{"id":7082,"date":"2013-09-10T14:44:30","date_gmt":"2013-09-10T18:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=7082"},"modified":"2014-01-25T18:09:50","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T23:09:50","slug":"college-in-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=7082","title":{"rendered":"College in Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re in prison, sandwiched between two barred iron gates, so why doesn\u2019t anyone else look nervous?<\/p>\n

The college students around me chat about final exams and which classes they\u2019re taking next semester. No one mentions the prison guards following us or the voice that yelled something\u2014it was hard to make out specifics, but it didn\u2019t sound friendly\u2014from one of the prison\u2019s windows on our way in.<\/p>\n

\"Professor<\/a>
Professor Glenn Steinberg taught Classical Traditions to a combined class of TCNJ students and inmates at Albert C. Wagner Correctional Facility last spring.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve received loads of information about what not to do here. Don\u2019t wear orange or khaki. Don\u2019t discuss an inmate\u2019s past. Don\u2019t bring in a cell phone or even a retractable pen. But I haven\u2019t heard anyone address the biggest question: What if something dangerous happens?<\/p>\n

Though he masks it well, there\u2019s at least one other person in this group who\u2019s also anxious. Professor Glenn Steinberg has been bringing his literature class to the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in Bordentown every week since January, but he still worries. The tense feeling usually creeps in over the weekend and takes a firm hold on Monday morning. \u201cIt\u2019s stressful being the professor,\u201d he says, \u201cand knowing that I need to overcome any administrative situations and<\/em> keep a cool head and face if anything odd or unusual happens so the students don\u2019t freak out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The heavy gate separating us from the prisoner area swings open and we\u2019re led down a concrete hall and into the prison cafeteria. It\u2019s crammed with four-seater stainless-steel tables and it smells sour, like rancid milk mixed with cheap disinfectant. The TCNJ students settle in a long row on one side of the metal tables. Two prison guards in police-blue uniforms watch closely from the back of the room.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more generic college chit-chat until someone spots the inmates, dressed in khaki jumpsuits, walking in through a different iron gate. They sit down on the other side of those metal tables, directly across from their TCNJ counterparts. The two sets of students smile at each other, exchange hellos, and spread out their books and papers and folders.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve met for class eight times now and have gotten friendly \u2014 though not overly so. As sophomore Stephany Sakharny puts it: \u201cI\u2019ve found that I have a lot in common with [the inmate students]. It\u2019s like we could have been friends in another life.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a quick wrap-up of the previous reading assignment, Steinberg strides to a whiteboard in the center of the room, grabs a black marker and writes out the opening lines to Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/i> in their original Italian:<\/p>\n

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita \/ mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, \/ ch\u00e9 la diritta via era smarrita.<\/em><\/p>\n

Midway along the journey of our life \/ I woke to find myself in a dark wood, \/ for I had wandered off from the straight path.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Sitting on the TCNJ side of one table is Sara Stammer, a friendly sophomore with an already-crowded resume: double major in English and women and gender studies; double minor in criminology and psychology; class representative on the Student Finance Board; member of the English honors society; columnist for The Signal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Her resume practically sparkles.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was looking for one of those college experiences people talk about \u2014 the things you can\u2019t do in everyday life,\u201d she says. \u201cI figured going to prison and taking classes with inmates was one of those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"48\"<\/a>After spending most of the day in other classes, Stammer hopped in a shuttle van outside Loser Hall with the rest of her Classical Traditions classmates at 5 p.m. At A.C. Wagner, after exchanging her driver\u2019s license for a visitor\u2019s pass, sending her belongings through an X-ray machine and spreading her arms for a metal-detector wand, Stammer finally made it to this beige cafeteria.<\/p>\n

