Presentations, discussions, and a little friendly competition took place on Cabrini Day, Nov. 10, 2015.
The annual event celebrates Cabrini’s heritage and is used as a platform to raise awareness around a timely social issue: This year, the social issue was mass incarceration.
Morning activities included a quiz game show and student presentations about a social justice issue, during which students competed for first and second place in order to secure a donation to a charity of their choosing. The individual students and teams who won were announced during the keynote presentation in the afternoon.
Students in the ECG 100 course, Our Interconnected World, taught by Jerry Zurek, Ph.D., earned first prize ($100) for a group presentation with a simulation about climate change; it was the third year in a row that Zurek’s class had won.
Sophomores Lisette Hrapmann ’18 and Chelsea Jones ’18 won first prize for an individual presentation on “Sustainable Farming and Education for Low-Security Inmates in the Philadelphia County Prison.”
Second-place winner for an individual presentation was Dan Gentilucci ’17, Kaitlyn McCollum ’17, and Nicole Procknow ’17, who presented on the “Prisoners of Guantanamo Bay,” and second place winner for a group presentation was the Bridges to Swaziland Club, who presented “Bringing Down Prison Walls in Swaziland.”
Executive Director of the Sentencing Project Marc Mauer delivered a keynote address to a full house in Grace Hall Atrium. He discussed the racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system and the ever-increasing prison population in the U.S.
“There are seven times as many people in prison today as there were four decades ago … but since 1980, the increase has been due to changes in policy, not changes in crime rate,” he said.
Mauer has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years and is the author of some of the most widely cited reports and publications in the field. After so many years working toward improving criminal justice policy, he now believes that reform is within reach.
“I don’t think we’ve seen this much momentum before,” he said.
“We have a window of opportunity. What can we do to strengthen communities through services and support, and reduce the violence that might be coming? Our job is to create a community where we can say that everyone’s children are our children.”
After Mauer’s talk, students participated in a Walk/Run for Social Change, and then attended two panel discussions in the evening—“The School to Prison Pipeline: The Effect of Criminal Justice Policies on our Children’s Education” and “Collateral Damage: Unforeseen Consequences of Imprisonment in America.”
Cabrini Day was organized by Assistant Professor of Sociology Andrew Owen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Criminology Katie Farina, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor of Criminology Vivian Smith, Ph.D.
Owen and Smith taught an ECG 300 course at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility last spring as part of the inside-out program, which allows students to learn side-by-side with inmates.
“We know that mass incarceration is a huge problem in this country, so we felt that this was an issue that we wanted to share with the community,” Owen said in a Loquiturarticle.
More than 450 students attended Cabrini Day events, which were offered in lieu of classes.