Simone Bishara remembers the day she went to prison and watched as the eyes of one of “the guys,” as she calls the inmates, welled up with tears.
A senior in sociology, Ms. Bishara is one of 100 or so students at Pitzer College who have chosen to take classes with students who are in jail. The program offers an equal number of “insiders” and “outsiders” — 12 from each group — the chance to study together in such courses as “Prison Autobiography,” “Latino Politics,” and “Linguistic Discrimination.”
By getting two distinctly different groups sharing their experiences beyond campus gates and prison walls, Pitzer aims to improve students’ understanding of others, as well as to sharpen their political and social thinking.
“We’ve been so scared of appearing partisan or political that we’re really not educating for democracy,” says Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, at Tufts University. Colleges are trying to change that, honing students’ political and rhetorical reasoning, and broadening their experiences beyond the campus gates.
“The crux of the program isn’t necessarily to go to prison to talk with the guys, but to talk with people you otherwise wouldn’t,” Ms. Bishara says. The two courses she has taken within prison walls, “Politics of the Middle East” and “Critical Community Studies,” have become highlights of her undergraduate experience. “It’s important to give prisoners an idea of what’s on the outside,” she says, “just as it’s important for us to realize what they have gone through. There’s a vulnerability, an openness that comes from the discussions we have there.”
The prison program at Pitzer, a 1,000-student liberal-arts school in Claremont, Calif., is offered to students at all of the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five liberal-arts colleges and two graduate schools that comprises 7,700 students.
Pitzer has offered three courses a year since forming the program in 2014, says Tessa Hicks Peterson, assistant vice president for community engagement. It is modeled on the Inside-Out Prison Education Program, founded in 1997 by Lori Pompa, a criminal-justice professor at Temple University. More than 100 colleges or universities now take part, though Pitzer is one of very few to offer credit for its prison-based courses, Ms. Peterson says.
The two-hour classes, given one day a week, are included in Pitzer’s catalog. Because of the courses’ popularity, many students who sign up land on a wait list. Those who do get in are interviewed beforehand by an instructor, who advises them not to make friends with people inside, become pen pals with them, or do them any favors. “We can’t even offer them a stick of gum,” Ms. Bishara says.
The majority of the students are women, and they are expected to follow a dress code — no tight jeans or tops.
Once briefed, they are shuttled 35 minutes or more to the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security prison in nearby Norco. Students offer up their driver’s license or passport number to enter the prison. They go through a quick security check and then are handed whistles to blow if they encounter trouble. But, says Ms. Bishara, “I’ve never even had anything close to a reason to use the whistle, and I’ve never heard of anyone else needing it, either.”
With traffic, the round-trip experience might take four hours.
“It’s quite a commitment,” says Ms. Peterson. “Students have to be really serious about doing this.”
“They have to understand that they’re making a semester-long commitment to being uncomfortable,” says Ms. Bishara. “It isn’t easy.”
The sessions are often held in windowless classrooms that resemble metal shipping containers and are either too cold or too hot, she says. Students arrange their cramped desk chairs into a circle — seeing one another is paramount.
Conversations can be uncomfortable, and there are regular points of friction. Many prisoners are more conservative than students from the colleges, Ms. Peterson says. Male-female tension can also arise. To get insiders and outsiders more comfortable with each other, instructors hold “icebreaker” conversations before plunging into each course’s subject.
“Prisoners might be worried about being judged by smart kids. So we work early on in classes to break down those assumptions,” says Ms. Peterson, who also teaches a course called “Healing Arts and Social Change” at the prison.
Inmate students, all of whom are required to be college students in good standing, get several benefits for participating. Pitzer does not charge them for the course. And a California prison program rewards them for academic success by cutting time from their sentences.
But there’s more to it than that, says Ms. Peterson.
“Insiders get to be refreshed through dialogue,” she says. “They get a sense of connection, a rare chance to feel like and be seen as a human being who has ideas.”
Along with the line of students waiting for spots in the program, Pitzer instructors, too, are queuing up.
“They say these are the best classes they teach. They’re champing at the bit,” says Nigel Boyle, dean of faculty. Besides the opportunity to experience the unique classroom dynamic created by prisoners and campus students, instructors enjoy having students’ full attention. No cellphones, tablets, or laptops are allowed into the prison, limiting the number of distractions. And the presence of prisoners can make students from the outside more responsible.
“They don’t get much sympathy from insiders if they’re not prepared for class,” Mr. Boyle says.
Such courses attract more and more faculty members over time because they help them develop fresh ways of teaching, he adds. “These are innovative, sophisticated courses we’re constructing. That’s the benefit for us. We’re not there to save souls.”
Pitzer plans to increase its course offerings to eight per year starting in 2018-19. Mr. Boyle says the college is developing prison-centered classes at the community-college level and intends to expand into a local women’s prison soon.
In addition to getting students thinking about the school-to-prison pipeline, in a region of California where the number of prisoners equals the population of college students, Pitzer wants its students to broaden their political horizons and apply that knowledge to their lives.
Ms. Bishara says the experience has “changed how I see my future. I’d like to be a lawyer who focuses on prison abolition or criminal-justice reform.”
The prison student who almost cried was comfortable enough to share his feelings with the class because he felt understood, she recalls. “He wasn’t aware that there are people out in the world who cared about what prisoners go through,” she says. “He felt there was something on the outside he could be a part of. His reaction reaffirmed for me that vulnerability and empathy exist in every corner of the world, including the really dark ones.”
