Kathy Boudin - Prison

Prison

Boudin was incarcerated in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York where she worked with AIDS patients and in adult education. While there, she had a central role in creating five formal programs:

• the Teen Program, supporting teens and pre-teens whose mothers are incarcerated, strengthening the mother-child bond during their separation, and helping the teens become positive, healthy, young adults;
• the Parent Education Program, helping inmate mothers to learn to be responsible parents to pre-school, grade school and teenage children while separated by prison;
• the Adult Literacy Program, which used an innovative curriculum that Boudin wrote, was an outgrowth of the work she did for her Masters Degree in Adult Education, earned while at Bedford Hills;
• the AIDS and Women’s Health Program is the first peer community health program devoted to AIDS among prisoners; and
• the College Program, which provided courses and degrees to incarcerated women. Boudin helped organize a consortium of private colleges to offer this program after New York State cut all public funding for higher education in prisons.

While incarcerated, Boudin published articles in the Harvard Educational Review ("Participatory Literacy Education Behind Bars: AIDS Opens the Door," Summer 1993, 63(2)), in Breaking the Rules: Women in Prison and Feminist Therapy by Judy Harden and Marcia Hill ("Lessons from a Mother's Program in Prison: A Psychosocial Approach Supports Women and Their Children," published simultaneously in Women and Therapy, 21), and in Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum-Security Prison.

She co-authored The Foster Care Handbook for Incarcerated Parents published by Bedford Hills in 1993. She co-edited Parenting from inside/out: Voices of mothers in prison, jointly published by correctional institutions and the Osborne Foundation.

Boudin also wrote and published poetry while incarcerated, publishing in books and journals including the PEN Center Prize Anthology Doing Time, Concrete Garden 4, and Aliens at the Border. She won an International PEN prize for her poetry in 1999.

Boudin continued to pursue her education as a doctoral student at the City University of New York (CUNY), which included participation in the CUNY Graduate Center research team that produced the study Changing Minds: The Impact of College in a Maximum-Security Prison.

Boudin and Gilbert's son Chesa Boudin was adopted by former Weatherman leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.