Bonds Through the Bars
Freshmen and Inmates Learn Together Through Innovative College Course
“Zach*, you look upset. What’s the matter?” I asked one of my students recently.
“I’m just so f-in angry at myself, that’s all!” he responded. “Here I am, at the front of the room, with all these privileges, and look, I’ve got seven more years to go for something I shouldn’t have done in the first place!”
Zach is one of my First Year Seminar (FYS) students who attends college classes at Greene Correctional Facility, a medium security facility in Catskill, N.Y. I teach at Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y., and the very same seminar I teach to freshmen there, I also teach at Greene. This relationship is made possible through Hudson Link, a non-profit organization that pairs colleges and universities with correctional facilities to provide higher education behind bars. Education behind bars, as any one of my students will tell you, is transformative. It provides hope for a better future and is a known antidote to recidivism.
Back to Zach. For the first time this year, I am teaching parallel, year-long FYS courses on both Siena’s Loudonville and Greene campuses. Siena was founded by Franciscan friars, and the Franciscan mission permeates life at the college. FYS demands that professors inculcate the Franciscan values of heritage, natural world, diversity, and social justice in our students through the lens of our specialty. In my case, that is criminal justice, and so my students study these values through readings and workshops related to incarceration of some kind, be it physical or mental.
Zach had just participated in a “privilege walk” activity that I do every year with my traditional college students during our diversity unit, to explore stigmas and the tensions between classes in society. Because this is the first year I have taught a joint course with Loudonville and Greene students, it was also the first time I had done the privilege walk with students behind bars.
The privilege walk starts with students standing in a horizontal line across the room. As statements are read about their socio-economic backgrounds, students take a step forward or back, as instructed. For example: “Take one step forward if you are male…if you are white…if you are over 6 feet tall…. if you are a heterosexual…if you went to private school growing up…if you never had to worry if there would be food on the table when you were a kid….if the history of ‘your people’ was taught to you in grade school…if there were people in your family who told you that you could be whatever you wanted to be,” and so on.
On the other hand, students must take one step back “if you grew up in a household where English was not the first language…if you were raised in a one-parent household…if you were ever on food stamps…if one or both of your parents did not attend college….if one or both of your parents ever lost their job, not by choice…if there were fewer than 50 books in your home when you were growing up…if you were ever ashamed of your home or clothes…if you have ever been a victim of violence,” etc.
At the end of the 20-minute exercise, most of my Loudonville students are against the front wall. Those farther back need to be reassured that their position was through no fault of their own. In fact, on their own steam, and despite those odds, they ended up in the same room, at the same college with students who had every conceivable privilege in life. It is always a revelation to those who had at first felt spurned by the activity, and, frankly, life.
But on the Greene campus, it was a much different scene. Not so much because of where the men ended up throughout the room, but because of the reaction to where they ended up. In truth, most of the students at Greene were somewhere in the middle of the room, with a few against the front and a few against the back walls. But this time, although we did have to reassure one student who ended up at the back wall, angry that he’d been “robbed,” most of the reassuring we had to do was focused on the pain of those against the front wall, as Zach so beautifully, passionately illustrated.
I wish we’d had it on tape. It would have astonished those who group prisoners into the category of “irredeemable” or sadly even “trash.” As my Loudonville students now well know, these men are anything but that.
Of course, I couldn’t preserve the moment on tape because there are no cell phones allowed in prison. In fact, there are no computers to teach with, to show short illustrative clips or outlines of lesson plans. So while I attempt to teach identical classes on both campuses, I am required to do some adapting. For instance, my Loudonville campus students are currently involved in semester-long research projects, but the Greene students don’t begin to have the facilities to engage in such research. So we are debating weighty issues that arise in the news and in our texts, instead. And, where the Loudonville students have studied prison poetry, the Greene students have crafted it. But when at all possible, identical texts are read, discussed and analyzed in writing. Then names are taken off of papers to protect the identities of both sets of students and papers are peer reviewed by students at the opposite campuses.
At the time that I conceived doing this with my students, I never imagined what a profound impact this peer review process would have on all of them. I had modestly assumed that the traditional students might be surprised at the depth of the writing of the student inmates, and amazed at their intelligence. What I hadn’t counted on was that these students would quickly understand that the men behind bars are just ordinary people who love Chinese food, the color purple, hip hop and, most of all, their children. They are men who speak of regret, remorse, paths not taken, of missing family and freedom. They are men who have been through traumatic childhoods too horrific to repeat here, and who are locked up for something they did on their worst days. They are men with unbelievable senses of humor, who are witty and creative, humble and, yes, kind.
The Loudonville campus students, at first surprised by the concept of communicating with prisoners, have completely risen to the occasion. They have accepted these men for whom they are; they have heard and absorbed their stories and have given consistently mature feedback. The Greene students were also astonished at what the Loudonville students’ papers revealed. They learned that a number of the traditional students grew up on food stamps, in single-parent families (in one or two cases, because a parent had died right in front of them) and even, with a parent behind bars. They delighted in knowing that many of the Loudonville students had to work to help pay for college, loved hip hop, dogs, Chinese food, and their families.
This course has far surpassed any expectations I had for it when I began to plot it in my head. From the time I applied to law school, I knew that I wanted to somehow use my law degree for the purpose of educating others. Teaching criminal justice, alternatives to incarceration and reentry courses at Siena, along with legal rights courses for high school students has certainly fulfilled that personal goal. But this FYS class, where I get to fuse the lives of 13 men behind bars (ranging from ages 19 to nearly 60) with 38 students, ages 18 and 19 who have their freedom, and who are ostensibly a world away, has been nothing short of winning the lottery.
During the spring semester, the Loudonville campus students traveled to meet the Greene students for the first time, face to face. At Greene, with correctional officers all around, they viewed a film about Hudson Link and the mission of bringing college educations to those incarcerated. Then we opened up the floor to discussion. While I have been lucky enough to have brought former FYS classes into Greene to participate in this very format of a field trip, the two groups never had any prior acquaintance with each other, and indeed, I had no familiarity with the Greene students until this year, save one or two whom I’d taught at a former facility. It was a uniquely moving and valuable experience.
In prison, there is raw talent and intellect. The men I am lucky enough to teach are eager students, hungry to learn and achieve, who know that there is a waiting list of men behind them, should they choose not to follow the rules required of them. My oldest Greene student told me that, prior to my class, he hadn’t been in a classroom in over 30 years. His first two papers were terribly rough, but now, after just a semester and a half of consistent writing assignments, he is one of my most consistently compelling writers. It turns out he was merely rusty. His writing, like that of so many of the men behind bars, is intensely profound, drawing on a breadth of experience far beyond the capacity of an 18-year old. He and his classmates have stunned my Loudonville campus students. Together, the two sets of students have bridged a gap of generations and cultures, races and realities. And I don’t think, at this point, that either group would consider turning back.
*Not his real name
Annie Rody-Wright, Esq
Prof. Rody-Wright, a lawyer, has been teaching at Siena College since 2009. She was the Legal Director of the Center for Law & Justice, a non-profit organization in Albany, for 16 years. She has taught in prison and regularly provides “Street Smart” (legal rights) workshops to hundreds of high school students in the Capital Region each year. In 2013, the New York State Bar Association published her legal rights text book for high school students. She is involved in regional and statewide juvenile justice and reentry advocacy.
