Anyone who has ever graduated from anything — high school, college, maybe even a graduate program — knows the ceremony and its rhythms: The students, in caps and gowns; the school officials welcoming everyone; handing out diplomas. At some point, a speaker congratulates the graduates but also tries to inspire them, hinting at the challenges in life that lay ahead, and how to respond in those moments.
My own graduation ceremonies came years ago. This year, I found myself in the speaker’s role. I stood in front of rows of capped and gowned students, and proud families there to support them. But I wasn’t at a college or a university. I would speak to the proud graduates of the educational programs at the State Correctional Institution Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. What could I say to inspire these students, and to help them meet challenges quite different than those of a person leaving college? What would help them find not just pride in this achievement, but the will to continue to learn and become better people, in an environment not always geared for learning?
I am not a stranger to SCI Greene. I’m a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, with 35 years of teaching behind me and eight years of law practice before that. For the past several years, I have taught special classes at the prison in which 15 law students and 15 incarcerated students become one class together for a whole semester. In our weekly sessions of “Issues in Law and Criminal Justice,” we meet inside the prison, using the Inside-Out Prison Exchange format.
These classes are like no others I have taught. We work on the material assigned, teaching and learning in dialogue with each other. The students connect with people they would never have met, and become peers — often across great social and economic divides. Every year, students tell me it is one of the most profound and deeply human experiences they have encountered.
I came to Inside-Out teaching because I felt that, for future lawyers in the era of mass incarceration, experiencing the inside of prison with people serving sentences creates a level of understanding not available in a classroom or via a one-day tour of some facility.
These sessions create moments I cannot even hope to get close to in my regular classes, because they arise from the direct experiences of the students themselves. To give just one example: It is not uncommon for students today at any university or law school to believe that the prison system should be fully abolished — eliminated completely. In one class session — the subject was “What Are Prisons For?” — several of my law students voiced that opinion to the full class during discussion. Prisons — putting human beings in cages — was just plain inhumane, the students said. These institutions had no place in a modern civilized community.
It took a bit longer for the incarcerated students to raise their hands and offer their thoughts. When they did, they surprised the law students with a very different take on the issue. They said they understood the sentiment, and they all wanted to go home tomorrow. But, they added, we on the outside really needed to understand some things about some of the people incarcerated here. There are people in here that can never get out. Never. They are violent, and they cannot live on the outside. And we have family on the outside — mothers, brothers and sisters. And we don’t want these predators outside around our families. We simply need prisons. Not as many, and not nearly as many people in them. But no prisons? No way.
This was a lesson that my students could not have fully accepted from me in a regular classroom. But coming from their incarcerated peers, in the Inside-Out classroom, it had an entirely different impact.
Some of the most talented people I have met
As the Inside-Out course ended this past spring semester, the prison school’s principal asked me to consider giving the graduation address for other prison programs. The graduates would come not from my class, but from the GED program, the Commonwealth Secondary Diploma, and the Business Education program.
Of course, I said yes. It only hit me later how different this audience would be from any other I had spoken to. There would be not just graduates and their families basking in this moment of achievement, but also prison staff. What kind of message would suit the occasion, and the people in that room?
The answer finally came to me. What would bring everyone to that graduation ceremony was learning and education. The graduating students had embraced educational opportunities. The families had supported the graduates as they worked toward their goals, encouraging them and urging them on through the difficult hours and low points, as only loved ones could do.
I began by discussing the down-and-dirty of basic education in the U.S. If a child starts life with a good basic education — competent in reading, reasonably able in high school-level math and science and history and the like — that child has a chance to become a full-fledged adult. He or she can earn a living, and participate comfortably in family, cultural and civic life.
But the sad fact is that not everyone gets the basic educational opportunities needed to become a stable adult. Despite much of the rhetoric that we hear from our political leaders about supporting families, in this society we do not make certain that all of our children get the foundational, basic education that they need to move down the path to productive adulthood. This connects directly to all of the people graduating: Nearly all of the men and women who end up incarcerated came from poor neighborhoods with very poor schools, and as a result, they received abysmal basic educations. And those people are disproportionately likely to end up in a place like this prison.
To be sure, other factors play a role: People make bad decisions, show loyalty to the wrong people for the wrong reasons, chase fast money and sometimes lack mature judgment and empathy for others. Don’t misunderstand my message: The responsibility for those actions lies with those who took them. But one commonality binds them all: a very poor education that left them unequipped for adulthood, without ways to better themselves, and often alienated from the rest of us in society.
