Mourning Our Losses is a crowd-sourced memorial to honor the lives of people who died in prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. We remember the lives of people who died from exposure to abominable public health conditions, as residents and as employees. Mourning Our Losses seeks to restore dignity to the faces and stories behind the statistics of death and illness from behind bars. We believe that a loss of any human life warrants mourning. We are united in our effort to honor our fallen brothers and sisters by telling their stories. We offer a platform for grief, healing, community, and reflection for all those touched by this preventable tragedy.
Our host Reginald Dwayne Betts chops it up with Jason Reynolds, a beloved author of young adult fiction and poetry. Jason has won all the prizes that dope writers get, including the Kirkus Prize and the Coretta Scott King Honor. In the inaugural episode of The Freedom Takes, Dwayne and Jason discuss their common roots in PG County, Maryland; the importance of literature in the lives of young people; and Jason’s book Long Way Down, of which the Million Book Project has sent 900 copies to readers in juvenile detention centers across the country.
Seats at the Table is the film portrait of Andrew Kaufman’s University of Virginia Books Behind Bars class which brings together university students with residents of a juvenile correctional center through the study of Russian literature.
Mississippi Freedom Winter addresses the humanitarian crisis occurring throughout Mississippi's prisons and immigrant detention centers. Their Study and Struggle program is the first phase of an ongoing project to organize against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi through four months of political education and community building.
The Alliance is excited to announce a new partnership with Richard Milner, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Education and Founding Director of the Initiative for Race Research and Justice at Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Higher Education in Prison Initiative to produce an Opportunity-Centered, Anti-Racist Teaching Guide specific to in-prison teaching. The guide will be organized around a series of interrelated competencies (e.g., mentoring, academic and social support, tutoring, learning theory and trauma-informed pedagogy and building responsive and relevant student learning assessment). Once produced, the guide will be made widely available for the higher education in prison community.
The Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project newsletter, The Warbler, is available to anyone interested in being on their weekly distribution list.
The Alliance's COVID-19 Action page contains materials and resources created by/for or that are meaningful for higher education in prison programs from across the United States.
Higheredinprison.org now features a Community Events Calendar. Look for events from the Alliance for Higher Education and events hosted by the higher education in prison community.
