This Women’s Month two women are leading the way in making significant changes to the South African criminal justice system.
The Prison-to-College-Pipeline-SA Programme which has already seen great success in the US, was launched in South Africa in July by founder, Dr. Baz Dreisinger, and Stellenbosch University Law Faculty Academic Director, Dr. Mary Nel.
The scenario at South African prisons is not a new one or unique to South Africa. Several common threads about prison life experiences on the inside, and the challenges of life on the outside, bind prisons and prisoners together in a universal way.
With this in mind, enter Dr Baz Dreisinger, a professor, journalist, justice worker, film and radio producer, cultural critic and activist, and the Founding Academic Director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP-SA) Programme. Part of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, the programme offers college courses and re-entry to society planning to incarcerated men throughout New York State, and broadly works to increase access to higher education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals.
Together with Dr. Mary Nel, Academic Director in the faculty of law at Stellenbosch University (SU), Preston Jongbloed, Re-entry & Outreach Coordinator, the Department of Correctional Services and a variety of local partners, Dreisinger facilitated and oversaw the launch of the inaugural Prison-to-College-Pipeline-SA Programme (P2CP-SA) on Mandela Day (18 July) at the Brandvlei Correctional Centre in Worcester in the Cape.
The educational partnership, which is the first of its kind in South Africa, is known as the Ubuntu Learning Community, and its home is Stellenbosch University. It is hoped that this will be the first of many prison-university partnerships.
“This is not a cut-and-paste model,” emphasises Dreisinger, “but a philosophy that manifests uniquely in various global contexts. The international P2CP movement has two premises: that universities have a powerful role to play in creating safer communities and that all educational programmes that operate inside prisons must be continued on the outside, when incarcerated people come home from prison – hence the concept of the ‘pipeline’ / a continuum.”
Nel says, ““To be part of initiating this empowering and rehumanising learning initiative has been one of the highlights of my lecturing career. It is incredible to witness the transformative connection and interaction between students from vastly different backgrounds, and to see their faces light up when they realise that they are truly an integral part of every step of the process from initial course design to implementation.”
“We are involved in something truly ground-breaking – helping to bring the learning communities in prison and university together to collaborate in ways that will enrich the lives of all participants – and it’s exciting!”
It is anticipated that P2CP will be an umbrella for various educational programmes, creating partnerships between departments of corrections and universities. The P2CP ethos is a marriage of education and prisoner reentry: education is made the centerpiece of one’s period of incarceration and, on release, one’s reentry into the community.
As part of the program, both in New York and now in South Africa, university students from the outside enter prison regularly to learn alongside their incarcerated peers. In this sense, the program both brings the university to the prison and brings prison to the university culture, all in an effort to change the narrative about prisons and people in them—all of which builds safer communities.
It is known that higher rates of education behind bars results in lower rates of recidivism and violence.
A fundraising campaign to assist with the work of the Ubuntu Learning Community is currently underway and anybody interested in supporting the initiative in this way is encouraged to visit the GoFundMe page.
Most broadly, it aims to ignite interest in education among those impacted by the criminal justice system. Versions of the program, which currently serves some 250 individuals in New York State, has been enacted in the United Kingdom and in talks with partners in Jamaica, Brazil and Trinidad.
The global P2CP movement is under the larger heading of Dr Baz Dreisinger’s Incarceration Nations Network.
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