The Freedom to Learn

by Jeff Mortimer

“There was no place to hide in this class,” says Robin Lucy. “You had to do your work and people would notice if you didn’t.”

There was no place to hide because Lucy, an associate professor of English, taught the Winter 2013 course she refers to inside the walls of Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, a prison in Pittsfield Township that houses all of the state of Michigan’s roughly 2,000 female prisoners.

Entitled “Narratives of Imprisonment and Liberation,” the class was comprised of 15 Eastern students and 15 inmates, following the model of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which has trained 374 college instructors in 37 states—as well as Canada, Australia, Denmark and the United Kingdom—in techniques for succeeding in a teaching environment unlike any other.

Lucy’s class was the fourth taught by Eastern instructors at Women’s Huron Valley. Eastern faculty have taught classes at the prison on a volunteer basis since 2006, but the Inside-Out courses, first offered in Fall 2011, are regular parts of the curriculum for which outside students receive credit and instructors are paid.

Perhaps “regular” isn’t entirely accurate. According to Lori Pompa, Inside- Out’s founder and director, the unique environment is what makes the program such a transformative experience for its participants.

“The crux of the whole thing for me is that what we do in that classroom is create an environment within which people feel really free,” says Pompa, who has taught criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia since 1992. “That could happen anywhere, but it is that much more compelling when it happens in the context of a prison, the antithesis of everything else that’s happening in the prison. By dint of people being together, and the focus being off of the instructor and onto the learning community, we build community in that room. Not that we ever had a caring community as a goal; we didn’t think all this through ahead of time, just created a class and started to see over time what was happening.”

"What happens, says Jessica Kilbourn, “is life-changing, for both inside and outside students and for the instructor. There’s something that is reached that you didn’t know was there.” Kilbourn and Kathryn Ziegler, lecturers in women’s and gender studies, co-taught Eastern’s first Inside-Out class, “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality.”

“Even in my own life, I don’t take my freedom for granted anymore,” Kilbourn adds. “That completely has shifted who I am and how I live my life.”

“We never cease to be amazed that it takes so much time for us to get in there and there are so many air locks,” says Ziegler. “The control the women are under, every minute of the day, resonates with us. My mission in teaching is to recognize their humanity, to foster the women’s ambition to be the productive citizens and good parents that they want to be, that they know they can be if given the chance. They’re so hungry to succeed and be good at something they can call their own.”

Much of the learning that takes place is, literally, extra-curricular. For a few precious hours, the incarcerated women are free to speak their minds, be themselves, and show what they’re capable of. Conversely, the outside students have to stay, uncharacteristically, put. It seems to be a singularly powerful form of role reversal. “

When inside and outside students are together, they learn from each other in ways that are really hard to explain,” says Lucy. “The inside students learn that they won’t be judged only by why they’re in prison, that they’re as capable as college students, that they have knowledge to offer the outside students. I think the outside students had to be at the top of their game to do well in the class because the inside students set the bar for them and they rose to the occasion. And everyone in the class learned how education is deeply integrated with how you live your life.”

Lucy points to Toni Morrison’s novel “Mercy,” one of the texts in her course, as a good example.

“There’s a scene in the novel where women traveling from England to Virginia, all European women but from all different classes, have this tea party in the hold of the ship,” she says, “and a number of inside students say that’s what it’s like in prison: you have to develop relationships and friendships that you never would imagine you would have to create for yourself. That opened up the book for the other students in class. I’ve taught Mercy to undergrad and graduate students and it’s not an easy book, but they found their way into it.”

“What I tell my students is this is going to be a transformative experience for you,” says Lora Lempert, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan- Dearborn, which also offers classes at Women’s Huron Valley, and Inside-Out’s state coordinator. “I can’t tell you the direction of the transformation but I guarantee you’ll be transformed. Partly it’s the creation of community because we’re in this bounded space. Students from the outside usually take classes and never talk to anyone else in the class. Here, they’re required to interact, so they bond.”

Lempert and Lucy met one evening when they were both ushering at an Ann Arbor Summer Festival concert. It was truly an “aha” moment. After they discovered their shared interest and experiences in teaching the incarcerated, the two joined forces to make Inside-Out a reality at their respective institutions.

“Lora has been the driving force behind everything that’s happened with teaching in women’s prisons in the state,” Lucy says. “It hasn’t been easy at times to convince people of why these are significant programs, why incarcerated people deserve the opportunity of education. But once people get on board, they really get on board, and Eastern’s been very supportive.”

The impetus for what became Inside- Out came from inmates themselves. Pompa had been teaching sessions of her classes inside correctional facilities for several years when a prisoner at one of them suggested she do it for an entire semester, and include students from the inside. Two years later, in 1997, she did just that, expanding the program in 2002 to Graterford, a state prison west of Philadelphia where, unknown to her, the man who gave her the idea had been transferred.

“This man has been involved with this program all the way through and still is,” she says. But it was the first inside student group at Graterford that inspired her to take it to the next level.

“Our very first class there was so on fire about the issues that we decided to stay together,” Pompa says. “That group has been meeting voluntarily once a week ever since, and it was that group that said this is too good to keep it just at Temple University; you should make it a national program. So we did.”

The original focus, not surprisingly, was on criminal justice courses, but the menu now includes instruction in a wide variety of disciplines. So far, Eastern’s Inside-Out courses have been limited to the Women’s and Gender Studies and English departments, although the program has, equally not surprisingly, attracted its share of students intrigued by the criminal justice field.

“We get a set of criminology students, we often get students who have friends or family who are incarcerated somewhere, and we occasionally get students who were incarcerated themselves,” says Elizabeth Currans, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies, who will teach Eastern’s next Inside-Out course this fall. “I think there are also people who are just curious.”

She says she was motivated to join the program because “I think that we really forget and write off the people who are incarcerated in this country. Even if all these people should be in prison—and I’m not a judge, I don’t know—they’re still people. We need to provide them some opportunities so that when they re-enter our society, they’re likely to contribute in ways that will help them as well as us.”

For Lucy, the Inside-Out experience was a refresher course in the rewards of her profession. “It reminds me why we teach,” she says, “because the inside students are careful readers, they speak their mind in a good way, and they want to know how to use their education to see another life and make sense of their own. Sometimes you forget how much is going on in your students’ heads, how much they’re struggling working with the material. For whatever reason, these kinds of classroom settings bring that to the fore; people are consciously and actively talking about what they’re learning, and that’s a real gift to me as a teacher.”

There was a gift for the outside students, too. “I told them our subject of study was not the inside students themselves, but as citizens we needed to develop knowledge about prisons, the justice system, our society as a whole,” she says. “What came out of that is that many of our students really thought about what it means to be free. Are we sometimes in prison in our regular worlds?"