I told the graduates that during my time teaching at SCI Greene, I noticed one thing consistently. Many of the men I have met through my classes here have been some of the most intelligent, talented and sharpest people I have come across — and I mean anywhere, not just at the prison. They are curious, motivated and hardworking, with an unmatched thirst for learning. And yet very few of them actually had a good basic education and some college-level training. Instead, most had a miserable formative education. The issue is not a lack of ability; rather, they were not given the chance to learn that the rest of us had. As adults, they had to teach themselves.
From subpar and degrading education to self-reflection
So what is the role of education at a correctional institution like SCI Greene? Why is education inside perhaps even more important than outside? I tried to explain this in three ways.
First, education can give incarcerated people the chance to learn the things they should have learned as young people on the outside. Many of those who arrive at these gates never finished K-12 schooling — in a world in which the basic qualification for employment is a college degree. Those without even a high school education are left behind, on the lowest rungs of the employment ladder —when they can get jobs at all. They lack skills in basic math, knowledge of history and social institutions, and have had few occasions to practice the ability to write anything longer than a grocery list.
Opportunities to attain a GED, to learn skills necessary for a job, to work on basic literacy, for writing and public speaking — all of this can help make up for the years of learning and teaching missed, for the subpar or degrading education that exists in the worst of our schools. This kind of basic education at any age can awaken the sleeping “learning machine” in each person. It can arouse the dormant reader and writer and leader. Basic foundational education can help get the incarcerated person ready for his or her first steps back out into the world after prison — and shame on us if we don’t remember that 95% of all incarcerated people are eventually released.
My second point begins with that statistic. Among those 95%, there is a massive problem of recidivism. Almost two-thirds of all people released are re-arrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years. Fortunately, we have evidence — lots of it — on the best way to address recidivism: education while incarcerated. This is catalogued across pages of peer-reviewed papers. I could talk for hours without repeating myself, quoting from study after meticulous study, all reaching the same conclusion: If you want people to succeed after release from prison, by far the best bet is to have them leave prison with a high school diploma, an employable skill or a college degree.
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Note what a dramatic decrease in recidivism would do. If fewer people are re-arrested and sent back to prison, there would be a smaller prison population and lower prison costs going forward. It means that, for those of us on the outside, we are less likely to be victimized by post-release crimes. We will have better, law-abiding neighbors. Formerly incarcerated people will have a better shot at supporting their families, paying taxes and becoming contributing members of their communities. It is one of the few scenarios these days that we could actually call a win for everyone.
Finally, education inside can lead to deep personal transformation. Education opens the mind to the possibility of being not a person of the street, but one of the classroom, the home, the workplace. The old saying goes that we can’t be what we don’t see. When we grow up without the broad vision that a real education provides, we lack the ability to see ourselves rising above our circumstances.
I have met men inside who have made that kind of transformation, and I know formerly incarcerated people on the outside who have been through the process. Their education inside the walls allowed them to emerge changed. They developed the ability to say to themselves that, no matter how dire the circumstances, the street life — the life of crime — is done. And they had the ability to see themselves not as criminals or inmates, but as full human beings who want to make the world better, contribute to it and bring others along with them. This kind of transformation is not easy, and not everyone can do it. But without real education, it is difficult to even know it is possible.
This is the message I tried to give the graduates, their loved ones and all of the staff members at the ceremony. But I knew I couldn’t stop there. Despite my own experiences teaching inside, I am — I can only be — a voice from the outside. And because of that, I wanted to bring them the voice of someone from the inside —from one of my former students, Tariq. Here is what he said:
This class has done so many things for me on a personal level, like being able to self-reflect and see that there’s so much more to me than a name and a number. Being able to read material, critically analyze said material and respectfully defend my point of view versus someone else’s. To debate if necessary felt normal in class … Ultimately having a feeling of self-worth … When I’m focused and I put my mind to it, I can learn and apply what I’ve learned to my life and make the necessary changes. This program has forced me to take a hard look into me, how I look at things, and to challenge them.
This is what education inside a prison can do. These are the walls and the barriers it can dissolve. This is the kind of personal growth and deep insight it can bring to people to help them change. And for those of us who teach, the privilege of helping another human being learn, and then watching as that person grows and changes and begins to flourish right before our eyes — there is simply nothing that tops that.
As I closed, I thanked everyone for the privilege they had extended me by letting me speak to them on this occasion. And I left them with one last thought. Whatever you have learned so far, I said, remember: “There is more out there. It’s waiting for you. Don’t stop educating yourself, taking advantage of all the opportunities you can find. Never stop learning. You were born to learn. That is what makes us all human.”
David Harris is is the Sally Ann Semenko Endowed Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh and can be reached at daharris@pitt.edu.
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