BMCC and Justice-Impacted Student Support: Project Impact

Michelle Ronda and Lisa Rose, Social Sciences, Human Services, and Criminal Justice

Introduction

In 2024, the nearly one thousand community colleges in the United States enrolled approximately 38% of the nation’s undergraduates, representing over ten million students (American Association of Community Colleges [AACC], 2024). A higher percentage of Black and Latinx students enroll in community colleges (40%) compared to four-year institutions (30%), with 32% of community college students being first-generation college students (AACC, 2024). Among these ten million community college students are an unknown percentage of people impacted by the criminal legal system in the United States. All told, “an estimated 70 to 100 million Americans… have an incarceration, conviction, or arrest record” (Vallas, Dietrich, and Avery, 2023). Indirectly impacted by the criminal legal system are the children, families, and communities (geographic and otherwise) of those “70 to 100 million people.”

The direct impacts of incarceration, conviction, and arrest include what are known as “collateral consequences,” which include formal legal restrictions and sanctions that interfere with access to employment, education, housing, social service access, civic involvement, adoption, and property rights, among other essential features of social life (American Bar Association, 2017; Kirk and Wakefield, 2018). These consequences are also informal, and stigma fueled. As the criminal legal system in the U.S. is rife with socio-economic and ethno-racial disparities, so too are the consequences of that contact: “the evidence is overwhelming that mass incarceration has produced significant social harms and that these harms are disproportionately visited on the poor, disadvantaged, and non-white” (Kirk and Wakefield, 2018).

Among the nearly 400,000 people in New York City with a criminal conviction from 1990 to 2019, eighty percent were Black or Latinx (Cadoff, et al., 2023). As lower-income and students of color are more likely to come into contact with the criminal legal system, BMCC seeks to support this population of New Yorkers and estimates that at least 1,500 of our students are justice-impacted. This fact inspired the development of BMCC’s Project Impact, one of four Support Programs & Communities for students with conviction records offered at CUNY. Project Impact is unique in its focus on supporting students to earn higher education degrees as much or more than high school equivalencies, as well as for its robust peer-mentoring program, to be described further below. Trauma- and criminal-legal-impact-informed support are critical for justice-impacted students as they navigate the collateral consequences of such contact.

In addition to affordability, accommodation of working students, and preparing students for transfer to bachelors degree programs, some community colleges serve as “opportunity engines” (Community College Research Center, 2021a; Reber & Sinclair, 2020), contributing to social mobility for students from low-income backgrounds. In 2020, a Brookings Institution study ranked five CUNY senior colleges and six CUNY community colleges in the top ten “nationwide with the greatest success in lifting low-income students into the middle class” (Borough of Manhattan Community College, 2020). BMCC was ranked third among all two-year colleges nationwide. Those completing an associate degree will out-earn people with less than a high school diploma or a high school diploma (American Association of Community Colleges, 2023). This opportunity is particularly important for people impacted by the criminal legal system.

Education, especially higher education, has proved highly effective in facilitating successful reentry among the incarcerated and reduces recidivism (which politicians often over-emphasize, but plays well with voters) (Jensen and Read, 2006; Lockwood et. al., 2012; Halkovic, et. al., 2013). Higher education not only provides access to professional development, employment opportunities and enhanced earnings, but it facilitates civic engagement, stronger families, and overall personal fulfillment (Davis, et. al., 2013). College programs inside prison provide on-site, potentially transformative, spaces where people caught in the revolving doors of prison are offered far more than an opportunity to earn college credits or career path qualifiers. Regardless of incarceration status, higher education impacts students’ beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge. Reentry to society, particularly after a long sentence, can be daunting. But even those without direct criminal legal system impact will fear and face stigma, discrimination, and have had fewer enriching education experiences before college. That is where support programs on college campuses can truly make a difference.

Campus-Based Reentry Programs and Their Impact

In New York State, reentry programs for the formerly incarcerated mainly consist of services and support delivered by non-profit and private organizations that exist outside of academic institutions. In other states—California, in particular—some reentry programs are institutionalized on campuses, mostly community colleges. Known as “campus-based reentry programs,” thirty-three percent of California’s 248 colleges provided reentry services, and of those 72% are community colleges (Yücel, 2022). Professor Lisa Rose (Human Services Program Coordinator), Tommasina Faratro (Project Impact Director), and Professor Michelle Ronda (Associate Professor, Criminal Justice) are at the beginning of a new research endeavor studying the best practices from these California campus-based reentry programs as well as how advocates there were able to pass legislation to fund these programs in the hopes of informing such a campaign in New York State.

