Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop - Participant Bios and Videos: Higher Education in Prison

Participant Bios and Videos: Higher Education in Prison

Image credits: "George Floyd Protest" by Geoff Livingston; Washington D.C.

Panelists

Adrienne Jones

Dr. Adrienne Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Her educational background includes a B.S. in Semiotics from Brown University, a J.D. in Law from the University of California-Berkeley, a M.A. in Political Science from the City University of New York Graduate Center and a Ph.D. in Political Science from City University of New York Graduate Center.
Dr. Jones’s research focuses on political policy that relates to the black experience, as well as the history and politics of black Americans. Currently, work from her Ph.D. thesis The Voting Rights Act Under Siege: The Development of the Influence of Colorblind Conservatism on the Federal Government and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is being adapted for publication in various research journals. At Morehouse College, Dr. Jones also teaches a variety of courses that focus on politics, race and law in the American context.

Sophia Howard

Sophia Howard is a Senior Comparative Women’s Studies major and Philosophy minor from Nashville, Tennessee, at Spelman College. While in college, she has studied extensively the intersections of white supremacy and patriarchy through the reproductive rights of incarcerated women. Through this study, Sophia has been led to create and work for organizations centered on supporting and advocating for incarcerated people. Sophia is a social justice fellow at Spelman College where she founded Unlocked Minds, a book club in Whitworth Women’s Facility, a minimum and medium-security prison in Hartwell, GA. She has hopes of cultivating a long-lasting relationship between the prison and Spelman College in order to eventually create a certificate program within the prison. Unlocked Minds currently has twenty-five women involved in the program and as it continues to grow there is a waitlist. Sophia is also the Vice President of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity (URGE) at Spelman and is the lead organizer working to create the Spelman College Period Project. She is also the student leader of The Learning Club, an alternative sentencing and mentorship program at the Fulton County Juvenile Court, serving boys ages 12-17. While being the student leader as well as mentor Sophia has raised over $2,000 for the program, has developed the relationships between the court, the probation officers, and the mentors, as well as forming a better connection with parents, all with the intention to improve the support system of the boys that are in the program. She has interned for the American Civil Liberties Union, working on their Smart Justice campaign, a campaign geared towards minimizing incarceration in the state of Georgia by 50%. Sophia organized and facilitated community conversations in the form of town halls in three different counties in the state of Georgia. Last year Sophia was the first undergraduate intern for the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. While at EJI she worked primarily on the soil collection project, a project created to commemorate the lives of victims of lynching in the United States. Researching and writing about the lives of lynching victims as well as traveling to different lynching sites and attending community dedications, Sophia worked on crafting an honest narrative of white supremacy in the United States. Upon graduation from Spelman College, Sophia plans to attend law school in order to become a public interest attorney serving incarcerated citizens in the United States.

Janet Morales

Janet Morales is an Education Specialist at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, where she assists with the strategic planning, design, assessment, and financing of new higher education programs across the Department. Prior to joining the Department, Janet led programs at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN which facilitated college access and workforce development for students traditionally underrepresented in higher education. She holds a Master’s degree in Educational Policy and Administration from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor’s degree from Carleton College.

Daniel Karpowitz

For nearly twenty years Daniel was a Director of the Bard Prison Initiative responsible for policy and academics, and helped launch college in prison programs in a dozen states across the country. He served on the faculty as a Professor of Law & the Humanities at Bard College, while previous legal work focused on residential red-lining in Chicago, race-based insurance underwriting in New York, and alternatives to incarceration in Philadelphia. Daniel has taught in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley, been a Soros Justice Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, and twice a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book, College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration, was published by Rutgers in 2017. In 2019, he joined the administration of Governor Tim Walz in Minnesota as a special advisor to the Governor. He serves as the interagency lead on criminal justice, and as an Assistant Commissioner for Policy, Research and Planning at the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

