first of all joe is the director of the program and has been directing the program since june of believe that's correct and you know jenny besides being a full professor of astrophysical science at the university is also the you know academic director  the program so first of all our i want to congratulate you on this program but let's talk about you know what it is and what it was founded so what is what is the present teaching  princeton university made up of grad undergraduates who function as tutors in prisons but mostly graduate students post docs and faculty as well as some staff members who teach  accredited college courses in prisons all around the state ok we were founded in two thousand and five by a small group of professors of astrophysics and including professor jenny crane and  we have grown from there we started just teaching a small number of math classes and garden they use correctional facility and over the years have grown we now teach courses in a whole range of subjects at eight facilities what was the what was the do for them so actually the impetus came from a fellow post of mine i was a post up in the astrophysics department at the time the name mark krumholtz who was teaching in san quentin and in a very similar sister program called the prison in universities roger university project and he wanted he wanted to implement something similar here and he just sent an e mail around and  i was intrigued and then the minute i started and jill can attest to this too i mean it's just the most rewarding teaching experience i've ever had in my life all of the students are incredibly motivated so once you start it's you just want to keep doing teaching jenny said you just get the bug and you want to keep coming back our students are the most passionate the most motivated learners that a teacher can hope for so we end up having an extremely passionate set of so princeton university we started it was we said as an all volunteer group and but prince university is our support is growing and growing over time and they now support small  administrative staff myself included but we also have support from around the campus from the graduate school and as well as from the center for human values department who give us mon ey for things like administrative fellows or expanding our poetry curriculum or expanding the bachelor's degree courses we're offering so different offices of the university basically help us with whatever thing they specialize in because it turns out that p t i sort of makes use of all the different resources that the university oka were housed i think we've said this but we're how's the mcgraw center for teaching and learning which has i guess been a year that we housed the area that's a really ideal home i think for us because one one of the we've said what an amazing teaching experience it is but it's very empowering not only for our students but also for our graduate students to do this teaching they really have a lot of agency to run the class the way they want to and so this is a professional development experience for them as well and working with mcgraw is wonderful because we work on providing the sort of pedagogy training  you yet graduate and like i said i started as a graduate student and jenny started as a postdoc those are positions where there is some sort of teaching at least in the graduate student role but usually only for my department for classes that you're a ts and so if you want to be competitive on the academic job market you need to get other experience not only in teaching more classes but also in being a sort of lead instructor who's in charge of lecturing or designing their reading schedule and that's different from the t a a role that standard at the university and just one other way of saying this it's very rare that you get to be involved in the students real first full experience as a as an intellectual and that is really the case for many of our students they really work tonight access to quality education in their past and the empowering moment i mean with math you don't think of math as like a super creative class but that first moment where they realize they can you know prove that the sum of of angles in a triangle is one hundred eighty degrees it's just so empowering you know and that those aha moments for them are incredibly meaningful because of the past history that they have with education so i think it's great to be a graduate doing in my field you know i am sort of the product of my ph d and so it feels quite self serving or you sort of lose sight of what it's for and then you get in a classroom where developing a really rich inner world through reading literature and talking to your peers about you know the human experience is contained within it it's very exciting and reenergizing i think one of the big questions that was discussed is this national conversation about mass incarceration which leads to things like the overcrowding of prison the depletion of communities the you know the ways that it effects individual lives but also the lives of whole neighborhoods so we see education as a time where you can make a difference in your life you can change your  life and this may be because you were never given the opportunity you were never given the chance we call this new way of finding prison out of this new old way the second chance pell grants but in fact for many of our students it's really their first chance at an education many of our students get their ged inside our students are about twice as likely to not have a ged as the average population  so so i think that's one way in which education can affect people's lives other people have had a chance to go through more of the educational system and then something went wrong in their lives and its chance to to make changes  and we see that we see how our students we've talked about the sort of additional motivation that we see in our students and i think it's because it's not only it is the love of the learning but it's also what education represents it represents a chance  to do something else with your life to gain confidence as a person to get a different identity and your students often come in and say you know what do you think of fallon's what do you think of prominence to us they want to understand what the real interaction is going to be and we say i see you as a student and a lot of education for us and that being about reinforcing that like i see you as a student you are a student you you have this other identity that's possible yeah so there's a large national conversation about the cost of and incarcerated individual versus the cost of an education and there's a lot of research that shows you're far less likely to go back to prison if you do have some level of education while incarcerated so that's recidivism and there's a big rand study that kind of puts together fifteen or twenty years worth of research and shows us rather definitively you are less likely to go back to prison if you have those opportunities while inside but we kind of want to reframe the debate and talk about how how empowering education is to be a productive member of society when you get out and for our students we have lots of testimonials talking not only about their own opportunities but also about the opportunities for their children the kinds of conversations they can have with their kids about how they're in college and what they're reading and you know that that's the other really critical piece i think for them is the impact on their on their kids when they can say i got a college degree and you know i think that the impact then is not only you know first it's that social relationship that hopefully changes for them in a positive way but it's also an economic impact it's also you know sort of a social social mobility impact and it's also what your children see as possible for them if you have a parent who goes to college you're so much more likely to go to college and so we see this as something that i think through you know that the students are in acting systemic changes in their own lives through was we should probably take one step back and talk about our work in the context of yeah so first of all it's worth saying that we are able to be so successful because the department of corrections is very supportive and in addition to p t i there have been historically a number of higher education groups or entities within the state working inside the facility so mercer county community college was since the seventy's working with different facilities and nationally you can see community college involvement with the incarcerated population go up and down with federal funding so when we started there was this problem program called project insight which was federal dollars and we sort of were for a brief time part of that