Remember Those in Prison

On Friday, I gave a guest lecture to about 15 men who are incarcerated at Stateville Prison in Joliet, Illinois. This is the second lecture I have given there in the past couple of years. My interest in issues of incarceration relates to my work in education. In my work with Jerry Moreno we have looked at the issue of the disproportionate identification of Latino youth identified as having behavioral disorders. This identification as being a "problem child" becomes a slippery slope towards criminalization as the following graphic shows:

Related to the funneling of males of color toward the prison system is an educational system that does not provide engaging and meaningful opportunities for the children it serves. Some argue that the disproportionate representation of youth of color among those who receive disciplinary actions in schools is due to their own behavior or the deficiency of their families and culture. Even our own president, a self-identified black man, has made this argument.

The "culture of poverty" argument ignores basic economic investments that reveal our priorities about education, poverty, and race. We invest significantly more in prisons than we do in schools in all states. An article in The American Prospect from 2010 noted:

Nearly 75 percent of imprisonment spending happens at the state level, where dollars are drawn from a general fund that is meant to pay for a range of public needs, including health care, housing, public assistance, and education. Whether we look back over the last two decades, or just the last two years, education, in particular, has become a casualty of state budget battles. Analysis by the National Association of State Budget Officers shows that elementary and high schools receive 73 percent of their state funding from this discretionary fund; colleges and universities count on the fund for half of their budgets. However, $9 out of every $10 that support imprisonment come from the same pot of money. With tens of billions of dollars in prison spending annually, states are finding that there is simply less discretionary money available to invest in education, especially in these lean economic times.

So, with both prisons and schools receiving their funds from the same source, there is obvious competition for scarce state resources. Prisons are winning out because there is an increasing profit motive. Many prisons are now privately run and are for profit entities. They have contracts with states and thus there is a built-in incentive to first get the state money and then to make money on top of that. Simply, the motive is to keep the prisons full so there is a constant demand for their product.

 

There is also a disincentive to spend on services in prisons for both the for-profit and the state-run prisons. The state run systems simply have less money, and the private systems are reluctant to spend money on services that would reduce their profit margin. The narrative of undeserving prisoners who cannot be rehabilitated because of deficient morals and culture justifies this lack of services. One might say it is the "perfect crime." Starve schools of funds, watch students misbehave out of boredom and anger, arrest them and blame them for their behavior, imprison them, and make money off of it in the private prisons you own or invest in.

 

Teaching at a public university in Chicago that serves a diverse group of largely first-generation students of color at a relatively affordable price has allowed me to come into contact with students of many backgrounds. One group that has offered both hope and alarm are students who were formerly incarcerated. In my five years as a professor I have had over a dozen students who have done significant amounts of time in prison. This is a phenomena that I have noticed along with another professor at Northeastern, Erica Meiners, who has long been dedicated to the issue of the so-called "school to prison pipeline." Together we have begun interviewing our students about their experiences of education, being incarcerated, and higher education. This project has increased my already heightened awareness of the consequences of failing to provide resources, such as quality schools, positive adult role models, mentors, and teachers, and out of school opportunities to youth early in their lives. It has also made me aware of the need for education in prison in order to facilitate better outcomes when individuals are released, such as employment and reduced recidivism.

My visit was part of a larger project to provide such services to inmates by a group of extremely dedicated volunteers, many of them university faculty, writers, and artists. The
Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project or PNAP,

is a visual arts and humanities project that connects teaching artists and scholars to men at Stateville Prison through classes, workshops and guest lectures. Classes offered include subjects ranging from poetry, visual arts, film study to history. Classes are held once a week, on a 14 week semester schedule. Each course will result in finished projects—visual art, creative writing or scholarly works—with specific audiences/neighborhoods in mind. These works are exhibited and read in neighborhood galleries or cultural centers. Over the course of an academic semester, artists and scholars on the inside and outside address key questions: What can we learn from each other?; Who are our audiences?; What materials and methods best relate our concerns?; What can we say from inside a maximum security prison?

The historical context of this program is described on its website:

Over the last twenty years, an absolute defunding of programming in prisons has occurred. Between 1953 and 1994, state and federal grants made art and higher education available to people in prison. Since the 1994 Crime Bill Act barred funding to incarcerated students access to higher education for people in prison has been nominal. Today, non-profits and universities have stepped in where the state has retreated. In Illinois, even prison libraries have been defunded, leaving to volunteer groups the task of getting books to prisoners. Men at Stateville are left with few outlets for educational and creative inquiry. The prison has a population of over 1,800, but only three GED classes with a long waiting lists. In this context, Art and Humanities programming in adult state prisons is unique. 

While there I shared some of my own work, which involved facilitating an after-school arts program aimed at youth who were incarcerated, who were involved, or are currently involved in gangs, and those who seem at high risk of getting involved in gang activity. The program is called LuchArte and a youth can be seen describing the program here, along with some commentary by me.

This project was co-founded with my student Eddie Bocanegra, one of those who was able to successfully complete his bachelor's degree at Northeastern Illinois University and who is a quarter away from completing his master's degree in social work at the University of Chicago.

 

The hardest part about this work, despite successes such as having the youth present their work at art shows, them winning art competitions, and selling their art, has been the fact that many of the youth continue to be involved in gang life and art is really only a several hour respite from the negative aspects of their environment each week. One youth admonished me once, saying, "I hope you don't think that you're some kind of Freedom Writer" referring to the trope in films where an adult savior turns a troubled youth's life around in what is often a simplistic, sometimes even racist narrative, that doesn't fully acknowledge the complexity of change. I must acknowledge that the actual program on which the film is based does not have such a simple view, but that is frequently missed by the feel-good story that Hollywood tries to portray, that typically involves white people saving people of color from their perceived bankrupt culture.

As I shared these thoughts during my visit, the inmates seemed engrossed. They then shared how they also struggled to reconcile the structural forces that contributed to them being incarcerated, on the one hand, and them taking responsibility for the crimes they committed on the other. We ended up having one of the most thoughtful, passionate, and nuanced discussions of free will, determinism, and personal responsibility I have ever had. They have obviously had much time to think about their situation and society; in a tangentially related story, in explaining my work, I sarcastically shared that my job is to think and that it is such an integral part of a professor's work, that we get the privilege of having a full paid year off every six years to allow us to do so. When I shared this, one person laughed and said, "well, I have been on sabbatical for ten years. I have been doing a lot of thinking." We all laughed at this. At some points during our conversation we all seemed to struggle with whether there was any hope at all for change given the large barriers that people must overcome, especially if they are black or Latino, poor, and go to under-resourced schools. 

I shared with them that one lesson that I have taken away from my experience working with youth is that time seemed to be key. Simply "doing time" with them, showing up consistently, and genuinely caring, had the greatest effect. It did not change their lives, but it was the most appreciated. The best part of my visit occurred at the end when one by one all the men came to personally thank me and shake my hand. Several of them quietly said, "you should keep spending time doing your work; it does make a difference." I was touched as these men with whom I spent time, who are so deprived themselves, appeared to feel the need to validate me, my work, and my insecurity. 

Perhaps the wisdom is that doing time is what matters. That requires acknowledging and remembering those that are most vulnerable. They are worthy and very human. As one of my students shared on Facebook this Easter:

Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. Hebrews 13:3

A Personal Post-Mortem on the CPS Teachers Strike & Latinos and Urban Schools

This is a long and personal one…

I am not your typical Chicago Public School student parent. I have a doctorate, an education from an Ivy League school and am fairly well informed about the nuances of urban schools; I have studied them and worked with their students, teachers, and parents for nearly a decade in several of the largest urban school districts in the country.