Project Impact: A Campus-based Reentry Program in New York City

Project Impact (PI) is a grant-funded success program at BMCC that supports students impacted by the criminal legal system (BMCC, n.d.). Project Impact is the first such program at a CUNY community college to provide comprehensive, wrap-around support for college students who have had contact with the justice system. Students can self-refer to participate or are recruited by one of many partner organizations of Project Impact. Confidentiality is paramount so there are no direct means by which to identify any students who have been justice impacted. This is an ongoing challenge for all programs that must rely on social media, traditional advertising, and word-of-mouth for recruitment. Project Impact provides direct services to justice-impacted students and prospective students through (1) an extensive peer mentoring program; (2) a high school equivalency program in partnership with the New York City Department of Education; (3) a program on Rikers Island; and (4) a partnership at Otisville Correctional Facility with the John Jay College Institute of Justice and Opportunity, Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP) Program, which has been offering college credit-bearing courses to students presently incarcerated since 2011, and will, from Fall 2024, begin offering a BMCC AA in Liberal Arts at Otisville (Ronda and Rose, 2022).

BMCC’s Project Impact also provides consultation and expertise to professionals in the college who teach and reach students who are formerly incarcerated, on parole or probation, have been arrested, or detained, or have family members in any of these categories. Project Impact staff and mentors not only provide that service, but they have collaborated with reentry organizations to receive referrals, make referrals, share resources, and advocate for educational opportunities for justice impacted New Yorkers, both inside and outside the walls of carceral institutions. Thus, Project Impact uniquely serves as a “reentry” program within a community college.

Project Impact defines “justice impacted” expansively as students who have been formerly incarcerated, have a sibling or parent who has been incarcerated or arrested, have had issues in family court, or in any other way have been significantly affected by the criminal legal system. As noted above, these students face collateral consequences of direct and indirect contact with the criminal legal system including stigmatization and discrimination in civic participation, housing, public assistance, employment, and education. Word of mouth and formal recruitment brought nearly one hundred students into Project Impact from Winter 2019 to Spring 2022.

BMCC’s Project Impact Participatory Program Evaluation

The participatory program evaluation completed by Professors Ronda and Rose in 2022 found—through dozens of interviews with Project Impact’s students, staff, and mentors, as well as internal and external partners—unequivocal data revealing the positive effect that PI is having at BMCC. To continue this essential work, and to fulfill its promise going forward, we believe that PI should be institutionalized in the BMCC budget. Currently it relies almost completely on grant funding (except for in-kind contributions) that must be sought after and renewed constantly. Programs like PI are quasi-independent on college campuses, operating as community-based organizations within the college, but are not integrated into the college. PI must be appropriately staffed to meet the needs of students facing multiple challenges, as well as to serve as a training and resource hub for the college community. Finally, as challenging as it is to navigate privacy concerns, as well as avoiding retraumatizing justice-impacted people, data collection and management are so important to plan strategically, monitor goals, and of course, satisfy and secure funding. California is a leader in institutionalizing campus-based reentry programs by legislating monetary support, an example New York should follow to ensure sustained support for justice-impacted students in public community colleges, topics that a new research project on which Professors Rose and Ronda are embarking will be able to advise further going forward.

College in Prison, Inside-Out Classes, and Learning Exchange

Professor Ronda’s research in recent years has focused on combined classes, often also referred to as inside-out classes, which bring undergraduates from “outside” prison together with incarcerated students, and have emerged as part of the transformative spaces that secondary education within prisons provide. An estimated three hundred or more courses have been offered across the country to date, as an increasing number of instructors from various disciplines join the ranks to explore their subject through the “prism of prison” (The Inside-Out Center, 2017). These combined educational programs provide a context in which to encourage genuine dialogue and exchange of ideas around the growing national momentum to re-evaluate criminal justice policies and their implications for human life. For students who arrive to prison classrooms from a vantage point of relative privilege, combined classes provide a potentially transformative educational experience as they seek to better understand the criminal justice system and promote social change. Their firsthand experience of prison institutional life and relations with incarcerated students provides invaluable grounded knowledge that can inform their perspectives of criminal justice and that can be used to engage civil society in criminal justice debate and policy decision making. For students who arrive to prison classrooms while incarcerated, combined classes provide a potentially transformative educational experience as they become peers with people whose life experiences are often quite different from their own. These courses also offer a window onto the society to which most, if not all incarcerated students will return, and provide important opportunities to inhabit an alternate role than that overshadowed/defined primarily by their status as “inmates.” Finally, during a time when higher education has come under recent attack, combined classes inside prison offers a unique prospect for enlightening students, staff, and faculty alike about the overall meaning, purpose, and transformative potential of education.

From the inception of the P2CP, the program included a so-called Learning Exchange in which community-based matriculated John Jay College students commuted to Otisville to learn alongside their incarcerated matriculated John Jay peers in a three-credit experiential learning course. The Learning Exchange has been on hiatus since the Coronavirus pandemic, but it will begin again in a future semester. At BMCC, we also hope to fundraise to make possible the inclusion of BMCC students in the Learning Exchange.  Since teaching college in prison is unlike any other teaching experience that Professor Ronda has had, she says one of her long-term goals is to find funding to teach an inside-out course with Manhattan-campus and Otisville-campus BMCC students.

