local experience there.
Even though Kabrhel focuses her teaching on what’s happening in Massachusetts, she has her students research what is happening in their home state.
She is working on more programs and would like to create an expungement clinic to assist people with paperwork on having their criminal records sealed or destroyed. Arizona just passed a law, effective January 2023, where eligible individuals will be able to apply to have convictions expunged.
“The students come to class almost demanding to learn what they can do to change the world and they want to be equipped with tools to change the world now,” said Kabrhel. “It’s very motivational for me as an advocate who wants to change the world today.” JN
For more information, visit brandeis.edu/ beji/. For information on Brandeis National Committee Phoenix Chapter’s programming, visit brandeisphoenix.org.
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