Mount Tamalpais College

Current Affairs

Our 2020 Annual Report is Now Available

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It has now been a full year since the pandemic shut down all programs at San Quentin. With this report we hope to not only provide an overview of our work during this unprecedented year, and share insight into how the focus and the impact of our work has shifted focus during this time—we also hope to cast attention on the experiences of incarcerated people in 2020. Thus, in addition to sharing news about Mount Tamalpais College as an emerging institution, we’ve also included an array of content including letters and stories that convey the pandemic’s impact on people in prison, and on those returning home.

The full report is available below.

Community Dialogs: COVID-19 Vaccination and the Incarcerated Community

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California has acted quickly to make the COVID-19 vaccine available to prison staff and residents. However, some people are reluctant or refusing to take the vaccine, citing concerns over its safety and a lack of trust between incarcerated people and communities of color with health care providers.

On February 25, we hosted a panel discussion that explored the legal, public health, and media efforts to protect the health of California’s incarcerated community and provide accurate information.

Featuring:

  • Juleen Lam, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Sciences, CSU East Bay; Faculty, Mount Tamalpais College
  • Michael Bien, Founding Partner, Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP
  • Joseph Hancock, Mount Tamalpais College Alumnus; Site Support Specialist, Family Bridges
  • Dr. Leah Rorvig, Director of Health Education, AMEND, Zuckerberg SF General Hospital
  • Nigel Poor, Co-creator and Co-host, Ear Hustle Podcast; Professor of Photography, CSU Sacramento

A recording of the event is available below.

Academic Program Resumes at San Quentin with Eight-Week Correspondence Courses

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After nearly a year of suspended programming, we are thrilled to resume Associate of Arts degree courses to help sustain students’ academic development during this extended period of disruption.

For an eight-week spring term, we are offering 13 one-unit credit correspondence courses that address one of the following learning outcomes: quantitative competency, written communication, critical thinking, or civic and community engagement. A full list of course offerings is available below.

We are also mailing math and writing practice curricula to college preparatory students, and offering a few other non-credit extracurricular opportunities to all students. There are 13 returning faculty facilitating the credit courses and 14 supporting college preparatory work; each course will have a maximum of 30 students.

Though we hope to be back in the classroom in person soon, we are excited to continue providing high-quality education to students at San Quentin in the interim.

The following one-credit correspondence courses will be offered this term:

Landmark U.S. Court Cases

This course is an in-depth study of three landmark court cases, each chosen because it illustrates something central to the U.S. legal system: McFall v. Shimp, a 1978 case wherein the court had to decide whether to force one person to donate bone marrow against their will in order to save the life of another person, Brown v. Board of Ed, a 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case wherein the court decided that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and Riggs v. Palmer, an 1889 case about whether a grandson who murdered his grandfather could inherit his money. 

Popular Music & Social Criticism in Modern America

This course explores popular music as social commentary in modern America. Students will look at the role of music in protest and response in recent decades beginning with the civil rights and peace movements of the mid-twentieth century, through the response of Chicano rock, funk, and hip-hop to the issues of the day, and continuing into the twenty-first century and recent developments related to politics and social issues. 

Strategies for Activism in U.S. History

What strategies have activists employed throughout the history of the United States to fight for social justice and civic change? This course considers the U.S.’s history of activism from Reconstruction to 2020 with a focus on the approaches adopted by civil rights leaders to not only communicate but also garner support for their causes within a range of movements.

Presidential Inaugural Addresses

On January 20, President Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address at an especially charged moment in the nation’s history. This course asks students to read, reflect on, and write about the civic signals Biden sought to send to his fellow citizens, and how they compare with the signals sent by six previous presidents in their noteworthy inaugural addresses.

Statistics of Vaccinations and Herd Immunity

This course explores how viruses such as COVID-19 spread, how vaccinations help us slow the spread to achieve herd immunity, and how statistics help us understand it all.

Future Vision: Science Fiction Utopias

Drawing upon science fiction and other speculative writings, students will explore and critically examine problems and possibilities of how social systems might be constructed, and imagine parameters towards a future society. Readings include work by authors such as Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Jose Saramego, Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Pamela Sargent, Mary Doria Russell.

Fire, Forests, and Forest Fires

This is an exploratory survey of the literature of forest wildfires, firefighting experiences, fire management, and policy, past, present, and future. Readings tell the stories of smoke jumpers, heroic and tragic, Indigenous legends and native land practices, as well as a discussion of California forest and fire ecology.