The whole process absorbs almost four hours of her Monday nights, but she\u2019s never missed a session. \u201cThe corrections officers told us that one of the most important things we can do is be consistent,\u201d she says. \u201cThe last thing [the inmates] need is for us to only show up sometimes or to not take the class seriously. And just knowing I only get 15 chances at this\u201d \u2014 Classical Traditions meets at A.C. Wagner 15 times over the semester \u2014 \u201cI want to make sure I make the most of coming here.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the first of those 15 visits, Steinberg\u2019s TCNJ students had already gone through two orientations, during which the prison staff rattled off rule after rule and cited danger after danger. \u201cI think they were trying to scare us, and as a result, we expected the worst,\u201d Stammer says. \u201cBut then we got here the first night and the inmates came in to join our class. They were smiling and asking us how we were. We knew it wasn\u2019t going to be this creepy us-versus-them environment. We\u2019re all just classmates studying the same literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Run through the College\u2019s Center for Prison Outreach and Education,<\/a> the College in Prison program has been offering these combined TCNJ-inmate classes at A.C. Wagner since 2009. This time it\u2019s Steinberg\u2019s Classical literature class; other semesters it\u2019s been criminology, history, sociology.<\/p>\n

Both the Wagner and TCNJ students will receive college credit for completing Steinberg\u2019s course. They\u2019ll read The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses<\/em> and Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>. They\u2019ll write papers and take exams, including a midterm and final.<\/p>\n

Steinberg distributed the graded midterms last class. One of the Wagner students had the highest score: a perfect 100 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cI definitely was surprised with [the inmates\u2019] preparedness and their ability to understand the material,\u201d says Kevin Alexander, a senior psychology major in Steinberg\u2019s class. \u201cThat\u2019s not to say I didn\u2019t think they were going to understand the material, but….several [inmates] in the class consistently say things that make me go, \u2018Wow, this guy is just so smart.\u2019 It makes you think, \u2018There but for the grace of God go I.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of them are very bright,\u201d Steinberg echoes. \u201cIn some ways, it breaks your heart to see these guys in prison who are clearly very smart and very curious about their world and what they\u2019re learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019re also \u201cvery typical of TCNJ students,\u201d Steinberg says. \u201cThere are students who are really passionate and committed, and there are students who are interested and engaged sometimes, but not always.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the seven inmates in class tonight, most have already taken multiple college courses in prison. One guy tells me it helps \u201cnormalize the experience\u201d of being there. He was partway through school at a nearby community college when he came to Wagner. With these classes, he\u2019ll be able to finish his associate degree soon. Maybe he\u2019ll go to Rutgers University after he\u2019s released.<\/p>\n

While the inmates and TCNJ students chat together during their mid-class break \u2014 and occasionally while Steinberg is trying to teach them \u2014 past offenses remain off-limits.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the inmates, even in our class, are violent criminals,\u201d Alexander says. \u201cBut at the orientations, they told us not to ask what they did and also not to worry about it. The last thing they want to be thinking about in class is why they\u2019re in prison and how they got there. It\u2019s three hours every week when they can just forget about that. Why should I ask why they\u2019re there if they don\u2019t ask me why I\u2019m there?\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The United States tops the rest of the world in the percentage of its citizens who wind up in prison. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, 2,239,800 American adults\u2014one in every 107 men and women\u2014were incarcerated in prison or jail in 2011. (Nine years earlier, in 1992, it was nearly half that: 1.3 million.)<\/p>\n

About a thousand of them, all men ages 18 to 34, are currently housed in the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in Bordentown, New Jersey.<\/p>\n

A.C. Wagner is on the left side of the road, a mile and a half off Route 130, just past a large cow pasture. Across the street, the town\u2019s \u201cFriendship Fields\u201d are often filled with Little Leaguers and their grinning parents or young soccer players and more grinning parents.<\/p>\n

\"46\"<\/a>There are several security watchtowers throughout Wagner\u2019s parking lot, but the buildings themselves are simple, multi-story red brick \u2014 not unlike an office building or high school. Only the tall fences and barbed wire clarify its use as a state-run, medium-to-maximum-security prison.<\/p>\n

Celia Chazelle, a Medieval history professor and chairwoman of TCNJ\u2019s Department of History, discovered A.C. Wagner while researching prisons five years ago. At that time, she was examining the lack<\/em> of prisons in early Medieval Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey maintained social order without a focus on the prison,\u201d she explains now, \u201cand I was interested in that tremendous contrast with the way we do things. I thought maybe studying the medieval system could help us rethink our current approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Chazelle had never been inside a prison, and that seemed like an important step in her research process. She signed up with the Petey Greene Prisoner Assistance Program\u2014a newly formed group in Princeton that was sending volunteer tutors into A.C. Wagner.<\/p>\n

