Chillon Project

On January 28, 2019, eleven studentsincarcerated at Arrendale State Prison, a maximum security prison in Alto, GA, graduated with their Associate of Arts degree in Positive Human Development and Social Change from Life University.  The students earned an average cumulative GPA of 3.9 and will go on to complete the Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology starting in January 2020. Their graduation reflects an ongoing shift in the landscape of higher education in prison in Georgia. This is the first class of students in a Georgia state women’s prison to graduate from an accredited college degree program since 1994, when Pell Grants were banned for incarcerated people as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of that year; it is only the second class to graduate with a degree in any prison in the state in that time.

The last forty years have seen a dramatic increase in rates of incarceration in the United States. We now incarcerate approximately 2.3 million people, while 7 million are under some form of correctional control. Even our least punitive individual states have higher per capita rates of incarceration than authoritarian nations around the world. As a means of promoting public safety, mass incarceration has been a failure. Crime has decreased dramatically since the 1990s, but rising rates of incarceration played only a small role in this decrease and came with severe costs: mass incarceration has meant separating people from their families while exposing them to violence and trauma at extraordinarily high rates; it has had a ripple effect on friends, neighbors, families, and children of incarcerated people; and all of these effects have been concentrated among communities who already face systemic inequality and exclusion. Mass incarceration is fueled by and implicated in racial and economic injustice—if, at the individual level, it promotes widespread trauma, at the social level it is one of the most powerful existing engines of white supremacy.

The Chillon Project is an undertaking of the Center for Compassion, Integrity, and Secular Ethics at Life University to address this crisis by expanding access to higher education for the people whom it affects the most—incarcerated people, correctional staff, and returning citizens—in the state of Georgia. The initiative takes its name from the poem by Lord Byron entitled “The Prisoner of Chillon.” Life University’s founder and first president, Dr. Sid Williams, used to recite passages of this poem to draw attention to how environments influence our lives. He noted Byron’s key message: “So much a long communion tends to make us what we are.” The question before us at Life University became, “Could we address the crisis of mass incarceration by transforming the ‘communion’ of those at the center of it all?”

A growing body of evidence-based research has shown that providing higher education in prison contributes to the well-being of incarcerated people, their children, and their communities inside and outside of prison. College degree programs have been shown to have the greatest impact of any educational programs on recidivism, the rate at which people released from prison return to prison. Our program is not primarily motivated by reducing costs or rates of recidivism, however. We believe that all people should have access to opportunities that enable them to fulfill their human potential and benefit others. We also believe that if we wish to end the crisis of mass incarceration, we must empower the people whose lives it affects the most directly to be leaders, teachers, and healers. We have already seen students take what they learn about childhood development, for example, about trauma’s effects on the body and mind, or about conflict transformation, and share it with other dorm- and bunkmates, staff, and their families.

Life University provides an Associate of Arts degree in Positive Human Development and Social Change and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Lee Arrendale State Prison, a maximum security women’s facility in Alto, Georgia. The coursework for these degree programs is also offered at the main campus and includes core liberal arts classes—math, biology, and english composition, for example—alongside courses such as Creativity and the Arts, Conflict Transformation, Critical Social Analysis, Environmental and Secular Ethics, and Peace Studies. The curriculum focuses on developing social entrepreneurs and transformative leaders, with an understanding that leaders need tools of critical social analysis, social skills, and the practice of cultivating inner values. Extensive research has shown that ethical and emotional values can be taught as skills and can enhance other aspects of leadership, including conflict resolution and communication, that we emphasize in the program.

For more information about Chillon, visit www.compassion.life.edu. You can also email questions about Chillon directly to Thomas Fabisiak at Thomas.Fabisiak@LIFE.edu.

• Arrendale State Prison is designated by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) as a site of Life University. The AA in PHDSC and BS in Psychology are accredited degrees equal in rigor and content to those offered on the main campus of Life University.
• Life has enrolled two cohorts of incarcerated students since 2016, with thirty total students enrolled since then.
• Over half of our students at Arrendale State Prison (56%) are mothers, with a total of 46 children.
• Starting in 2019, Life University will begin offering upper division coursework leading to a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Arrendale State Prison. The students who have completed the AA in PHDSC will continue on to their Bachelor’s degree.
• In addition to traditional core classes in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, students take classes in the AA in PHDSC take Conflict Transformation; Positive Business; Spirituality, Integrity, and Transformational Leadership; and Ethical and Moral Reasoning, among other courses.
• Students have written business proposals for social enterprises, competed in Lincoln-Douglas style debates, created educational modules in social and emotional learning for K-12 students, written sociological literature reviews, and composed grant proposals.
• All of our students also complete Compassionate Integrity Training (CIT), a multi-part training program that cultivates basic human values as skills. Students have the option to go on to be trained as facilitators in this program so that they can share what they have learned with others in their incarcerated setting as well as with their families.
• An on-going study of the program found that students scored higher than a control group in a control group in measures of personal, social, and emotional well-being. Results showed a significant positive impact on participants’ resilience, overall mental health, and ability to manage emotions, for example, while participants experienced lower levels of depression, anger, and anxiety; students also reported improved relationships with correctional staff and children, better ability to handle conflict, and improved outlooks on their future.
• Tuition, books, and supply costs are waived for all incarcerated students.
• In the last two years, Chillon has provided full scholarships and enrolled six correctional officers and other staff people from Arrendale in degree programs at Life University’s main campus in Marietta, GA.
• Students at Arrendale who are released before finishing their degree can also continue at the main campus; currently, two students who began the program at Arrendale are finishing their AAs in PHDSC outside of the prison.
• Our program is funded by Life University, private donations, and a grant from the Laughing Gull Foundation (laughinggull.org)who have been transforming the landscape of higher education in prison in the south through their support of these programs.

Chillon is part of a new coalition of a growing number of programs in Georgia dedicated to empowering incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in the state to pursue higher education. The coalition also includes the following programs that provide higher education in Georgia State Prisons:

Reforming Arts (www.reformingarts.org)

 The Certificate in Theological Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology (candler.emory.edu/programs-resources/institutes-initiatives/certificate-in-theological.studies.html)

Common Good Atlanta (www.commongoodatlanta.com)

 The Georgia State University Prison Education Project (perimeter.gsu.edu/gsupep/)

For questions about joining or supporting GCHEP or Chillon, please email Thomas.Fabisiak@LIFE.edu