Site-Specific Panel at American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Location: Hilton Inner Harbor, Floor: Second Floor, Holiday 2

This roundtable at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting will convene representatives from colleges and universities (including Goucher College, University of Baltimore, Towson University, Bowie State University, Georgetown University, and Johns Hopkins University) that offer college-level courses to students in Maryland state prisons.

We hope that this conversation will accomplish two main goals. First, the roundtable is a chance for these programs to share their work and experience with the scholarly public. The oldest of these programs has been in operation for 11 years; others are still in the planning stages. Higher education in prison is thus at once an entrenched feature of our academic landscape and a fast-growing one still in its early stages. By discussing both the history of their work and their outlooks for the future, participants will provide college administrators, students, teachers, and scholars of American Studies alike with knowledge crucial to shaping our understanding of the past, present, and future relationship between higher education and the prison-industrial complex in Maryland and beyond.

Second, the roundtable is a chance for these programs to share their work with each other. One effect of the various legal, institutional, and logistical challenges to offering college in prison in the US is that this space is uniquely collaborative. Partnerships between R1 institutions, HBCUs, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges are common, as are state-wide consortia in which distinct programs share resources, people, and infrastructure. We hope that the intellectual environment of ASA will foster collaboration among existing programs in Maryland, expose systemic needs and gaps, and allow administrators and scholars of incarceration and education to articulate practice with theory – all in line with the conference’s goal of understanding “grounded engagements not as discrete bounded places but rather as interconnected.”

Other topics of discussion may include: alumni testimony about the experience of being a college student in prison, and of being a formerly incarcerated college student or graduate; faculty testimony about the experience of teaching in prison; “inside-out” classroom exchanges and relationships between students across campuses; legal, political, institutional, and logistical challenges to running programs in prison; reentry challenges and coordination, including employment and housing; support for continuing education upon release; Pell grants; and fundraising.

Speakers:

Ann W. Duncan is Executive Director of the Goucher Prison Education Partnership and Susan D. Morgan Professor of American Studies and Religion at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. Her research involves intersections of religion and public life including Religion and Politics, Motherhood and Religion, New Religious Movements and the Spiritual but not Religious.

William Freeman III is the Manager of the Higher Education Justice Initiative at the Education Trust, where he leads and manages the Justice Policy Fellowship working with the policy team to provide an equity perspective on higher education in prison issues. Prior to joining The Education Trust, William served as an inaugural Justice Policy Fellow. Before that, William worked part-time with Prison to Professional as a program coordinator, where he recruited program participants, tracked attendance and assignments, and organized a virtual job fair. William also works with Dr. Stanely Andrisse as a research assistant. A native of New York, William grew up in Baltimore, where one wrong decision after another landed him in prison with a life sentence. During his incarceration, he got involved in the Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP). He reentered society after serving 21 years in prison with 73 transferable college credits. He transferred onto Goucher’s main campus, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in Sociology/Anthropology and was selected to deliver the commencement for his graduating class.

Emily Hainze is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative. She is also the Associate Director for the Bachelor of Liberal Arts (BLA) degree program for incarcerated students at Patuxent Institution in Jessup, MD, and directs the Writing Program for the BLA. Her teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th century U.S. literature, the history of race, gender and incarceration in the U.S., and archival methods. Currently, she is at work on a book titled “Incorrigible: Writing from the Early Women’s Prison in the United States,” and her research has also appeared in American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, and Public Books.

Elyshia Aseltine is an Associate Professor at Towson University (TU) in Maryland. Her research focuses on racial inequalities and the criminal justice system. She is also the 2022-2024 College of Liberal Arts Mitten Professor, the founding Director of TU’s Fair Chance Higher Education initiative, and 2019 Open Society Institute-Baltimore Community Fellow.

Charles Adams is a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, Founding Executive Director of the Institute for Restorative Justice and Practices, and Executive Director of the Prison Education Program at Bowie State University.

Andrea Cantora is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Baltimore. She has worked at UBalt since 2012. Prior to coming to UBalt, Dr. Cantora worked in NYC at the Vera Institute of Justice, and at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she received her doctorate in criminal justice. She specializes in qualitative research and program evaluation, with a primary focus on prisoner reentry, correctional education, and urban crime prevention. Her work has been published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, the American Journal of Criminal Justice, and Criminal Justice Studies. Aside from her research, Dr. Cantora has also worked directly with incarcerated populations since 2000. She has provided tutoring to juvenile offenders, worked as a counselor for girls with mental and developmental disorders, developed and implemented a reentry program for women, and taught college courses to incarcerated men. And, most notably, in 2016 she helped launch the Second Chance College Program at Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland.  

Commentators:

Alex Streim, Ph.D, is a lecturer with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership. He is also a Fellow in the Office of Government, Community, and Economic Partnerships at JHU. He teaches American literature courses across periods, and his current research focuses on the intersections of didactic poetics and pedagogic theory. His essays and reviews have been appeared in or are forthcoming from Public Books, Chicago Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, Modern Philology,ASAP/J, and Annulet. 

Stuart Schrader is the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism and Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

This panel is sponsored by the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism and is part of the Critical Prison Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association.