Climate Change

This course introduces the basic science of climate change. Students will discuss how carbon dioxide affects the climate and humanity’s role in the production of carbon dioxide.

The Legacies of “Redlining” and “White Flight”

Redlining is the illegal practice of refusing to provide financial services to consumers based on the area where they live. This course will introduce students to a mix of historiographical writings, some fiction and poetry, and recent studies to offer a brief overview over redlining then and now, including maps illustrating the practice. These maps hold the key to understanding why American cities today look the way they do—from the distribution of poverty and environmental pollutants to gentrification, COVID-deaths, and police killings. 

Thinking about Thinking: Introspective Psychology

Introspective Psychology is a method of studying conscious experience by examining our own thoughts, images, and feelings. Through assignments and readings, students will practice this method and learn about its place in the history of psychological science. 

Principles of Rhetoric

In this course, students will study the fundamental principles of rhetoric, analyzing how authors and speakers convey a message to an intended audience. Using these techniques, students will write a persuasive essay on a topic of their choice.

Poetry in Times of Crisis

Students will explore various poets who in different historical moments address moments of political and cultural crisis, from war and revolution to civil rights and environmental struggles, combining both literary analysis as well as their own creative writing.

The Personal Essay

In this course, students will read, contemplate, and reread one personal essay a week. The capstone project will be to write a personal essay of their own.

Student Steve Brooks Honored by Society of Professional Journalists

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Steve Brooks was awarded a Contest Award by the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California for his commentary on criminal justice in California in “The Hidden Heroes Forgotten Inside” and “‘Violent Criminals’ Deserve Second Chances, Too”.

A full list of the SPJ’s 2020 Excellence in Journalism award recipients is here.

Steve was on track to graduate last year with the Class of 2020, but we were forced to cancel graduation due to COVID-19. He shared a commencement address on the importance of education which is available here.

Even in a Pandemic, San Quentin Must Restore Rehabilitation Programs

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With COVID-19 running amok in lockups across the state, California’s prison population at San Quentin State Prison is suffering a double blow. As of Oct. 20, there were more than 2,200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among its residents and 28 deaths.

Not only must the other residents live in fear of getting sick, their minds are being starved by lack of stimulation. A state of emergency has virtually confined them to their cells like penned cattle. And with the holidays fast approaching, the level of anxiety might be further heightened with the exclusion of the customary observances that have been a programming hallmark at San Quentin State Prison for decades. This lack of exposure to rehabilitative programming deprives them of the resources that would prepare them for their return to society.

When I was first incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in the fall of 2016, it was a hub of rehabilitation. The Prison University Project provided an avenue for me to improve myself academically. Criminal Gangs Anonymous and Millati Islami, an Islamic 12-step program, offered peer-to-peer support and recovery-based studies on the underlying causes of substance abuse, recidivism and criminality.

At my parole suitability hearing, the panel members from the Board of Parole Hearings remarked that it was my participation in rehabilitative programming that guided their decision to find me suitable for parole. They reasoned that it would be one thing to be able to enjoy the fruits of scholarship by securing a well-paying job, and another to have those gains go up in smoke in the form of vaporized rocks ingested through a crack pipe.

During the coronavirus outbreak at San Quentin State Prison, social isolation protocols were implemented and rehabilitative programming was suspended in response to the coronavirus. While those measures seemed justified, it has been nearly eight months since all rehabilitative programming was discontinued, and it looks as if no attempts are being made to address the programming needs of San Quentin State Prison’s rehabilitation-starved residents.

The indefinite suspension of rehabilitative programming runs counter to the mission of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Since 2004, the CDCR has invoked rehabilitative programming as an essential function of its operations, along with corrections officers, civilian support personnel and medical staff. None of these other components faced indefinite suspension, and neither should rehabilitative programming.

Restoring programming could be done safely. One approach would be to install more kiosks in the housing units, like the kiosks that are currently available for legal research. Secure media platforms such as kiosks, electronic tablets, e-readers and correspondence coursework would give prison officials enough latitude to continue rehabilitative programming activities that will meet the needs of the residents, as well as address any security concerns during the pandemic. But the use of these media seems to have been overlooked or dismissed.

