The founder of Mount Tamalpais College — an accredited school that provides classes to incarcerated people at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center — received a prestigious national award last week for her work in the prison.
Jody Lewen was one of three recipients of the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, given by the McGraw Family Foundation and University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Lewen and the other two winners will each receive an award of $50,000 and an awards sculpture and will be celebrated at a ceremony in November.
Lewen received the Higher Education Prize for her work in prisons over the past two decades, starting as a volunteer at San Quentin in 1999 and eventually taking a leadership role with its college program. She founded the Prison University Project in the early 2000s and for years it operated at San Quentin as an extension site of Oakland-based Patten University.
In 2020, the program changed its name to Mount Tamalpais College and in 2022 was granted accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, making it the first independent liberal arts school dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students, with nearly 4,000 students at San Quentin having taken at least one course.
Lewen, whose work has received many awards including the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2016, said she was pleased with the latest honor and recognition of the school, which does not charge tuition and is entirely privately funded.
“What’s particularly special is that it’s for higher education specifically. It expresses a true recognition of the field of higher education in prison as fully a part of higher education,” she said.
San Quentin, the oldest prison in California, is undergoing changes, including the shuttering of its death row, the recent renaming from San Quentin State Prison to San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and the demolition last month of a former warehouse to build a new education facility.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for the overhaul of San Quentin to serve as an example of what his office calls a new “California model” of overseeing state prisons.
In a press release about the demolition of the former warehouse, Newsom’s office said the California model “improves public safety by breaking cycles of crime for the incarcerated population while improving workplace conditions for institution staff through rehabilitation, education, and restorative justice.”
Our hope is that going forward the state will invest equally significant resources in staff training, technology, information management systems, and improving critically failing infrastructure across the whole prison.
Jody Lewen, founder of mount tamalpais college
Lewen said “we’re hopeful but we’re waiting” about the changes at San Quentin.
“I would say that the jury is still out,” she said. “So far the state has only invested massive resources in the demolition and construction of a new building. They haven’t invested yet in the infrastructure that will be required to support high-functioning programs and a healthy living and working environment for everyone there.”
She said, “At this time, it’s really only the incarcerated people and individual prison staff and administrators who are trying to implement significant changes on the ground. Our hope is that going forward the state will invest equally significant resources in staff training, technology, information management systems, and improving critically failing infrastructure across the whole prison.”
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