One might think that my graduate educated wife and I are crazy to even be sending our precious kindergarten-age daughter to what many view as a dysfunctional system. For many reasons we decided to send her to our neighborhood school; not that we did not make the attempt to navigate the CPS bureaucracy to get her into a selective enrollment school or a gifted program, but we were aware that the odds were slim, even for our upper-middle class family; we knew that the neighborhood school might be our only public school choice. Indeed, our local school ended up being the only CPS school option for us. We knew that we still had the choice of sending her to a private school or relocating to the suburbs, but ideologically and politically we believe in integration across class and race and ethnicity and we also believe in public education that is universally provided and supported. Also, our neighborhood school is among the top 20% of elementary schools (in terms of test scores) as our neighborhood reflects our income, education, while still holding to our values of diversity along race and class. Also, as a researcher, I know that much of what affects kids’ success in school has nothing to do with schools at all; success in school has to do with poverty, physical health, parents’ income and education level, the exposure to oral and printed language in the home, immigration status, violence in the neighborhood, and having two adults in the home to care for children. Enrollment in pre-school, where our daughter spent three years, also provides a significant and lasting effect on academic success all the way through college. So, our child holds advantages in just about all of the above categories.

Our resolve was tested though on the day of our orientation when we entered a 90-degree auditorium with no air conditioning and a hundred or so parents and their children. There the principal informed us that our children would be in two classes of 37 students each, and that likely even more would be enrolling before the school year began in less than a week. An astute parent asked if the teachers would have aides and the principal replied, “no.” Determined, she followed-up asking, “can parents volunteer.” The principal grinned and then rattled back, “yes, but you’d have to go through all the requisite background checks, which would take a few weeks.” A collective pause, laden with hope was present. Then the principal’s ironic grin grew large and with almost comedic timing he said, “but CPS in its wisdom does not allow parents to volunteer in their own child’s classroom.” And the parents, regardless of probably not being well versed in game theory, knew that the classrooms would have no volunteers. Then he introduced our daughter’s teacher, a young woman no more than 25 years old with only one year of teaching experience under her belt.

For four days we experienced the chaos of our “good” neighborhood school. I weighed in my head whether we could really conceive of selling the home we just bought last year as I dropped off my precious daughter to a room of students who ranged from having graduate educated parents to those who probably arrived as immigrants within the past few years and spoke little English, to those who were spending their very first days away from their parents, never having had any sort of formal pre-school instructional experience before.  

One day I saw the forty or so students line up in the morning to enter the portable unit which housed their classroom, and two children screamed and clawed to remain with their parents as the other students marched into the building. The young teacher peeled the more strident child off of her father and carried her into the class. Meanwhile my daughter and her classmates were already in the room, unaccompanied. I only imagined that my daughter, who is very well behaved in school and is already on the verge of reading, would be tacitly neglected by the teacher to deal with the most needy students for the first few months of school. As already wrote, she is advantaged, right? She would be fine anyway. There is only so much a teacher can do.

And then the strike came.

I followed the strike as closely as a parent, and as fairly well informed researcher of urban schooling. But all theory, research and principles fly out the window when things hit you directly. Despite knowing that the teachers deserve the protection and stability of tenure, that they need to be assessed on true measures of learning and success, that student learning is influenced in many ways by factors that occur outside of school, I still wanted to blame the teachers for neglecting my daughter that first week and for abandoning her to strike. But again, there is only so much a teacher can do-forty students, parents who I attempted to converse with but couldn’t because they didn’t speak English, a principal who proudly said he keeps test scores up by giving no less than 60 minutes of homework a day to kindergartners (to serve the mandates of the state and federal governments)-the odds against having a good experience were overwhelming. The teachers needed more; an assistant, a smaller class, a system that provides healthcare and integration services for immigrant parents, among so many other things. While these may not be “strikable,” especially when you make an average of $76,000 a year, the teachers seemed justified in taking a stand.

