Bard Prison Initiative Debate Team Beat Harvard in 2015

Originally published 2015-10-08.

A Prison Debate Team's 2015 Win Against Harvard Students

Carl Snyder of the Bard Prison Initiative debate team speaking during the September 2015 debate against the Harvard College Debating Union. Photo: Peter Foley for The Wall Street Journal.

On Friday 18 September 2015, a debate team of incarcerated students from the Bard Prison Initiative beat a team from the Harvard College Debating Union. The contest took place inside the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Napanoch, New York, and a panel of three judges ruled in the prison team's favour. The BPI debaters had prepared without internet access, and they won while arguing a position they personally rejected.

The result made headlines around the world, partly because it was surprising and partly because of what it suggested about education behind bars. Here is what actually happened, who took part, and what the programme behind the team does.

The debate in brief

The motion was: "Public schools in the United States should have the ability to deny enrollment to undocumented students." In competitive debate, sides are assigned, not chosen. The BPI team drew the proposition, so it had to argue in favour, even though its members disagreed with the idea.

Rather than defend exclusion outright, the team built a narrower case. It argued that many undocumented children end up in badly under-resourced "dropout factory" schools that simply hold them rather than teach them, and that if those schools could turn students away, nonprofits and better-funded schools could step in and do more for them. According to the judges, Harvard never fully answered that line of argument.

The debate lasted about an hour. Roughly 75 fellow BPI students watched from the audience and cheered when the decision was announced.

Who was on the teams

The prison team came from the BPI Debate Union. Members named in coverage of the event include Carlos Polanco, 31, from Queens; Alex Hall, 31, from Manhattan; Carl Snyder; and Dyjuan Tatro. Polanco and Hall were both serving sentences for manslaughter. Some early viral versions of the story described Polanco as a convicted murderer, but Bard's own report gives manslaughter.

The Harvard side was three undergraduates from the Harvard College Debating Union, one of the best-known university debating clubs in the United States. The judging panel was led by Mary Nugent, an experienced debate judge.

After the result, the reactions were generous on both sides. Anais Carell, a Harvard junior on the losing team, admitted, "They caught us off guard." Nugent praised the prison team's work, saying "Their academic ability is impressive," and adding a simple reminder that "We're all human."

Preparing without the internet

Modern debaters lean heavily on online research. Inside a maximum-security prison that is not an option. BPI students cannot use the internet, and requests for books and articles have to be approved by prison administrators, which can take weeks. Researching a topic means planning far ahead, sharing printed materials, and leaning on whatever is in the prison's education library.

Team members described the gap honestly. Hall said they might not be as naturally gifted at rhetoric as their opponents, but that they worked very hard. Polanco spoke about what the programme meant to him, saying that the people around him made the students believe in themselves.

Not a one-off win

The Harvard victory was not the team's first. The BPI Debate Union was founded in 2013 and made its debut in spring 2014 against the US Military Academy at West Point, winning that contest. It then beat a nationally ranked team from the University of Vermont, and lost a rematch with West Point in April 2015. By 2023 the team's record stood at 12 wins and 4 losses.

That history matters because it shows the result was not luck. The students were well coached, practised regularly and treated debate the way serious university teams do.

What the Bard Prison Initiative is

The Bard Prison Initiative is run by Bard College, a liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. It grew out of a project by Bard undergraduates in 1999 and started teaching in 2001 with a pilot group of 16 students. Today it works in seven New York prisons with roughly 400 students enrolled full time, and it has awarded more than 760 degrees.

Admission is competitive. In 2015 there were about ten applicants for every open place, and students were selected through essays and interviews. Tuition is free for students; at the time of the debate the programme's annual budget of around $2.5 million came from private donors. The courses carry the same academic expectations as those on Bard's main campus, and BPI also helps other colleges set up similar programmes in other states.

The programme reached a wider audience in 2019 with College Behind Bars, a four-part documentary directed by Lynn Novick and executive produced by Ken Burns, which followed BPI students through their studies.

Why prison education matters

The strongest argument for programmes like BPI is what happens after release. Bard reported in 2015 that fewer than 2% of its graduates who had earned degrees in custody returned to prison within three years. The comparable figure for New York State as a whole was about 40%, much of it due to parole violations. BPI's students are selected, so the comparison is not a controlled experiment, but the gap is large enough that policymakers have taken notice.

The wider policy context has also shifted. In 1994 the US Congress barred people in prison from receiving federal Pell Grants, which had paid for many prison college programmes, and most of those programmes closed. Programmes like BPI survived on private money. Congress lifted the ban in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, and incarcerated students have regained access to Pell funding in the years since.

A single debate does not prove that one group of people is smarter than another, and it was never meant to. What it showed is narrower and more useful: given rigorous teaching, time and high expectations, people serving long sentences can do work that stands up against students from one of the world's most selective universities.

Watch: criminal justice reform discussed

The debate also fed into a broader conversation about criminal justice reform. The progressive news show Ring of Fire discussed the result in a video commentary that also looks at wrongful convictions: