Education Behind the Wall

Why and How We Teach College in Prison

Mneesha Gellman, Mneesha Gellman

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781684581078
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An edited volume reflecting on different aspects of teaching in prison and different points of view.

This book seeks to address some of the major issues faced by faculty who are teaching college classes for incarcerated students. Composed of a series of case studies meant to showcase the strengths and challenges of teaching a range of different disciplines in prison, this volume brings together scholars who articulate some of the best practices for teaching their expertise inside alongside honest reflections on the reality of educational implementation in a constrained environment. The book not only provides essential guidance for faculty interested in developing their own courses to teach in prisons, but also places the work of higher education in prisons in philosophical context with regards to racial, economic, social, and gender-based issues. Rather than solely a how-to handbook, this volume also helps readers think through the trade-offs that happen when teaching inside, and about how to ensure the full integrity of college access for incarcerated students.

Part I

Why We Teach

1

Teaching Literature Inside: The Poet’s Report

KIMBERLY MCLARIN & WENDY W. WALTERS

Something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make.

—James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”

We are two literature and writing professors who believe in the power of literature to offer joy, unsettling provocation, radical rethinking, empathy, and even social change. In other words, we believe in the poet’s report. Both in our teaching for Emerson College in Boston and in the Emerson Prison Initiative at MCI-Concord, we often face students who distrust poetry, students who question the merits of studying literature. Who can blame them? Students look at the world they are seeking to enter and see economic instability, widening inequality, racial injustice, and the existential crisis of climate change. Students in Boston want to know that their education will enable them to land a job, secure a career, and build a livable future. Incarcerated students want exactly the same thing, only more so. They want a straight path to freedom, independence, and stability. Literature can seem like a diversion from those goals. In 1968, the poet Nikki Giovanni wrote,

maybe i shouldn’t write

at all

but clean my gun

and check my kerosene supply

perhaps these are not poetic

times

at all

(“For Saundra”)

But of course it is a poem that reports this powerful sentiment; it is through poetry that Giovanni reports about these incendiary times. The primary challenge of teaching literature to incarcerated students is the same as the primary challenge of teaching it anywhere in America: conveying to students the lifesaving, society-changing value of the poet’s report.

Most American students enter college adequately (if unenthusiastically) familiar with metaphor and simile, with imagery and foreshadowing and point of view. They are vaguely aware of theme, have a modest grip on allegory, can sometimes recognize an archetype. They might identify literature when they see it in the way a teetotaler can identify a bar or an atheist a church: from the outside.

“It’s hard to be engaged and attentive when you don’t care about the material,” wrote a campus-based student on a mid-semester evaluation one year. “None of this has anything to do with my career.”

“This is about our lives,” said an incarcerated student on the first day of class. “We don’t have time to waste on fluff.”

In our teaching of literature, we don’t want to waste our time on fluff either, and we view literature as speaking urgent messages to those willing to listen. Our hope is to invite students to both hear this urgency and take pleasure in the languages of its call. The literature classes we teach on both campuses are part of a four-year liberal arts BA, which means that our Concord students are able to make connections in their learning, across both space and time. In their readings they see colonial histories played out in different eras and locations, they hear the echoes of liberatory philosophies and strategies from one century to the next, they recognize the political tactics of social movements with varying goals and strategies, and their conversations reflect this critical thinking.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE

KIM: The first time I stepped inside a prison I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, a reporter for the New York Times. I had been sent from New York to Chicago to interview an avowed White supremacist, a man who had tracked down, shot, and killed a plastic surgeon whose name he found in the phone book. The reason: to stop the doctor from shaping the faces of non-White people to look whiter. (Why my editor thought this story needed to be amplified I had no idea.) All that I remember about the Cook County Jail was that it was massive and maze-like and confusing, and that after only twenty minutes (the man refused, at the last minute, to meet with me; I later interviewed him by phone) I was so desperate to leave I climbed into my rental car afterward and cried in relief.

The next time I stepped inside a prison it was to visit my nephew. The state was Missouri, the month was May, and the flowering dogwoods had already lost their blooms. I have written about my nephew elsewhere and will not revisit it here other than to say leaving a prison knowing someone you love remains locked inside is a surreal experience.

The next time I stepped inside a prison it was at the invitation of the African Heritage Coalition at the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. I was there to attend a Kwanzaa celebration, and arrived to find myself one of several special guests, the others being a robed Catholic priest, a suited minister, and a woman who turned out to be the prison’s volunteer of the year. The program began with “Lift Every Voice and Sing” played by a very tight band. Afterward an invocation, candles lit (with matches from a corrections officer) and water poured out for the ancestors. A musical interlude: two men rapped and a third sang. Next a speech by the prison superintendent, a small, White woman (this surprised me) who wandered the stage like Oprah, microphone in hand as she preached the gospel of forgiveness and nonviolence: “We want you to get out. We don’t want to see you back here.”

When it was over, a few of the men shook my hand and thanked me for coming. One man lingered; speaking softly, he told me he was being released in the coming weeks and asked if he might come visit me at work. When I reminded him that this was against the rules, he backed off immediately, apologizing. Turning to leave, he asked a question. It was a question I would hear again when I visited another support group in another prison and again when I first taught inside:

“What do people on the outside think about us? Do they think we’re all monsters? That we are all beyond repair?”

What does it mean to be human? Most people never stop to wonder, not even those of us whose humanity has been cynically (and profitably) questioned for four hundred years. Who has time for philosophical musings when the boss needs supplicating and the rent needs paying and the laundry needs doing and the children need feeding and the car must have a brake job?

WENDY: Teaching in prison breaks down any false barrier between “outside” and “inside” of mass incarceration in this country. The prison draws you toward it. Because of the advance planning required by Department of Correction (DOC) regulations, teachers work on our courses, on every assignment, book, film, and literal piece of paper, often a year in advance of the course start date. Planning to teach in prison reorients your thoughts, pulling you closer and closer toward the prison well before you enter its doors. Preparing the course materials becomes an all-consuming drive and quickly starts to feel like the only thing worth doing.

Once you finally meet the students and begin to work together with them, reading and talking, you can never not think of your freedom and their confinement. In the classroom, you are together working and thinking. At 3:45, when they gather their books and head out and they turn toward the right and the cellblocks and you turn toward the left and the gates, you know that the fiction that creates your freedom is as light as the story that justifies their confinement. But lest you forget, the razor wire gleams in the sun above your head as you exit through the gate.

Maybe that evening you are standing in your kitchen trying to decide what to make for dinner. Did that question ever feel like a burden? Because now it will never be anything but a radical privilege. Getting to know people who have such limits on their freedom throws a stark light on the most mundane elements of a life “outside.”

Talking about books and ideas with the students means that the students never leave your mind. Sunday night, when you are reading for class in a small room by a light, you wonder whether your students have a space in their cell to sit that does not hurt their back, and whether the light is bright enough for them to read, or whether it is quiet. You can never take freedom for granted once you get to know people who are confined. You are only outside in a provisional sense, connected emotionally to people inside, drawn back toward the prison, waiting for each Thursday to come, to go back inside, to pass through the wall.

---

These sliding Steel Doors that take you from nowhere to nowhere; these shadowed and inhuman corridors.

—Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, quoted in Averbach 2016, 113

“On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted,” writes Angela Davis in Are Prisons Obsolete? “It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives” (Davis 2003, 15).

Indeed, the prison can only exist because people do not think about it. It is only possible to incarcerate over two million people in this country because most people never have to think about that fact. Does thinking about it make it any less possible? Does getting to know twenty people, learning about forty more people, all working to create opportunities for themselves, for the people they mentor inside, the family members they nourish outside, the communities they all support, somehow lead to abolition?

We aim to create in our prison classrooms an insubordinate space that gives intellectual agency to our students so that they may take the tools offered them by a liberal arts education and use them as they need to. This classroom space is in direct contrast to the goal of the prison, which is ultimately to dehumanize: the disconnection from family and community; the loss of control and agency; the violence and tedium and isolation and everyday chaos (Metcalf 2018) all conspire to separate a person from their personhood. Prison days are neither shapeless nor empty (Metcalf 2018), but prison time is always dehumanizing time. The incarcerated person who does not wrestle, in some way, shape, or form, with the question of what it means to be human is the person potentially lost. (The same can be said for those of us on the outside, but that’s another essay.) But as with the system of slavery, this institutional goal of dehumanization is never complete. Humans can never be fully separated from their personhood. Literature offers both a response to the question of what it means to be human and a Baldwinian report on the very society that would dehumanize such vast numbers of its population.

The acts of teaching and learning, both within a small liberal arts college and in a state prison, exist within institutional contexts. Stacy Bell McQuaide uses the term “industry,” not “institution,” as a way to call attention to what is being made inside these spaces. She delineates the privilege industry from the punishment industry, stating,

When I refer to the privilege-industry classroom, I imagine a four-year liberal arts or pre-professional program, public or private, where the majority of students have matriculated within a year or two after high school. I do not suggest that all students enrolled in such programs are equally privileged. Rather, I argue that the goals of the curriculum and the instruction that takes place are designed to propel students towards privilege. . . . The prison classroom is situated within the punishment industry, which discourages agency and critical reflection. Prisoners are not expected to lead; they are expected to obey. (McQuaide 2019, 102)

Yet each of these systemic characterizations is also challenged by rebellious teaching, learning, and activism both inside the prison and on the college campus. Students in Boston learn to analyze and interrogate the very forms of power and privilege that created their pathways to college. Students in Concord challenge the carceral system’s discouragement of agency and expectations of obedience, defining themselves as incarcerated people, not prisoners, acting as leaders in their communities both inside the prison’s walls and extending outside into their larger family and community networks.

At the same time, the phrases “punishment industry” and “privilege industry” remind us that these structures make things; they are industries that produce subjects. On the Boston campus, this structure produces students who conceive of themselves as consumers, paying a very high price for an education that they view as a product, as they are encouraged to think of it in all of the ways they are hailed as purchasing subjects by this “privilege industry.” This particular generation of students also comes to college expecting and feeling that they deserve to be loved. When they do not experience love from the institution, which can never, and was not designed ever, to love them, they invest their idealistic energies in trying to change the institution itself, aware and knowledgeable of its deep imbrication in larger structures, and yet buoyed by their convictions that the structures themselves must change.

In contrast, students at MCI-Concord are pursuing an education inside the most repressive institution in the world, the American prison system, the totalizing manifestation of “the punishment industry.” Beyond the specific physical institution itself, their lives prior to it and surrounding it are often marked by myriad forms of structural violence that inflict quite different degrees of trauma than those experienced by a college student on the Boston campus. Incarcerated students make no appeal to the prison to love them. They have never been taught to expect love from either the prison or the society that created the prison. They even extend this skepticism to the institution of the College itself, and toward the liberal arts. No, they do not expect the College to love them, and they are sometimes even doubtful it will be of use to them. Nevertheless, they come to class with joy and an almost boisterous enthusiasm. They infuse the classroom space with their energy for questioning, reading, arguing, and thinking together as a learning community.

How is it that this energy is so much more prevalent in the most unfree space? Perhaps it is the neoliberal model of education itself that has already conscribed and delimited the possible joy that Boston students can feel in a classroom. Thus we suggest that it is not the Boston model of education that should guide our teaching in Concord, but rather the reverse. We should learn from the lessons our Concord students teach us about education and share these strategies and tactics with our Boston students. How can we and all our students learn to take the tools of this temporary refuge we cocreate in a classroom and use them to escape from the institutions that would conscribe the liberatory potential of that joy? As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney note, “It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can” (2013, 26).

Concord students do not conceive of their education as a product, but rather a pathway. As teachers, our job must be to make that path work as best for them as it can. We must bend our pedagogy toward their path. The program directors emphasize the need for the “inside” curriculum to maintain the same high standards as the “outside” curriculum. But we can also resist allowing the neoliberal market logic of the expensive private liberal arts college to determine the possibilities of a liberatory education. Students at Concord know what they want to learn. While we are not under any illusions about the ability of college in prison to actually dismantle the prison–industrial complex (PIC), we do believe in the agency and intellectual creativity of incarcerated students. We aim to work together with them to create spaces within the institution where their own intellectual goals can be met.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

For nearly two decades we have been talking together about African American literature and our teaching. We believe in the transformative power of literature to tell complex stories. African American literature is the story of people of African descent in the United States of America. It is a powerful story, a story of slavery and resistance and freedom, a story of oppression and refusal and demand. It is a story of love and anger and family and individuals, a story of despair and determination and will. African American literature is a story of a people as told not by those who enslaved and oppressed them, not by those who sought to justify those sins, and not even by those who sometimes took their side, but by the people themselves. As David Walker wrote in 1829, refuting Thomas Jefferson:

For let no one of us suppose that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough—they are whites—we are blacks. We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks themselves, according to their chance; for we must remember that what the whites have written respecting this subject, is other men’s labours, and did not emanate from the blacks . . . I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them. (Walker 1829, 17–18)

More critically, the story of African Americans is n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bringing College to Prison
• Part I: Why We Teach
• Part II: How We Teach
• Part III: Who We Teach
• Afterword: Reflections on Bringing College to Prison
• Appendix: Resources for Further Exploration on Incarceration
• Contributors
• Index