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

Schools as Prisons

One of my academic responsibilities is supervising student teachers.  Student teachers are just what the name implies – university students learning to become teachers.  Typically, student teachers work with a veteran teacher at an area school over the course of a semester, ultimately assuming all facets of a full-time professional teacher.  Part of my job involves observing student teachers teaching a lesson in the classroom.  Lately, however, fulfilling this obligation has become increasingly onerous.  It has nothing to do with the students I supervise or the lessons they teach, but rather how schools are run.

As I arrived for a school visit recently I explained to the security personnel that greeted me who I was and the reason for my visit.  He asked to see a photo identification so I presented my university faculty id.  He asked instead for my driver’s licenses, explaining that he needed to enter my home address, telephone number, and birth date into a computer and then snap a digital photograph of me, all of which would be kept in a central database.  I explained that I was hesitant to disclose so much personal information and offered my work address and telephone.  The security person at first insisted on having my personal information but eventually accepted and entered my work information, but not before he and a nearby custodian who observed the exchange stated that all of these procedures were “for the safety of the kids.”  The implication that I was at the school to do some harm and the assumption that I do not care about student safety rankled to say the least.  I explained to both men that as a tenure-track professor at a public university, a former public high school teacher, and someone with over 20 years of experience in education, I would not be at their school if I was in anyway a threat to children.  I stated further that I am all for ensuring school safety but do not think I need to waive my privacy rights or other civil liberties to do so.  This ultimately ended the exchange and I was allowed to proceed to complete my visit and observation.

I thought about this experience again last week when I read about San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District (NISD) initiating a program requiring all students to wear identification badges embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID), enabling school personal to track students' movements.  Some students and parents complained of the new program as an invasion of privacy.  Students not complying with the program allegedly were subjected to harassment from teachers while administrators reportedly threatened to ban these students from extracurricular and other social activities.  School personnel meanwhile explained that the program was aimed at reducing truancy and promoting school safety.

I am skeptical of the district’s claim.  This program may indeed be about reducing truancy and promoting safety, but I wonder who’s safety the district has in mind that truant or absent students threaten.  The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) reports that the NISD student population is nearly 64 percent Hispanic, nearly 25 percent white, and approximately eight percent black or African American, with just over 47 percent of students eligible for federal reduced or free lunch programs.  This LoJack-type system and other technological deployments seem more about corralling poor and minority students than about anything with any pedagogical value.  It seems to be part of a troubling trend.  In her book, Lockdown High, journalist Annette Fuentes argues that legislative and policy responses to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and similar tragic events have created police-state like conditions in many American schools.  Often school personnel implement these responses with little regard to their consequences - not the least of which is how being presumed guilty before being innocent affects the social and psychological development of children.

Using Big Brother tactics provides an easy solution to the complex problems of student truancy, absenteeism, and dropping out.  Schools would be better served by creating warm, welcoming environments staffed by caring teachers who develop interesting curricula taught with engaging learning activities and authentic assessments.  Perhaps that is too much to ask.