Mandela’s ethos motivated the organizers behind the Mandela Day launch of South Africa’s Prison to College Pipeline program. The program aims to highlight Mandela’s “legacy of education behind bars in South Africa,” Dreisinger said. It also facilitate inmates’ reentry into society and helps build better relationships with communities suffering from high crime rates.
Dreisinger, who launched a pilot prison-to-college program in the U.S. in collaboration with the New York State Department of Corrections and The City University of New York, said they had near immediate buy-in from university partners but faced obstacles in broader support for the program in South Africa.
“Given crime is a real crisis here, there isn’t an empathy to the incarcerated population as a whole … so you’re battling against that climate,” she said.
The celebratory tone of Mandela’s centennial belies a grave reality: South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime. The cape region, home to Brandvlei prison, has the highest murder rate in South Africa. Communities here are ravaged by intergenerational cycles of gang violence.
Dreisinger insists that giving inmates a second chance at freedom and what is often a first chance to become educated helps break this cycle for entire communities.
Makaluza — who grew up in an informal settlement or “township,” and lost his father at age 6 — said young people facing his circumstances have “zero options.” Without a high school education, he had turned to crime before the age of 13 to support his family, kicking off what felt like a hopeless cycle of jail time.
“I saw the same faces released … and then back in prison with me,” he said.
Dreisinger works with community-based partners to raise awareness of that reality. “It’s not just about sympathy or empathy,” she said, “it’s about giving people opportunity, which … creates public safety.”
Her work in South Africa has striking parallels to her work in the American prison system.
“All of these students [enrolled in the Prison-to-College Pipeline program] are direct products of years of apartheid and rampant inequality in terms of class and race. Cape Town is still a vastly segregated, unequal place,” Dreisinger said. “The ‘colored’ population is among the most incarcerated population in the world per capita.”
More than 97 percent of the prison population in South Africa at the end of 2016 was listed as black or colored, according to Africa Check, a nonprofit fact-checking organization.
“In my 13 years [in prison], I noticed the prison population is mostly black people, and what we have in common is that we’re uneducated,” he said. “Those with education were out there living their lives and uneducated people from disadvantaged backgrounds were busy filling up prisons.”
Data supports the link between education and staying out of prison: According to one study, incarcerated people who enroll in education programs are 43 percent less likely to go back to prison than those who do not have access to education.
Few know that connection better than the Prison-to-College Pipeline program’s global ambassador for higher education, Devon Simmons.