Teaching at Otisville: A Unique Opportunity for BMCC Faculty

The college in prison program at Otisville will make P2CP the City University of New York’s (CUNY) only such program providing an undergraduate degree in a New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) facility. Professor Ronda is serving as the Assistant Academic Director of the P2CP Program at BMCC, working closely with Academic Director Carla Barrett at John Jay, recruiting part-time and full-time faculty to teach at the facility in fall and spring semesters.

Anyone who has ever taught in prison will tell you that incarcerated students are among the most earnest, motivated, and engaged people you will encounter. For those of us who are able to enter facilities to teach, the benefits far outweigh the many challenges of operating within carceral constraints and logic. Otisville Correctional Facility is a state prison and a medium security facility for men only. P2CP offers about nine or ten courses each semester, and faculty teach one day a week, Monday through Thursday, in one of two “mods” (what they call chunks of time in the prison): 12:30 to 3:30 pm or 6 to 9 pm. P2CP classes are usually small (10-20 students). A course at the prison counts toward the CUNY workload for both adjuncts and full-timers, the latter a great win that was first possible at BMCC in Spring 2022. One needs to be able to drive and have a valid license, as the prison is about two hours north of NYC. P2CP reimburses the cost of travel at governmental rates if using your own car or the cost of rental. Perhaps the most time-consuming part of the process of teaching in prison is becoming an official volunteer of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, a requirement which includes paperwork, a background check, fingerprinting, a tuberculosis test, and attendance at an in-person orientation in the facility. Although you will be aware during your time there that you are most certainly inside a prison, once you close the classroom door, you are then aware that you are in a college classroom like any other, but with students who are prepared for class, eager to discuss the material for the day, and ready to engage you and their peers. It may feel like a return to an earlier time, as there is no internet in the facility, no computers in the classroom, no whiteboards, or smart screens.

If any of this has piqued your interest, we do hope you will reach out to Professor Ronda for more information at mronda@bmcc.cuny.edu or (212) 776-6436 (voice or text). We also hope you will let your students know that BMCC’s Project Impact is ready to support all justice-impacted people to reach their goals, and ultimately to Start Here, and Go Anywhere.

References

• American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). 2024. “AACC Fast Facts 2024.” American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). Retrieved May 31, 2024 (https://www.aacc.nche.edu/research-trends/fast-facts/).
• American Bar Association. 2017. “Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions: Judicial Bench Book.” Office of Justice Programs. Retrieved May 31, 2024 (https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/collateral-consequences-criminal-convictions-judicial-bench-book). NCJ Number 251583
• BMCC. n.d. “Project Impact.” Borough of Manhattan Community College. Retrieved May 31, 2024 (https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/academics/success-programs/project-impact/).
• Borough of Manhattan Community College. 2020, June 17. BMCC ranks third nationwide in helping students move up the socioeconomic ladder. https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/news/bmcc-ranks-third-nationwide-in-helping-students-move-up-the-socioeconomic-ladder/
• Cadoff, Becca, Erica Bond, Preeti Chauhan, and Allie Meizlish. 2023. “Criminal Conviction Records in New York City (1980-2019).” Data Collaborative for Justice. Retrieved May 31, 2024 (https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/work/racial-justice/criminal-conviction-records-in-new-york-city-1980-2019/).
• Davis, Lois M., Robert Bozick, Jennifer L. Steele, Jessica Saunders, and Jeremy N. V. Miles. 2013. “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education: A Meta-Analysis of Programs That Provide Education to Incarcerated Adults.” RAND Corporation, RR-266-BJA, 2013. Retrieved June 1, 2024 (https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR266.html).
• Halkovic, Alexis et al. 2013. “Higher Education and Reentry: The Gifts They Bring. Reentry Research in the First Person.” Education Resources Information Center (ERIC). Retrieved June 1, 2024 (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed558779).
• Jensen, Eric L., and Gary E. Reed. 2006. “Adult Correctional Education Programs.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 44(1):81–98.
• Kirk, David S., and Sara Wakefield. 2018. “Collateral Consequences of Punishment: A Critical Review and Path Forward.” Annual Review of Criminology 1(1):171–94.
• Lockwood, Susan, John M. Nally, Taiping Ho, and Katie Knutson. 2012. “The Effect of Correctional Education on Postrelease Employment and Recidivism.” Crime & Delinquency 58(3):380–96.
• Reber, S., & Sinclair, C. 2020, May. Opportunity engines: Middle-class mobility in higher education. The Brookings Institution: Research. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/opportunity-engines-middle-class-mobility-in-higher-education/
• Ronda, M., & Rose, L. 2023. (rep.). “BMCC’s Project Impact: Participatory Program Evaluation Final Report” (pp. 1–66).
• The Inside-Out Center. 2017. “Podcast Episode 1: The Origins of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.” The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Retrieved June 1, 2024 (https://www.insideoutcenter.org/podcast-episode-1.html).
• Vallas, Rebecca, Sharon Dietrich, and Beth Avery. 2023. “A Criminal Record Shouldn’t Be a Life Sentence to Poverty.” Center for American Progress. Retrieved May 31, 2024 (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/criminal-record-shouldnt-life-sentence-poverty-2/).

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