Editor’s note: The following article is the first part of a two-part commentary on the Inside-Out prison education program. The second part will run on Friday.
“Hope no one’s wearing blue,” one of my fellow “outside” students said as we pulled into the parking lot of Oregon State Prison for the first time. Because the “inside” students’ prison uniforms consisted of denim jeans and a blue button-up shirt, we, the outside students, were not allowed to wear any sort of blue clothing. In fact, we were not allowed to wear a lot of things – jewelry, tight clothes, open-toed shoes, hoodies, pocketed jackets, skirts or under-wire bras. Needless to say, it seemed highly unlikely that my literature class will be taking home any fashion awards this term.
The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, in which the University participated this term, was envisioned by Paul, an inmate in the Pennsylvania Prison System, and first instituted at Temple University. The nation-wide program allows college students and incarcerated men and women to study as peers in a seminar behind prison walls. Since its inception in 1997, most Inside-Out courses have focused on criminal justice. University Professor Steve Shankman’s Honors College literature course is one of the first humanities courses offered through the program and focuses on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s psychological thriller, Crime and Punishment. Oregon State Penitentiary, UO’s partner in the exchange, is the oldest prison and only maximum security institution in the state currently in operation.
Upon entering OSP’s visitor lobby for our first class, each of us presented the security guard with a photo ID. One by one, in alphabetical order, we walked through a metal detector far more sensitive than the ones you walk through at the Portland Airport, placing our belongings – consisting of a pen, a notebook and maybe a belt or a hair clip – in a basket on the side.
After passing the first security test, half of our class entered a small room where we signed in, smiling at the stoic guard stationed behind tinted, bullet-proof glass who exchanged our photo IDs for numbered visitors’ passes. While we signed in, a large gate with thick metal bars separated the first half of our group from the second, echoing loudly as it slid horizontally and locked in place. For me, it was reminiscent of the gates I saw two summers ago while on a tour through Alcatraz. Surreal, I thought, that I was no longer a spectator staring wide-eyed at what used to seem like a museum exhibit, another world; rather, I had become a part of it.
The first week our entire class met together at OSP, we spent two of our three hours doing ice-breaking exercises in order to establish a level of familiarity and comfort between the inside and outside students. In my opinion, we reached that level within the first 15 minutes. After the inside students returned to their cellblocks, Professor Steve Shankman told us that several inside students had expressed to him beforehand that they were very anxious about meeting us.
I remember that this seemed really funny to me at the time, considering that nearly all of the UO students are younger than the inside students, and 10 of our 15 Honors College students are women.
After our first class, we developed a routine for our literature discussions. In groups, we began by talking about our reading for the week – a section of Crime and Punishment – sharing why certain passages stood out for us individually. Inevitably, our discussions ended with students sharing personal experiences to aid in the group’s interpretation of passages or events in the novel, which addresses topics such as fear, loss of authority, murder, robbery and morality versus legality.
Our class cohesion became such that our discussions about what drives Dostoevsky’s characters to act weren’t impeded by outside students’ endeavors to be politically correct or by inside students’ self-consciousness about their past. In my small group last week, most of the inside students felt comfortable enough to discuss Crime and Punishment in the light of their personal experiences, and I genuinely felt that their input broadened my perspective of the novel.
Quite honestly, part of the reason I felt instantly attracted to the Inside-Out Program was that it presented the opportunity to escape, so to speak, from the structurally mundane world of academia. I would take one of my college courses not situated with my face to a chalkboard, sitting at a desk that miraculously allowed me to squeeze behind its much-too-small workspace five days of the week. Instead, my learning environment, for at least one day, would transform into what seemed to me precisely the antithesis of a university classroom.
At the time, I didn’t recognize my flawed logic. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t where I was, but with whom I was interacting that made learning engaging. It wasn’t as if the white-washed walls, the two barred windows and the folding chairs at OSP were really propelling my education anyway. Rather, I found intellectual inspiration where I don’t think I had truly expected it-embedded in the comments of my inside classmates, thoughtfully questioning, analyzing and drawing conclusions about literature and about life.
Colette Crouse is a student at the University