Welcome to “University of Sing Sing” EDUCATION IS THE KEY THAT OPENS PRISON DOORS
BY HANS B. HALLUNDBAEK
The tall, broad-shouldered man strides to the podium to receive his master’s in theology diploma, a smile stretched across his dark face. A portrait of accomplishment and self-respect, he turns to the audience gathered in the large room and slowly scans the rows of people until he focuses on a woman sitting close to the front. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to express...” he begins, his deep voice quickly trailing off into a poignant silence. Struggling to compose himself, he finally manages, “Mother, I owe this all to you! You are the one who kept blowing wind under my wings.” By now there is hardly a dry eye in the room, for while this scene would be touching under the most conventional circumstances, this graduation ceremony is taking place behind the barbed-wire-topped concrete walls of a maximum security prison.
At Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y., a prison for long-term felons, graduations such as this are an annual and joyous event. Since 1982, New York Theological Seminary (NYTS) has graduated an average of 15 men a year from its master of professional studies program at Sing Sing. As contradictory as it may sound, the seminary program has fostered an impressive crop of theologians and ministers, many of whom have left prison and proceeded to ordination and respectable positions in social institutions; some have gone on to earn their doctorate degree.
Death births new program
Ironically, it was the brutal Attica massacre, which led to the death of 43 people in 1971, that provided the impetus for the seminary program at Sing Sing. Dr. George W. Webber, president emeritus of NYTS, recalls how in the early 1980s,
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