Bahiyyah Muhammad

Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad is an Associate Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology at Howard University (HU) in the District of Columbia (DC). Dr. Muhammad is also Founding Director for the Higher Education in Prison (HEP) Programming across all three campuses at the university and the HU Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel. To date, Professor Muhammad has spearheaded HEP courses and innovative programs offered through Howard University’s Schools of Law, Divinity, Communications, Fine Arts and the College of Arts and Sciences. These graduate seminars and undergraduate classes have occurred in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the DC Department of Corrections (DCDOC), the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) and the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) detention facilities in Maryland and Washington, DC. To date, approximately one thousand howard students, alumni, faculty, incarcerated, and formerly incarcerated individuals have participated in classes inside prisons, jails and detention facilities in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Under Dr. Muhammad’s leadership, Howard University became the first HBCU to offer award winning post-secondary education to incarcerated females, males, detained juveniles and their families, simultaneously. Most recently, Dr. Muhammad was selected as a 2020-2021 Mandela Washington Reciprocal Exchange Fellow for the U.S. Government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) and the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX). Through this fellowship, Dr. Muhammad will spend the year working with an African Leadership Fellow to expand prisoner and juvenile refugee programming in the Kingdom of ESwatini (known as Swaziland), located in Southern Africa. Specifically, Dr. Muhammad will travel to Swaziland in 2021 to provide face-to-face expert consultation at Mawelawela Correctional Centre and Mpaka Refugee Camp for STEM classes and empowerment programming for detained female youth. In 2017, Dr. Muhammad served as a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. In this position, she reviewed the U.S. policy on human rights for children and helps to design new approaches to assist the U.S. government in addressing the issue. Dr. Muhammad served within the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs. Furthermore, Dr. Muhammad has been the recipient of various service awards for her engagement with correctional facilities. Most recently, she was a Featured Honoree for Voices for A Second Chance-50the Anniversary Gala and was award the Carolyn Cross Community Impact Award for her groundbreaking work with the DC Department of Corrections. In addition, in 2018, Dr. Muhammad was awarded with the George Strawn Volunteer Award for her innovative programming and college courses offered to scholars in the DC Jail’s Correctional Treatment and Detention Facilities. Dr. Muhammad’s prison services were also awarded by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2016. She was recognized as Volunteer of the Year for her MOM Camp program that allowed children of incarcerated parents to “sleepover” at a federal prison camp with their incarcerated mothers who completed her college course, “Special Topics: Children of Incarcerated Parents”. In 2015, she received a Human Rights Award from the New Jersey Education Association, which was an advocacy award for her service to school-aged children affected by parental incarceration. This work was highlighted through the Newark Public Schools Superintendent in 2018, in the VICE of HBO Segment with Michael K. Williams, entitled “Raised in the System”, which she worked with Newark Elementary Students of the incarcerated. This film highlights success and resilience among those affected by mass incarceration and is aligned with Dr. Muhammad’s recent TED talk on this topic. For more than a decade, Dr. Muhammad has been conducting groundbreaking research on the children of incarcerated parents and the consequences of parental incarceration on children. Dr. Muhammad has done hundreds of interviews with affected children and parents in the United States, Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. She has published research on the impact of parental incarceration - from witnessing a parent’s arrest by police to the physical and emotional separation resulting from actual incarceration - on children, their parents, and familial bonds, as well as children’s success stories. Dr. Muhammad is co-founder of Project Iron Kids, an initiative to educate and empower children of incarcerated parents. She co-published the first coloring book for children of the incarcerated, titled The Prison Alphabet: An Educational Coloring Book for Children of the Incarcerated. Her work has been translated in Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and French. In addition, Dr. Muhammad is the author of two criminal justice textbooks, is working to complete a manuscript on success and resilience among children of the incarcerated and a co-edited anthology titled “Mothering From The Field” (Rutgers University Press). Her research has been published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Law Review, the Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law and the American University Business and Law Review. Dr. Muhammad has served as an invited speaker inside prisons, jails and detention centers around the world. Her research, innovative programming, study abroad enrichment sessions and college courses have exposes students to global issues of imprisonment in Africa, Asia, Europe, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America. Dr. Muhammad is an innovative educator that utilizes a radical pedagogy to engage students in an intellectual journey that is described as, “empowering”, “transformative”, “critical” and “freeing”. Her classes have been dubbed the “Dr. Muhammad Experience” and have won her the title of Professor of the Year 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019. In addition, Dr. Muhammad voluntarily lived in a cell for a weekend (January 15-17, 2016) to gain a more holistic understanding of life behind prison walls. Dr. Muhammad is a unique educator working strategically to change the landscape of higher education, as it is known today. Dr. Muhammad was recently nominated for the very prestigious Global Teachers Prize for her groundbreaking instruction. Professor Muhammad’s newest revolutionary course, the only of its kind in the world, Policing Inside Out initiated through a partnership with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, brings together law enforcement officers and black millennials to engage in brutally honest dialogue, trust building excursions and critical readings on minority community-police relations. Now offered at Morgan State University and Coppin State University, Policing Inside Out has transformed the ways in which inter-departmental law enforcement agencies police in Black communities. Prior to Dr. Muhammad’s academic tenure, she served as Director of the College Bound Consortium (CBC), a HEP program founded in 2010 to educate incarcerated persons in New Jersey. The CBC was facilitated at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCF) in Clinton, NJ through a partnership between Drew University, Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) and the Drew Theological School’s Partnership for Religion and Education in Prison (PREP). During this time, Professor Muhammad taught classes at EMCF and Northern State Prison (NSP) and arranged for faculty across both campuses to teach a variety of courses to approximately 200 incarcerated women in New Jersey. Dr. Bahiyyah M. Muhammad received her B.A. in Administration of Justice with a minor in Psychology and a Criminology Certificate from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. She received her M.A. in Corrections Administration from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice with a specialization on children of incarcerated parents was received from Rutgers University, School of Criminal Justice in Newark, New Jersey. Professor Muhammad has taught courses at The New School-Urban Studies Department, West Chester University-Department of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University-School of Criminal Justice and currently serves as a tenured faculty member at the Howard University.

Moderator:

Josh Page

Joshua Page is the Fink Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, where he serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in the Law School. He is the author of The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officer Unions in California (2011) and co-author (with Michelle Phelps and Phil Goodman) of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle over Criminal Justice (2017). He’s currently studying the bail bond industry and, with Joe Soss, writing a book titled Preying on the Poor: Criminal Justice as Revenue Racket. In the early 1990s, Page volunteered as a teaching assistant in San Quentin State Prison's college program.

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