So, allowing rationality to prevail, my family supported the striking teachers. I took our daughter to “strike camp” each day, provided by a local non-profit that typically runs supplemental afterschool programs in the public schools. The camp was a relief. The seventy or so students who were enrolled in the camp were met by no less than ten young adults, a staff to child ratio 7 to 1, about one-sixth of what the public schools had to offer. Our daughter knew all of the staff members’ names by the second day and displayed an excitement about the program that she had not shown in the first week of actual school. She was learning Chinese, was doing theater, and completed worksheets that had writing exercises. By the third day I noted that all the staff greeted our daughter by name, with large smiles, and a genuine interest in having fun.

While driving her to the camp on the fourth day, our daughter seemed especially pensive. She noted that I had been honking and waving to the red-clad striking teachers at the five or so schools we passed on the way to the camp. She asked why and I explained that I wanted to show that I supported them, because they wanted to help get more things to help kids do better in school. She paused and then said, “I hope they get more toys for us.” I laughed and told her that they would probably get more books or even more teachers. She heaved a sigh and said, “Daddy, you know I really hate school. There is too much learning.” I was shocked. This was a statement coming from a little girl who had been anticipating going to elementary school for months; a girl who would come home from pre-school singing and happy on most days. After having the opportunity to visit the elementary school of some friends’ children in suburban Atlanta, she became enthralled with the idea of the cafeteria and how “big kids” got to pick their lunch (of course the CPS school we enrolled her in had no cafeteria). Now she was saying she hated school. “Why?” I asked. “I have to sit in one place all day, and we don’t get to play, and all we do is learn,” she lamented. My heart was breaking. “We are just kids,” she said.

There was another pregnant pause. She then said, “Daddy, you’re a teacher, right?” “Yes, I am.” “I think then that I don’t have to go to school again. I can just stay home with you and you can be my teacher.” I couldn’t believe her desperation to find a way not to return to school. “I would love to stay home with you, but I have to work to make money. I can’t stop teaching my own students.” Silence. “I know,” she said. “You can teach me at night after you work in the day. During the day I can just spend time with Mommy.” And then we arrived at camp. “I can see you have given a lot of thought to this idea.” “Let me think about it,” I said. And so I did.

After some hard conversations and frantic searching on the Internet for private schools, my wife and I found ourselves at a local Catholic school on the sixth day of the strike. We were visiting with the principal, who for the next two hours explained the curriculum, showed us the kindergarten classrooms that each had less than twenty students with teachers with over thirty years of experience between them. We saw the already beautiful, but soon-to-be renovated gymnasium, the library filled with books, the friendly and calm staff. And for our last stop we saw the spacious cafeteria, where the kids would be treated to hot meals each day. Then next day the strike was resolved, and while the teachers and students returned to public schools after that, our daughter began Catholic school.

So, what does this have to do with Mexicans or Latinos? Well, as we walked away from the Catholic school I told my wife that I wondered how in our pleasant middle-class neighborhood that the public school still felt very urban, crowded, and disproportionately minority. After visiting the parochial school it made sense because we had found the white middle-class people; they pay for school quality because they can. Poverty among Latino children is at 27%, and schools are so much more than just places of learning for them; they are medical centers, social service agencies,recreation spaces, babysitters, and spaces for acculturating new immigrants. The strike hit Latinos hard because they lost this resource. But how much of a resource can they be with such poor funding that is dependent upon test scores rather than the full array of socioemotional outcomes that schools are responsible for. How could schools overcome all of the challenges facing Latinos when there are as many as 50 students per teacher in some pre-school classrooms? Meanwhile, the middle-class and above remove themselves from this system by fleeing to the suburbs or private schools. Without ethnic, racial and class integration, how can schools get better? I wish I had the solution to this complex problem. It will probably take a really long time to address. Despite my ideals, I’ve learned that for our Latina daughter, we simply couldn’t wait for the answer to arise in the public schools. Unfortunately, so few other Latinos have this choice.