Civic engagement doesn’t die in prison
A state bill outlines an education program for those about to be
released.
Chicago
Reader: 5.23.2019 by Christian Belanger
In
1992, Nasir Blackwell was desperate. He had been convicted of murder and
sentenced to be executed. While incarcerated in Pontiac Correctional Center, he
visited the law library—a six-by-nine-foot cell, most of its books published in
the 50s—and picked up a volume on homicide. "I began studying law. I was
studying history, and so I began studying the history of jurisprudence. I could
not believe how law was man-made," he says. "It just became a
passion. It helped me litigate on behalf of people that were incarcerated. I
was empowering voices—teaching people how to study law, [helping] if they
needed a transfer."
Blackwell's
death sentence was thrown out by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1996; he
received a 49-year prison term after his retrial. In prison, he eventually made
it to Danville Correctional Center, where there was a bigger library, and read
nearly all the books there. He also helped organize a tutoring program at
Danville that, he says, significantly improved educational participation in the
prison, whose inmate population until then had a low literacy rate. And he
formed groups with other inmates to lead conversations around masculinity,
conflict, and basic civics. "We talked about the democratic process and
government involvement. There's a lot of negative feedback [from other
prisoners] telling you the system is rigged," Blackwell says. "Once
you have the knowledge that you can speak out against an issue that affects
you, that's empowering."
Upon
his release on parole in 2015, he began organizing for the Inner-City Muslim Action Network
(IMAN). Now, Blackwell, 54, and IMAN are part of a coalition working on a new
piece of statewide legislation that would give more inmates access to the
knowledge he found so liberating. House
Bill 2541, which is due for a full vote from the state Senate later this
month, would put in place a civics education program for people who are about
to be released from prison, taught primarily by their fellow prisoners—one of
the first of its kind in the country.
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While
it's difficult to get exact data on how many formerly incarcerated people vote,
a 2009 study by political scientist Michael V. Haselswerdt
found that only about 5 percent of eligible ex-felons had voted in a 2005
election in New York, compared to 39 percent of the general population. One
reason could be that those released from prison don't know exactly how to
exercise newly restored rights.
“Preventing
someone from exercising their rights, or perpetuating a system where huge
groups of people are unaware of their rights, can in itself be a statement
about what voting rights are," says Ami Gandhi, director of voting rights
and civic empowerment at the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, one
of the organizations advocating for HB2541.
READ
MORE >>
Prison
2016: Highlights-US PIAAC Survey of
Incarcerated Adults: Their Skills, Work Experience, Education, and
Training, NCES Number:
2016040
2013: Evaluating the Effectiveness of
Correctional Education, Rand
2013: Saving Futures, Saving Dollars: The
Impact of Education on Crime Reduction and Earnings; Alliance
for Excellent Education
2011: Correctional Education, OVAE
2010: Prison Count, PEW
2009: One in 31: The Long Reach of American
Corrections, PEW
2006: Locked Up Locked Out: Educational
Perspective on US Prison Population, ETS
2003: Literacy Behind Bars, NAAL 2003
2003: Education And Correctional
Populations, BJS
1994: Literacy Behind Prison Walls, NCES
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