The installation of additional kiosks might be costly, and not everyone can afford an electronic tablet or e-reader. The staff needed to maintain security and provide technical support might also strain resources. In addition to that, I am certain there are those who might say: “These people got themselves into prison, so why waste precious resources when society is being equally challenged by the pandemic?” But the suspension of rehabilitative resources could prove more costly than folks might imagine.

Take the case of an incarcerated individual who suffers from the disease of addiction and receives no in-prison substance abuse treatment. CDCR recidivism tracking data, from 2014 to 2017, shows that of those who did not receive in-prison treatment 47.8% were convicted within three years of being released. By comparison, of those who completed both in-prison treatment and aftercare 18.5% were convicted within three years of being released. According to California’s Legislative Analyst Office, in 2018-2019, it costs about $81,000 per year to incarcerate someone in prison in California. The data speaks for itself: rehabilitative programming works and is less costly. It also shows the antiquated approach — which proposes we leave those who fell from grace to their own devices — does not work and is more costly.

Rehabilitative programming was my key to freedom. And rehabilitative programming continues to play a pivotal role in my recovery. Moreover, in my case, it is because of rehabilitative programming that society has thus far gained the benefit of having another citizen that can contribute to the well-being of all of its citizens.

Pandemic notwithstanding, rehabilitative programming should be reinstated and California’s authorities need to step up to the plate to see to it that my comrades have a decent shot at returning to their communities better off than when they suffered what can arguably be construed as one of the worst moments of their lives. That is what the CDCR declared in its mission statement and this is what the public should expect.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 14, 2020. Read Story

October 14: Update from the President

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Dear friends,

I hope everyone is doing OK during this tumultuous and trying time. I’m writing to share some brief updates on San Quentin, as well as some longer thoughts about the road ahead, now that we have achieved the historic milestone of becoming Mount Tamalpais College. (Note that “Tamalpais” is pronounced “Tamal PIE iss”.) Making such a profound change in the midst of a pandemic has presented some formidable challenges, but we are finding our way, even locating meaningful opportunities within this period of extraordinary change. 

Larger picture at San Quentin: the COVID-19 outbreak there has largely subsided. As of Sunday, October 11, there was one current positive case; 2,152 resolved. So far 28 people at San Quentin have died of the virus. As always, the numbers don’t convey either the physical toll or the enormous psychological impact of the prolonged lockdown—now going on month eight. It’s difficult to describe the frustration of not being able to do more to intervene in this situation, though I know many of you are experiencing it as well. 

As you know, at the start of the pandemic we made the judgment call to focus our attention and resources on protecting the mental and physical health of everyone inside, including both incarcerated people and staff, and to help stabilize the prison itself. Given the state of crisis of the prison, including the precarious state of the institutional mail systems, as well as the near-impossibility of delivering high-quality education via course packets, we opted not to try to continue instruction by correspondence. We have, however, worked to ensure that people inside at least have reading and writing materials, as well as quality video content. We also continue to explore the feasibility of creating technological systems to deliver quality courses without face-to-face contact. Even once we have the appropriate systems, equipment, funding, and institutional cooperation, such technology-based strategies will take time to implement, but we hope to make significant progress in the coming months. 

All of these strategic decisions reflect our interpretation of our mission. They form our response to the question, what is the role of a higher education institution in the face of a pandemic? Our answer has been to deploy our knowledge, resources, relationships, and experience strategically, to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the most vulnerable members of our community.  

As the lockdown drags on, we continually reassess our decisions, like everyone else constantly trying to anticipate the future, while weighing the nature and intensity of the crisis, our organizational capacity, the capacity of the prison, as well as the availability of resources. There is obviously no playbook for this situation. 

As we work on these formidable human, material, and logistical challenges, we are also eager to turn attention to some of the other “higher level” projects that will be critical to shaping and sustaining the new Mount Tamalpais College, and advancing through the final initial accreditation stage. In the next year, we anticipate hiring several new positions as we build out our administrative infrastructure. The work of attracting a highly skilled, diverse pool of candidates with relevant professional experience and expertise will be one of our most significant priorities. We will be posting these positions soon and hope that all of you will assist by disseminating these announcements throughout your own networks, and also sharing suggestions for getting the word out. 

