Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part article about the Inside-Out Program, which allows Oregon state prisoners and University students to learn together.
After our first week in the Inside-Out class, part of a nation-wide program allowing college students and incarcerated men and women to study as peers in a seminar behind prison walls, everyone was more at ease – “outside ” and “inside” students alike. We all wore nametags (first name only), but there wasn’t much need for that formality anymore because we were talking to classmates, not strangers.
At the beginning of class each week, the inside students, prisoners, all trickled in from their various cellblocks and we chatted about current events, what happened during the day, how we were feeling, what we thought about the reading, maybe about a vacation that one of the inside students took a few years ago, or about a visit from a family member.
The inside students, or simply “the guys” as we fondly referred to them, loved talking about pop culture, especially movies and music, and they always asked about life at the University. Isolated from the outside world, the guys said that listening to us describe our everyday experiences – even just a few words about an interesting class or a joke told by one of our friends – things that to us seemed incredibly mundane were, to them, a breath of fresh air. Many of them said their limited interaction with the outside world was what gave them hope and made life in prison somewhat tolerable. For them, our meetings weren’t simply about the literature. Every inside student, without exception, said our class was the best part of his week, every week.
The guys said they appreciated escaping from the noise of their cellblocks and engaging in intellectual conversation for those three short hours on Wednesday nights. Our class, they said, gave them a temporary feeling of freedom in a room where no guard was looking over their shoulders and where they could speak openly about themselves, about life inside or outside the prison, and about literature. A few weeks back, an inside student and I discovered that we both enjoyed writing poetry. The difference was that his poems would be published in an anthology the next year; mine would not.
At the beginning of each class, we would situate ourselves in a circle, alternating inside and outside students. From there, we broke off into smaller group discussions, either one-on-one or in pods of four or five, every group consisting of a similar number of inside and outside students. In the groups, we normally began by talking about our reading for the week – a section of Dostoevsky’s suspenseful novel “Crime and Punishment.” What struck me most about the inside students was how incredibly genuine, honest, intelligent and thoughtful each one was. I guess that before going into the Inside-Out Program, I hadn’t quite anticipated interacting with such an amiable, insightful group of people. Perhaps I had expected a group wholly unlike myself; perhaps I had wanted it. But what I encountered was a group of guys strikingly similar to the students and adults I interact with every day, if not a little more perceptive. I remember that after our very first class at Oregon State Penitentiary, we ended with every student sharing one word to describe how he or she felt. “Hopeful,” said one of the inside students; another one remarked, “Alive.” “Excited” and “Exhausted” were both words from outside students. I said exactly how I felt after that first class – the same way I’ve felt every week since: “Privileged.”
Colette Crouse is a University student