When she entered the prison for the first time in June 2008, \u201cI had all these preconceptions about it,\u201d she says. \u201cI mean, some of them are accurate. Prisons can be places of violence, they\u2019re very harsh, you don\u2019t question authority, that sort of thing. But at the same time, what I had not been expecting was this level of intellectual engagement and interest and the courteousness of the prisoners I was teaching. They were very grateful and very eager to do the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through her tutoring visits, Chazelle became friendly with Wagner\u2019s administrator, TCNJ alumnus Alfred Kandell \u201983<\/b>. She told him how much she enjoyed tutoring and said she wanted to do something bigger to help. Kandell encouraged her to teach a non-credit college course in the prison and eventually Chazelle agreed. She would lead a group of carefully selected inmate students through the same freshman seminar she was teaching at TCNJ that semester: Social Ethics.<\/p>\n

She chuckles now, acknowledging the irony. Then she adds: \u201cIt turns out the Wagner students have very developed, very carefully thought-out ideas about ethics. They were quite conservative, actually\u2014much more conservative than the TCNJ students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon Chazelle was incorporating TCNJ more directly into her classes at Wagner. In 2009, she launched the College in Prison program, which places TCNJ and Wagner students side by side for combined classes taught in the prison. The program falls under the College\u2019s Center for Prison Outreach and Education, which Chazelle co-directs. She taught the first combined class herself\u2014The History and Culture of Prison.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was sure the [College] administration would say no,\u201d she adds. \u201cSend our students to prison? You\u2019ve got to be kidding! <\/em>But they were very open to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it was soon clear that, for the TCNJ students, \u201cthis is such a transformative experience,\u201d Chazelle says. \u201cIt\u2019s so much more powerful than anything you can give them in the classroom. I love to watch them change over the semester. Instead of having an amorphous view of prison statistics, they get to know these individuals as classmates, and very often, they start questioning the American prison system.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\u00a0A.C. Wagner houses only a fraction of New Jersey\u2019s inmates\u2014a population that hovers around 23,000.<\/p>\n

According to the New Jersey Department of Corrections\u2019 Office of Transitional Services, the average person leaving a state prison like Wagner is a single (83 percent), black (63 percent), 34-year-old man who has spent two or three years behind bars.<\/p>\n

And there is a one in three chance he\u2019ll be back.<\/p>\n

OTS reports that 55 percent of inmates released from a New Jersey prison are rearrested, typically within nine months. The state\u2019s former inmates are re-convicted 42.7 percent of the time and about a third of them end up back in prison.<\/p>\n

\"57\"<\/a>Multiple studies have shown that uneducated inmates are the most likely to be re-incarcerated\u2014and in fact, OTS claims that returning offenders, on average, read at a sixth-grade level and have a fifth-grade math level. Two-thirds have no GED or high school diploma.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of these inmates ended up where they did because the education system failed them,\u201d notes Rebecca Li, a TCNJ sociology professor who taught the combined course Self and Society at Wagner last fall. \u201cIn my class, many of them talked about a common story: They went to school and the school was not teaching anything. It was boring, so they began getting in trouble. When they got in trouble, they were labeled as troublemakers. Then they got kicked out of school or dropped out, which is how they got in with the wrong crowd and ended up in prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

While some gripe about the college education these inmates are getting free of charge\u2014Steinberg has seen \u201cfriends\u201d on Facebook share posts about how great prison must be, stuff like Free food and brand-new gyms? Sign me up.<\/em> \u2014 Chazelle says the benefits of College in Prison are farther-reaching than most people realize.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese guys are locked up in a facility that offers them nothing above a GED right at the time they should be getting job skills and vocational training,\u201d she says. \u201cRight there, that\u2019s a life sentence you\u2019re giving them for poverty. It\u2019s also adding to recidivism. You\u2019d think if we\u2019re going to lock them up for a decade, we\u2019d want them to come out more capable of functioning in society. Instead, they\u2019re often forced to go right back to the life that got them in trouble initially.\u201d<\/p>\n