Another major priority remains diversifying faculty. Some of the obstacles to this goal are fairly obvious: the demographics of those holding advanced degrees in the U.S., as well as those of the Bay Area, are almost the inverse of our student population. Yet recruitment is not just about demographics: individuals’ feelings about, and experiences of, teaching inside vary dramatically.  Precisely what makes some individuals most needed can also be what makes the experience of teaching that much more intense. The emotional labor of teaching in a prison is by no means constant, but rather varies dramatically based on myriad often deeply personal factors, including race, gender identity, socioeconomic background, as well as experience with the criminal justice system. What for a person with one background might seem like a novelty—teaching in a prison—for another person might be deeply fraught. 

In addition, Black and Latino academics and professionals in particular are constantly being called upon to provide volunteer service, especially for institutions and organizations that serve communities of color. This is one of the most important reasons why the feasibility of transitioning from a volunteer model to paid faculty is something we are now exploring. We are also constantly seeking to understand how the program can better support faculty of color. Nevertheless, the sharp contrast between the racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds of students and those of faculty and staff—which essentially illustrates inequality in the U.S.—remains one of the most persistent and intractable challenges of the field.

Another compelling realm of work in the process of building out the new institution is establishing community norms, pedagogical practices, and administrative standards that honor the cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of our entire community. One of the most complex challenges within the field of higher education in prison is the contrast between the socioeconomic, cultural, and political diversity of the incarcerated population, and program staff and educators’ often more homogenous cultural and political backgrounds. Staff and educators at times approach incarcerated students with strong beliefs about who they are or what they need, which can potentially deprive them of the space that they, like all students, need to think independently and critically, and to develop their own thoughts, ideas, identities, and perspectives.  

For better and for worse, the prison is a study in what happens when human beings are systematically deprived of all formal power—when, as is often the case in prison settings, conflict and aggression have a swift and harsh price, and people have no choice but to coexist. One surprising result of this landscape is often a capacity for imagining and engaging with diverse viewpoints that is increasingly rare in the non-incarcerated world. In this sense, a liberal arts college located within a state prison would seem to have an obligation to honor that strength by engaging deeply with the notion not just of intellectual freedom, but even more fundamentally, with the notion that every human being deserves safety and dignity, no matter how radically incomprehensible, repulsive, or threatening they may appear to others. We intend to build a model for higher education that engages seriously with these questions, and that we hope will be worthy of emulation by institutions and communities far beyond the prison.

This is, finally, one of the most compelling aspects of the entire enterprise of Mount Tamalpais College. Higher education itself contains an infinite multitude of tensions, contradictions, and possibilities: it perpetuates social stratification and inequality, and yet its capacity to overcome marginalization and exclusion is unparalleled. Many of academia’s norms and conventions systematically diminish, even erase, entire communities and cultures, yet its tools and practices often possess an extraordinary capacity to elevate and protect human value. Students arrive with profound knowledge and wisdom, and they also need teachers and administrators with the commitment, expertise, and confidence to provide structure and assert standards. Expertise as a concept may contain all kinds of hubris and oblivion, and yet without it, as a society we are surely doomed.

In spite of its tremendous complexity, higher education harbors within it knowledge, resources, tools, practices, and strategies that hold the power to transform individual lives, communities, and society as a whole. Thus, we intend to critically examine, reclaim, and deploy it for the public good. Our hope is that long into the future, Mount Tamalpais College will continue to become a place where students, faculty, staff, administrators, and the community at large can encounter people and ideas from worlds away; approach complex questions with curiosity, patience, humility, mutual respect, and an appreciation for nuance; and where everyone can genuinely thrive. Even in the midst of the profound uncertainties the world currently faces, we are convinced that this work plays a part in repairing the world. We are grateful to have you, our community, along with us on this path.

With warm regards,
Jody Lewen

Fall Program Update

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Dear friends,

I hope you are all safe and as well as can be in these strange and hard times. We are still unable to run our college inside the prison, and we miss our students and regular activities tremendously. However, in the meantime we are working on a number of projects to serve our current and former students and to build our college for the future. Updates on our students and some of our projects are below.

Student News

As you’re likely aware, San Quentin was the site of a COVID-19 outbreak that infected approximately two-thirds of the prison. Twenty-six incarcerated people and one officer died in that outbreak. Two of our students were in that number.

In better news, almost 100 of our students have been released from San Quentin since March.

We’re hopeful that there won’t be a second wave of COVID-19 at the prison, but we nevertheless anticipate not being able to resume programs in the prison for some time.

