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HWPEP Scores a Major Grant
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Dear <<First Name>>,
Welcome to 2022. The students, faculty, and staff of the Hope-Western Prison Education Program wishes you and yours every possible blessing in the new year.
We are humbled and gratified to report that HWPEP has been awarded a significant grant from JFF/Ascendium. The two-year, $120,000 award will help us expand our capacities in anticipation of the July 2023 rollout of the Federal Pell Grant for incarcerated students. The grant will help us bring several offices at Hope College into greater knowledge and understanding of how to work with HWPEP's incarcerated students, including the development of specific, measurable indicators of program success. The award also provides funding for the development of trauma-informed approaches to teaching, learning, and formation. Portions of the grant will be used to further develop the formation program under the direction of Dr. Pam Bush. Finally, wrap-around services for students who may one day be paroled will be enhanced by the planning this grant will fund.
Special thanks are offered for the expertise of Ronald Fleischmann, Director of Hope's Office of Sponsored Research and Programs in developing the proposal that led to this grant!
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Preparing for Second Cohort
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Planning is underway for the recruiting and admission of HWPEP's second cohort of students. This is an exciting step in the program's evolution — one that signals that college–in–prison belongs at Muskegon Correctional Facility, and that Hope College and Western Theological Seminary are committed to being those colleges.
Notices will be sent to 26 prisons in the Michigan Department of Corrections system. Interested men will seek a recommendation from their warden, school principal, or chaplain. Qualified men will be invited to submit three essays describing their motivations for desiring a college education, understanding of and experience with being a servant-leader, and their views on the role civility can play in the prison context. Accepted applicants will be transferred to MCF in June and will begin their college courses in July.
Our program plan calls for cohorts of 20 students. Regrettably, COVID–imposed social distancing along with COVID–complicated prisoner transfer processes will limit the size of the second cohort to 12 students. Still, we are encouraged, for the Gospel reminds us of what 12 motivated and transformed people can do. They can change the world.
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2021 Fundraising Goals Met
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 Thank you doesn't seem adequate to express our gratitude for so many who contributed to HWPEP's fundraising goal for 2021. We — students, faculty, and staff — are so very grateful for your help in pushing our fundraising over the 2021 goal of $200,000. Our fundraising results have grown steadily as more and more people become aware of how HWPEP students are turning their lives around through the transformative power of a Christian liberal arts education. We are grateful for every gift, for each contribution is an expression of support for the idea of extending the Hope College and Western Theological Seminary missions to students living in an incarcerated state. Thank you!
Scroll to the bottom to see how your gifts are being used, and to learn more about our goal for 2022.
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Former HWPEP student Sean Sword speaks to an audience of program supporters.
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Two important audiences were recently brought into more intimate knowledge of the Hope-Western Prison Education Program. In December, friends of HWPEP Circle of Advisors member George Julius gathered at the Macatawa Bay Yacht Club to learn about HWPEP. It was a special treat to introduce them to Sean Sword. Mr. Sword was a member of HWPEP's pilot program before he transferred to the Calvin Prison Initiative at Richard Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia. He was resentenced in August and was released from prison after serving 27 years. He is now completing his Bachelor of Arts degree at Calvin University, where he serves as a student ambassador in Calvin’s TRIO Student Support Service (SSS) program.
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The Hope Academy of Senior Professionals hosted a presentation about HWPEP at its first monthly meeting of 2022. HWPEP's purposes, plans, possibilities, and progress were outlined to this interested and eager audience of approximately 125 lifelong learners.
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The Restorative Prison: Essays on Inmate Peer Ministry and Prosocial Corrections
Byron R. Johnson, Michael Hallett, and Sung Joon Jang (2022)
Drawing on work from inside some of America’s largest and toughest prisons, this book documents an alternative model of "restorative corrections" utilizing the lived experience of successful inmates, fast disrupting traditional models of correctional programming. While research documents a strong desire among those serving time in prison to redeem themselves, inmates often confront a profound lack of opportunity for achieving redemption. In a system that has become obsessively and dysfunctionally punitive, often fewer than 10% of prisoners receive any programming. Incarcerated citizens emerge from prisons in the United States to reoffend at profoundly high rates, with the majority of released prisoners ending up back in prison within five years. In this book, the authors describe a transformative agenda for incentivizing and rewarding good behavior inside prisons, rapidly proving to be a disruptive alternative to mainstream corrections and offering hope for a positive future.
The authors’ expertise on the impact of faith-based programs on recidivism reduction and prisoner reentry allows them to delve into the principles behind inmate-led religious services and other prosocial programs—to show how those incarcerated may come to consider their existence as meaningful despite their criminal past and current incarceration. Religious practice is shown to facilitate the kind of transformational "identity work" that leads to desistance that involves a change in worldview and self-concept, and which may lead a prisoner to see and interpret reality in a fundamentally different way. With participation in religion protected by the U.S. Constitution, these model programs are helping prison administrators weather financial challenges while also helping make prisons less punitive, more transparent, and emotionally restorative.
This book is essential reading for scholars of corrections, offender reentry, community corrections, and religion and crime, as well as professionals and volunteers involved in correctional counseling and prison ministry.
(Source: Routledge)
If you know of a book that you think others committed to the prison education project might find helpful, please send us your suggestions.
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In a Missouri courtroom in 2008, Stanley Andrisse realized that he wasn’t seen as human. The case being fought that day centered around a drug trafficking charge—Andrisse’s third felony conviction. Not long ago, he was a college student churning through sweat-soaked undergraduate years funded by a football scholarship at Lindenwood University. Now, he was facing a bifurcated future, one path leading to a burgeoning career and the other stopping at gray, cinder block walls.
Sitting in the courtroom, Andrisse knew that he had chosen to break the law, but it felt like the road from middle school detention to prison had been paved for him—and the other kids, mostly Black and working class, who regularly appeared in those places—long before he sold drugs. When he heard the punishment he could potentially face, he was shocked: 20 years to life.
Now an endocrinologist scientist and assistant professor of physiology at Howard University, Andrisse is part of a growing number of academics and activists who are fighting barriers that prevent formerly incarcerated people from entering the sciences. That work requires dismantling forces that tell students that they’re not cut out for science, bolstering STEM education within prisons and eliminating embedded racial biases, and removing obstacles that block students from continuing their education after incarceration.
Interested? Read the entire story here>>
(Source: Christina Couch, April 19, 2021 for NOVA NEXT)
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Please consider a gift to support our work.
The Hope-Western Prison Education Program's fundraising goal for 2022 is $200,000. Gifts made this year will be matched up to $100,000. All gifts help offset costs for professor and teaching assistant stipends, travel to and from Muskegon Correctional Facility, textbook and computer purchases, school supplies, and student and staff orientation. Can you help?
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Help us spread the good news of the Hope-Western Prison Education Program by forwarding this to a friend. Thank you.
Our mailing address is:
prisonprogram@hope.edu
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