At a dinner party honoring a member of the Romanian armed forces who had recently graduated from West Point, our esteemed guest politely asked me what I did for a living. He seemed shocked when I told him, “I teach college courses to prison inmates.”
“Why would you do something like that?” he asked.
Why? Because of the three significant factors in reducing recidivism, education is the one that we can really do something about. The other two are age (people over 40 are far less likely to commit another crime that lands them in prison) and a spiritual program of some kind. It’s the trifecta of education, maturity, and introspection that is truly effective in changing these men’s lives for the better.
It took me a moment to realize that our European friend comes from a culture where only the hardest, meanest, most dangerous criminals are in prison. Romania has an incarceration rate of 152 people per 100,000, as opposed to our U.S. rate of 716, and crime rates in both countries, including violent crime, are about the same. In fact, crime rates in the United States have been going down steadily for the past 20 years, and, as Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt noted in their 2005 book, Freakonomics, that’s not due to the overwhelming increase in incarceration; it’s simply a function of changing demographics.
Our prison population is bloated: In the prison where I taught for four years, in Walla Walla, Wash., we would have to remove all but 400 of the 2,200 inmates to get down to the same per capita incarceration rate as Romania. So really, we should be educating most, if not all, of our incarcerated population. Of the 2,200 inmates, only about 200 are now enrolled in college-level courses. Lack of motivation is a big factor in the low enrollment rates, as is funding.
It is against the law in the State of Washington to use state money to pay for any kind of higher education for inmates. The courses I’ve taught inside were financed by a grant from the Sunshine Lady Foundation. Ari Kohn, of the Post-Prison Education Project (which boasts a recidivism rate of less than 2 percent), told me that when the state passed legislation forbidding the use of public funds for any kind of higher education within the walls of state prisons, a lone inmate somehow dug up an address for Warren Buffett and sent him a letter asking for money to support the defunct education program. Buffett’s staff vetted the letter and sent it onward to their boss, who then sent it to his sister’s foundation, and so once again we have education programs inside the walls. For those of us teaching there, the benefits are obvious and significant. As are the challenges.
Plenty of time to study, right? A group of us teachers at the prison sat listening to a lecture on emotional intelligence, taught by an East Coast professor with a Ph.D. in psychology. She gave an example to illustrate a point: A young woman was too distressed to attend class. It turned out she had broken a fingernail and her debutante ball was that evening, and she did not feel she had time to both get her nail fixed and attend class. The instructor telling us this story recognized her own lack of empathy and used her subsequent understanding as an example of emotional intelligence. Meanwhile, we were sitting in the back of the room shaking our heads.
Upper-class problems are significantly different from ours. Our students fight for inexplicable reasons, and we sometimes take sick leave to deal with collateral inhalation of OC overspray: oleoresin capsicum, a potent version of pepper spray. We are sometimes escorted from our classrooms by shotgun-armed guards wearing flak jackets to protect us from rioters. Students simply disappear from our attendance rosters—transferred to another facility, solitary confinement, or the hospital. Or they have committed suicide.
And yet I learned something from that professor’s lecture. I was assigning tons of homework for my students because I figured they had tons of time. After that lecture, I developed this nagging feeling that I was not fully understanding the situation in the prison cells, and although I still have not gone there (and don’t intend to), I have realized that what they face in their “dorm rooms” is cacophony. Very little table space, if any. Fifteen loud radios echoing off the enclosed walls. Iron doors crashing. Yelling. Occasional fights. And those who do try to sit and work are often scorned and mocked by the majority of the population.
So we, as teachers within the walls, have been forced to adopt a “flipped” classroom of sorts. I’ve discovered a few fairly effective ways, in this extreme environment, to engage my students more fully in the learning process, and to use project-based learning to keep the students engrossed and engaged.
Flipping the prison classroom. The classic flipped classroom includes self-study or recorded lectures viewed on students’ own time, with group projects, homework, and one-on-one contact within the classroom. Inside the prison, we don’t actually flip the classroom like that. We can’t. Inside their cells, students don’t have access to the kind of online instruction that we’d like them to have.
