Prisoners in maximum security prison win debate against Harvard students

Peter Holley writes in the Washington Post,

Last month, a debate team of three inmates with violent criminal records defeated a team of three Harvard University undergraduates.



It sounds like an underdog story plucked from the pages of a yet unwritten Walt Disney screenplay — and in some ways, it is.

But it’s also worth pointing out the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a matchup — the first (and most pernicious) being that criminals aren’t smart. If a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it.

...The debate took place last month at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison about an hour southwest of Bard College. The hosts beat a Harvard team that had won three of four American Parliamentary Debate Association national championships.

To prepare for the competition, the inmates, members of Bard’s Prison Initiative, were forced to acquire knowledge the old-fashioned way: Without access to the Internet, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2015, can you seriously imagine preparing for anything — purchasing a movie ticket, looking up directions or researching basically anything — without going online?

Complicating their challenge, the Journal noted, was the fact that research requests for books and articles had to be approved by the prison administration, something that could take weeks.

Read more here.