Elena Bilheimer, EcoNews Journalist
Project Rebound, a program created to empower formerly incarcerated students, is now in the midst of its second year at Cal Poly Humboldt. Cal Poly Humboldt is the newest school in the Project Rebound consortium, which consists of 14 California State Universities. Over the course of the past year and a half, the organizers and coordinators of the Cal Poly Humboldt Project Rebound program have been working tirelessly to provide support for formerly incarcerated students wanting to obtain an education. While supporting formerly incarcerated students has not been a major concern of the mainstream environmental movement so far, the prison industrial complex contributes to environmental degradation in countless ways. Creating space for formerly incarcerated students to thrive in higher education is important for helping tackle many of the environmental justice concerns associated with prisons.
The Project Rebound consortium was started by a man named John Irwin who, after serving a five-year prison term, earned his Ph.D. from University of California Berkeley and went on to become a Professor of Sociology and Criminology at San Francisco State University. The program has had huge success since its inception in 1967. Since 2016, Project Rebound students system-wide have a zero percent recidivism rate, meaning that none of the students in the program have gone back to prison. This is because Project Rebound’s efforts extend beyond educational support to provide resources and community from those who have inside experience. “If you don’t get your basic necessities and resources, you are more likely going to keep being involved in a system,” said Tony Wallin, the Program Coordinator for Cal Poly Humboldt Project Rebound.
The program at Cal Poly Humboldt was co-founded by Wallin when he was a student and unable to find the resources he needed. He got his start by creating the first Formerly Incarcerated Students Club (FISC) on campus. After a year of raising awareness about the club, he met Franklin Porter, a political science major who helped build the club’s resources so that it could be accepted as part of the Project Rebound consortium in the fall of 2020. Kory Lamberts, the former Correspondence Specialist for Project Rebound, began working with the program when he was trying to find his place on campus and within the environmental studies major. Through Project Rebound, he was able to locate a community that looked and talked more like he did while also allowing him to explore the ways in which the environmental movement often fails to address the social and environmental justice consequences of prisons.
Lamberts has focused a lot of his work around prison ecology, which deals specifically with the relationship between mass incarceration and the environment. Because the country’s incarceration rate has increased around 500 percent over the past four decades, there has been a massive push to build prisons in environmentally compromised areas. Although prison developers often market prisons as job creators, the towns around them usually end up more environmentally and economically degraded after their construction. Considering that people of color are disproportionately represented in prisons, mass incarceration is also deeply connected to systemic racism and the ways in which these institutions have been used to maintain social inequality.
“In so many ways the prison industrial complex is a negative externality for the environment,” Lamberts said. “Not to mention the freeways going through inner cities, increasing the rates of asthma for children in inner cities, which then increases the rates of truancy, which then is directly linked to the rates of arrests. So everything about the prison industrial complex is an environmental justice crisis.”
Prioritizing the knowledge of those experiencing oppression is a central tenet of environmental justice, which focuses on how identity affects the way environmental benefits and burdens are distributed. These environmental burdens have historically been unequally distributed onto marginalized communities, including those in prisons. In order to break this cycle, the voices of those who have been negatively impacted need to be centered in environmental activism work. “When we look at education and who holds knowledge from a decolonized perspective, it’s apparent that the people who are closest to the systemic issues are the experts,” said Lamberts. Later on in the interview he stated, “I think that getting people who are currently incarcerated back into society, integrated properly back into society and given positions of power within institutions like universities, city council, and those types of roles, we’re going to start to see serious change. Because then you’ll have people that have been affected by the system in a serious way, and have a passion for people.”
In order to ensure that those with carceral experience gain an education and a platform in order to make change, Project Rebound will continue to be a robust builder for community reentry while also working to build a bachelor’s program for Pelican Bay State Prison. If you are a student at Cal Poly Humboldt and would like to become involved with this work, FISC is the ideal space for someone who wants to be an ally and advocate for prison justice. While you do not have to be formerly incarcerated to be a member of FISC, Project Rebound is reserved for those who have been incarcerated or who have been directly impacted by the carceral system to ensure that the community is always served. If you are not a student, Wallin suggests having conversations about these issues with your community or with people with opposing points of view. Project Rebound hosts a number of events throughout the semester where it brings in guests and creates panels of experts in order to help educate the community.
“What this program does is, you know, really shouts no, you have a seat at the table, you belong here,” said Wallin. “That’s what’s really important to me, a shared sense of community. I think so long as we operate in the shadows, society places this really overhanging shame for those of us who have had any kind of system involvement. When a lot of times it’s due to society not creating opportunities, and instead setting us up for failure. And this program really is a beacon of hope.”