However, since we teach in three-hour blocks (inmate movements occur between meal times and are highly structured) it works well to run classes as a combination of lecture and lab—some instruction and then some hands-on, project-based work. Good teachers eventually find their own point of equilibrium, balancing technology with traditional teaching.
Adjusting content delivery to fit the circumstances, using some imagination, experimenting a bit, and brainstorming with other teachers and trainers—all of those things can help shake the classroom out of the chalkboard lectures that we grew up on and into the 21st century. Our students want to be engaged. We owe it to them, and to ourselves, to find every way we can to engage them.
Most of the students on the college’s North Campus, where I teach, earned GEDs inside. A lot of my students get into the education program simply to get out of their cells for a while, to alleviate the boredom and stress of being cooped up all day. Many of them struggle with things we take for granted—reading, adding and subtracting fractions, creating a coherent sentence. As a result, there are a lot of disengaged students in my classrooms. Even so, most of them will catch the learning bug if they are given the chance.
One of my students asked me to put in a good word for his “cellie,” who had spent the first 20 years of his sentence doing nothing, and who now, with eight years left to go, had begun to regret wasting all that time not taking classes. Before he gets out, he wants to complete his associate degree. That takes a lot longer than two years when you can take only one class a semester, if there is even one available (funding remains a big problem). I see some of my students, guys who several years ago struggled through basic math, now tutoring other guys and sitting outside the Fafsa office, two deep, waiting to apply to a university when they get out.
Sometimes people ask me what makes a difference in reaching these students. How do we get them engaged? What is the secret?
The secret is there is no secret. Only diligence and patience, and for us to be engaged ourselves. That’s the most important teaching technique.
When I run seminars for teachers on the issue of engagement, I often do a brainstorming session called “pitch madness,” in which participants write a blurb on a large sticky note. They stand up and blurt out their favorite teaching tools—the ones that have worked really well in engaging their students. We compile a big list of ideas, and then participants get to select one that they can incorporate into their own teaching. Some of the recurrent ideas include: games, games, and more games; documentaries; role-playing; projects (small and large); practicums; case studies; and real-life (relevant) applications.
Project-based learning works here, too. Project-based learning comes up again and again as one of the most effective teaching techniques. Project-based learning is about relevance. We love learning things that have meaning in our lives. As a professional musician, I’ll study a guitar riff for hours until I master it. But in taking music lessons as a kid, I hated the tedium of scales that were out of context and seemed useless in real life.
In a July 23 article in The New York Times, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?,” Elizabeth Green noted, “By focusing only on procedures—‘Draw a division house, put “242" on the inside and “16" on the outside, etc.’—and not on what the procedures mean, … math [turns] into a sort of arbitrary process wholly divorced from the real world of numbers. Students learn not math but, in the words of one math educator, answer-getting.”
In our bookkeeping curriculum at the prison, we use a project called Holiday Gift Shop. Students receive a stack of business receipts, checks written, memos, sales orders, invoices, purchase orders, shipping documents, and inventory records. From that paperwork they reproduce a year’s worth of financial records for a fictional business owner who needs to file a tax return. The project resembles a real-life scenario, toned down but still reflective of what students would face as bookkeepers, and they love it. They can’t wait to get their hands on the work, to solve it like a puzzle.
Finding your own way. Along with writing, teaching inside the walls is the most challenging and rewarding career I have ever had. We have very little technology. No web access. Tattered, outdated textbooks. And, well, we’re in a prison.
However, what we lack in resources we make up for in resourcefulness and commitment. We have to find the best ways to teach and nurture engaged learners. We find ways to use flipped classrooms and project-based teaching in order to make education both fun and effective, even in the toughest circumstances.
Even without hard statistical evidence, we have stacks of empirical evidence inside the walls that support what teachers around the country are promoting on college campuses as the best modern teaching practices. Seek out these great ideas, find the ones that work for you, and make them your own.
Joe Cooke is leaving behind prison teaching to take a tenure-track job in accounting this fall at Walla Walla Community College. He is the author of Inside Job, a memoir about his four years spent teaching inside the walls of the Washington State Penitentiary.