Li speaks of the intellectual confidence that inmates build by taking college courses \u2014 a confidence that may encourage them to pursue college degrees when they leave prison \u2014 and Chazelle says there are about 50 current Rutgers University students who have come from the prison system, including a few from Wagner.<\/p>\n

In 2012, Rutgers senior Walter Fortson was selected as a Truman Scholar \u2014 a national award that includes a $30,000 scholarship for senior year expenses and graduate school studies. Only a few years earlier, Fortson was in prison for selling crack cocaine. He began taking classes at Rutgers while living in a half-way house in Newark, awaiting parole.<\/p>\n

\u201cA number of the guys I\u2019ve taught at Wagner have said they never thought about college before they were incarcerated,\u201d Chazelle says. \u201cNot all of them can go on to a four-year school, but [taking these classes] also increases their chances of employment. It lowers their chance of recidivism. It makes them better fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n

With those benefits in mind, TCNJ, Rutgers and five other New Jersey colleges and universities teamed up to create the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium last year. \u201cOur vision,\u201d the NJ-STEP website announces, \u201cis that every person in prison who qualifies for college [will] have the opportunity to take college classes while incarcerated and continue that education upon release.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe approached a group of major benefactors who were looking to fund a state-wide initiative that could then become a national model for prison education,\u201d Chazelle says. \u201cNJ-STEP has made New Jersey that model.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ford Foundation and the Sunshine Lady Foundation each committed $2 million to support NJ-STEP through 2016. \u201cA host of studies of higher education in prison demonstrate that this is one of the best ways to reduce the recidivism rates of people who are sentenced to prison,\u201d the NJ-STEP site says. \u201cWhile we are dedicated reformers who share a vision of social justice, we also know that by expanding the opportunities for college in prison, we reduce the rate of correctional failure, increase public safety, and in the long run reduce the costs of prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a long semester for Glenn Steinberg\u2014a soft-spoken scholar with a professorial beard and glasses. He says he likes teaching the inmates, but administrative issues keep popping up, especially around location. At first Classical Traditions was put in the auditorium, then about a month ago, it was moved to the prison cafeteria, which swallows the voices of Steinberg and his students but magnifies every passing garbage cart or jangling set of keys.<\/p>\n

Then there are all the rules. Steinberg and his TCNJ students have to wear loose-fitting clothes. Their tops can\u2019t show any shoulder or lower-back skin and their jackets and sweatshirts can\u2019t have hoods. Their notebooks can\u2019t have spiral bindings and their pens can\u2019t have springs. One student set off the metal detector this semester by wearing an underwire bra. Another had to miss class because she\u2019d forgotten to bring a photo ID.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, a blaring alarm interrupted Steinberg\u2019s lecture. There had been a medical issue in the prison gym, but the TCNJ students were whisked away from their inmate classmates and taken to a separate location.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been incredibly challenging,\u201d Steinberg says, \u201cbut if there was an opportunity to do to this again, I\u2019d jump at the chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

As would Sara Stammer, the sophomore student. \u201cIf I could,\u201d she says, \u201cI\u2019d take this class over and over again.\u201d<\/p>\n

They may not have that chance, though. Chazelle says with some sadness that these courses are in jeopardy \u201cbecause the Wagner administration has changed and is now much more security-concerned.\u201d For the first time in eight semesters, the College will not offer a combined Wagner-TCNJ class at the prison this fall. \u201cWe have to get these issues sorted out,\u201d Chazelle adds. \u201cNot every professor would be as patient as Glenn has been this semester.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

But tonight, it\u2019s still spring. Steinberg\u2019s combined class is only halfway over and\u2014though some have \u201cwandered off from the straight path\u201d\u2014the Wagner and TCNJ students are, as Stammer put it, \u201call just classmates,\u201d sitting together in a drab cafeteria, jotting down notes about the opening lines of Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>.<\/p>\n

All photos (c) Dustin Fenstermacher.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\t