BY HAROLD G BAILEY
Observer writer

NEW YORK, United States — A programme under which inmates in Jamaica’s correctional facilities will have access to university level education is closer to reality, its organisers said.

Representatives of the Prison to College Pipeline project plan to visit Jamaica next month to advance talks with The University of the West Indies, Mona, the Department of Correctional Services and other stakeholders on setting up the programme.

New York-based Devon Simmons, an early beneficiary of the programme will be among the visitors.

Dr Baz Dreisinger, an English a professor of english at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and founding academic director of Prison to College Pipeline, said the project was designed to help people who have been incarcerated to reintegrate into society.

Dreisinger first announced the programme was headed for Jamaica a year ago at a briefing at the United States Embassy. But a lack of funding appeared to have delayed its establishment. The professor, however, has remained undaunted.

“This programme aims to break the stigma that those who have been incarcerated are vastly different from us,” she emphasised in a telephone interview from South Africa where she is on a Fulbright scholarship to establish the project there.

Dreisinger said that talks were well underway with Jamaican stakeholders. A fund-raising programme was also launched here to secure US$100,000 to finance start-up of the Jamaica project.

The programme will offer courses at the higher education level as well as re-entry planning for incarcerated people. While details on how the courses will be administered are still being fine-tuned, it is expected that professors will visit the institutions to deliver their lectures, said Coral Crew-Noble, project co-ordinator for the programme in Jamaica.

Author of the book i ncarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, Dreisinger said the programme which had its genesis in New York seven years ago would be replicated across the Caribbean and the United Kingdom.

“The wider and ultimate aim is to establish a road map on how Prison to College Pipeline and restorative justice can replace mass incarceration as a system of justice,” she told the Jamaica Observer.