project as implemented by mercer and then that went away in one nine hundred ninety four was when pell grants stopped funding incarcerated and rituals for that round to now of course it's coming back with the second chance pell experiment which was started by obama and in twenty twelve twenty thirteen we became part of a state wide a consortium of educators in new jersey working to build a pipeline for our students so they're working for their a and sometimes there be a inside and then professor named don road and started what was called the mountain view program to help students formerly incarcerated enroll at rikers so we have four hundred so impressive number of mountain view students on all the rockers campuses who are formally incarcerated and are working to complete their be a ok so that's our consortium it's called and j step and  working in various facilities and so all together or we're helping the students work towards a specific days and yeah the important thing for from our sort of mission perspective is prison education funding as jenny says as has fluctuated wildly over the years our program certainly was one of many that started around the country in response to the cancellation of second chance or pell grants for incarcerated students  important for us is that whatever funding is available our classes are offered on top of that so in any given year we teach about twenty to thirty percent of all the classes in the state  those move for you know students and you know you structures within the program too but i want to get more on the one of talking about your restrictions for materials that may exist you know in the prison classroom maybe  explain the you know what effect they have this and the on the classes that you could teach and how you teach them so across the country you'll see that most sort of higher ed in prison programs tend to be really humanities and social science focused and has to do with like the places where these programs tend to start you'll get sort of somebody who's quite passionate about their subject maybe they've right on incarceration and they'll start teaching inside but we're quite unusual because we were started by a group of scientists and mathematicians and so that meant that they weren't actually going to try to get lab sciences into the prison and we've had immense success with that with the collaboration  department of corrections and with the federal facility at fort dix now to use the board of prisons so we do teach lab base sciences in what is otherwise a very materials restricted environment and are we tend to see this as a sort of do each by our we get no and because we think that it's really important that our students that they're in a liberal arts degree program but within that we try to create what we call stand tracker stem concentration in collaboration with our community college the kind of the lab classes are the most dramatic here in terms of challenges we have this is what he plans class that first of all the officers love calling the plants  but you know he claims were right but even the most basic composition in our math class i think really benefit pedagogically from there being no computer resources of any sort i mean it's chalk it's you it's a few things that you can print out and pass around and all look at and it's just real pure teaching so i mean i love it because  you can see it actually as a a wonderful opportunity to lose all the things you feel like are critical those damn power points that you need to through fat to fast and just really talk to the students and get them excited so it's so you  you'll find contact information for us in order to be an instructor you need to have a master's degree in a relevant discipline to your subject such that you can be approved as a teacher at the community  college but we also have a tutoring program that i mention right off the top is is a great part of our program it's primarily staffed by princeton undergraduates but we also have community members and instructors who go in weekly as well my next door neighbor going on more and more now which i think is very positive about the issues of mass incarceration in this country the fact that people of color are overwhelmingly the people incarcerated the fact that the united states has more people incarcerated  the rest of the first world by a very large amount but to me as an educator what is very striking is how those who are incarcerated are far less likely to have had a quality education before they were incarcerated and to me that just speaks to the failing of our ability to provide people with their basic needs and i think education is a right i think that you know it's something like forty percent police there is what happens with the justice system there is bail and all of those things are complicated but to me the education piece is central and so that's that's really where p t a comes in to add on to that what we notice in particular so our students have to test quite low and are in the preparatory program particularly in math and we think it's because of a pervasive attitude that somehow even though literacy is important for everybody being able to read and write we expect that that's the sort of baseline we see math is something that you're either a math person or you're not right you're categorized that way very early and so our students we feel and this correlates to the groups that they come from particularly young men of color being tracked out of math and sciences we think is a massive issue and we see it correlated with who's represented in our in our incarcerated student population so that's why we've had also i think having this rather unusual stem focus and has given us that window or that that that a goal that we think is actually quite important that each person should be literate in the way that we expect everyone to be able to yeah so we we mentioned that we have this past to appear and when students get out there's also a growing pass to our community college partners to finish the a and my case think i said there's a lot of research nationally that even a small amount of education while inside empowers people to not go back to prison but to lead for a more productive lives when they get  out so we unfortunately are not in the position of a lot of data about our students of side from saying that we do we have one student who's a graduate student and in an engineering program it be you now we've had six or seven students do undergraduate research this summer on campus oh yeah and then we did three the summer before so now i think total we have eleven or twelve and so we're really we're really focused on opening their eyes to the fact that they can continue in an academic track that's not typically orientation of the students who are much more practical you know there was a pretty law there was business  were sort of opening their their minds to these other possibilities because there's two sides there's one there preparedness to fill any given role and so we're working on that and they're working on that and but i think hopefully and what we see is that this is changing that there is an awareness of what's leading to incarceration all of these different systemic factors that's hopefully reducing the stigma around being somebody who's formerly incarcerated and being someone who is seeking employment and is formerly incarcerated and so yeah i would say that we see ourselves as on a positive trajectory there not only helping to build preparedness but also to reduce stigma and it's fabulous to have these students on campus for these internships in the summer because i think they change hearts and minds just themselves like you find out how to do summer oh this guy my lab you know  we want to be in every facility in the state we want to build our relationships nationally so that we can really promote this volunteer model because you know to the extent we can not have our students be more  shorter term we're definitely looking to really keep improving our volunteer training process because we do think that it's a specialized thing that you're doing by going into this basically i think we do print job preparing people to go into the present and what to expect and all that but we want to continue to help our princeton faculty and postdocs and grad students understand adult learners as programs around the country but to really make that a network of mutual supports that we're not all recreating the wheel that we were all talking and figuring out what's working in our context and seeing if we can learn from one another and bring the the weight of our of our friends and connections to the policy discussions are also going  watching this week of education we'll see you next week on another dish to tell those defocus stay healthy and stay active have a good