Academic and Educational Programming

In the absence of normal programming, our goal is to continue to offer opportunities for students to learn, think, and engage and to build our college for the future when we can return to campus. This fall, we will be offering the option to students in three Spring 2020 courses to complete these courses remotely: US History, Ethics, and Comparative Religion. The criteria we used to determine courses that students might complete remotely were that students must be able to obtain the remaining course skills, learning, and content without feedback from instructors, by reading and writing alone, and without scaffolding, repeated lessons, or regular assessments, so it was only the three more advanced courses, in which students need less feedback and in-person attention, that qualified. Huge thanks to Ian Sethre, Bill Smoot, Benjamin Perez, and Oliver Organista for your willingness to take on this further teaching!

We are also putting together a reader to send to all students and former students inside the prison, with contributions from many of our faculty. This will be going out in early October, and includes a wide range of fiction, non-fiction, brain teasers, and other intellectually challenging and engaging texts, as well as discussion prompts for further analysis. Our goal is to provide all students with material to help them continue their intellectual growth and discovery, even in the absence of regular coursework. Thank you to everyone who contributed! We will also be sending an activity packet to students who were enrolled in the 99s in the spring.

To continue such opportunities as the pandemic extends into 2021, we’re currently exploring the feasibility of non-credit distance learning modules for Spring 2021. Like the non-credit workshops we’ve conducted in person the past, in topics such as financial accounting, public policy, and environmental justice, these units would introduce students to a discrete topic and allow them the chance to maintain their studies. While it is clear that such projects in no way replace face-to-face learning, we hope to continue to offer students projects to engage their minds and intellects.

We are mindful that our students only make up a portion of those incarcerated at the prison, and that the past six months have run the gamut of extreme stress to illness to trauma for all inside, so we’re happy to have been able to provide some resources available to all those incarcerated at San Quentin as well as to San Quentin staff. Thanks to support from colleagues at iTVS, we’ve been able to supply dozens of documentaries for everyone incarcerated at San Quentin to view on SQTV, the closed-circuit television inside the prison. We sent two sets of packets to all at San Quentin, in April and again in July, with reading material, soap, beef jerky, packets of fish, envelopes and stamps, and other essential goods. We also provided hot food and on-site showers to San Quentin staff. (For more on these efforts, see “Our COVID-19 Response Initiative for the Incarcerated Community in California”.)

An especially exciting development is the work we’ve been doing to expand student access to technology. We’re doing intensive research into options for bringing laptops into the prison for students to use for research, learning, and writing. It’s unclear yet whether there we will be able to use this initiative to develop short-term remote learning opportunities, or if we will have to wait until we can run our physical program again to make laptops available to students, but we are exploring all options, with the help of a consultant, Ethan Annis, with whom we’ve developed a comprehensive plan for our college’s technological advances. As faculty and students well know, this will mark an enormous advance, from the days of our “technology” consisting of whiteboards, DVD players, and overhead projectors, and will allow students access to a panoply of learning opportunities and advances, not to mention befitting our status as an independent college.

Finally, with the partnership and guidance of David Cowan, our Director of Operations, who is also the co-founder of the re-entry organization, Bonafide, we’re working to build out our Alumni Affairs division, to better communicate with and serve our former students. This work involves networking with and offering opportunities and resources for paroled former students, including workshops in computer literacy, workforce development, and financial literacy. Our Director of Student Affairs, David Durand, is leading this work, and we look forward to expanding it back inside the prison to students preparing for parole.

Accreditation

We are moving forward with preparatory work for our independent accreditation application, which is required to move us from Candidacy to Independent Accreditation. This work consists largely of building our capacity to assess student learning and institutional effectiveness. Huge thanks go to Theresa Roeder and Josie Innamorato, who have been leading some key math program review pieces, including a review and analysis of students’ math autobiographies, and generating a report from external reviewers on our math program, which will guide our path to improving it in the future. Last, we have contracted with and started implementing our new student information system, the software that will help us track and report on student data. Because we aren’t currently able to run classes, some data collection on current student learning is impossible, but we’re doing our best to prepare for learning assessment and for reporting on student achievement when we return to the prison, all of which will support the final goal of independent accreditation.

In a time of immense loss and change, when we miss our students and regular program tremendously, we are all working hard to maintain our contact with and support of students and to build towards an improved college. Without wanting to proclaim any positive aspect of a pandemic or wildfires, or any of the other challenges our nation and world currently face, our work gives me hope and determination to continue to move forward.

My very best wishes,
Amy