08.11.10
Posted in Teaching in prison at 11:34 am by Administrator
My students range from unmotivated to driven, from third- or fourth-grade academic level to college level, at least in reading. Most of my students have maturity levels significantly below their ages, which is a product both of what got them into this concrete-block world in the first place and of the institution itself. Imprisonment does not foster emotional growth, but that’s another story.
A prison teacher has to find a balance between strict adherence to rules, along with recognition that staff and inmates are natural enemies, and building enough friendly trust to give non-threatening guidance. I lean toward the latter.
Younger inmates cannot be seen working in class, except under my harassment, because they have to look tough. I had the same experience with my high school students last year. Part of being tough is to seem savvy enough to need only street smarts. It’s hard to convince them that the guys who tell them what to do have gained my kind of knowledge, whether from school or just through native intelligence, as well as the street’s lessons.
It’s almost magical what a few years, and, I think, a little restriction in the flow of testosterone, does to these guys. Older students, by and large, start thinking beyond the needs of a narrowly dictatorial peer group, aka, a gang. They tend to be serious, or, at least, less disruptive students. I have a couple of exceptions to that rule, but even in these guys, I’m seeing evolution toward introspection. Both have earned the respect of the younger inmates and enjoy their new status as thought leaders. They’re getting more confidence in their own judgment as a result.
With younger students, you teach the “why” as well as the “how.” With adults, you teach the “how” and let the “why” develop on its own.
My greatest satisfaction comes when an inmate with some brains and drive begins to recognize that he has a mind and that the mind is worth feeding. That’s when they accept fish and when, I hope, I can start to teach them to fish.
Permalink
07.29.10
Posted in Teaching in prison at 9:43 am by Administrator
Lockdown is a miserable time for inmates, because they’re stuck in their cells for most of it. They don’t even come out for meals. The only benefit is that they get to catch up on sleep, which they don’t get to do much on most days.
A few times a year, the lockdown is accompanied by a shakedown. In a shakedown, prisoners are called out in small groups to the prison gymnasium, clad only in underwear and carrying all their personal belongings in a plastic bag or a laundry cart. In the gym, they are searched thoroughly and then they wait.
When they are called, they stand, looking pale, muscular (usually) and dully tattooed in the greenish glare of mercury lamps, before two or three individuals, usually female, who pick through and inventory their worldly goods. The search is item-by-item and the inventory crew targets items that violate prison rules. Staff attitudes range from officious to apologetic. Many try to keep spirits up, though. Bad jokes abound on both sides.
Most of the inmates seem to acquire too much of some things and some items they’re not supposed to have at all. Like too many pencils and pens, tracing paper that can be used for tattoos, too many prison-blue pants and shirts, overstuffed pillows and contraband. That’s any item that they’re not supposed to have in the first place or that has been altered for other than its intended use. Findings of improper possession are almost always met with protests. Some items can be sent back home and some are confiscated outright.
For the staff, it’s a change in routine, welcome or not. Teachers and counselors do laundry and warehouse work when the paperwork is caught up. Security personnel help on the loading docks. Everyone does things outside of their regular job description. It’s just expected in this environment.
But for the inmates, it’s just one more way in which prison life drags along in a slow chain of boredoms and dreads.
Permalink
06.13.10
Posted in Teaching in prison at 8:19 pm by Administrator
Prison food goes by on trays that look like battered hard-shell briefcases turned on their sides. I see the leftovers go by after lunch. Because this is New Mexico, a lot of the leftovers are lumpy masses of overcooked pinto beans. There is often a smattering of canned vegetables and shredded lettuce in the tray compartments that the prisoners ignore.
Yesterday in the library, the inmates had a “taco pie” that looked like a pink sauce with meat chunks in it. There was some yellow stuff in another compartment and gray stuff in another. “If you think of it as food,” my chief worker says, “you’d never eat again.”
“I would think of it as functional nourishment,” I said.
Meals are carefully planned to have a certain number of calories. If inmates ate just that food, all of them would be trim. They have the commissary, though, and much of their meager pay for jobs in the prison goes for food items available there. They can get nutritious fare along with the junk food. As a result, even though prisoners, by and large, are fitter than the population they come from, there are still plenty of paunches. On the other hand, everybody works out. Those who have been in several times say they come out of prison strong and fit, but that goes away soon after they leave.
*******************************************************
I had a conversation with a lifer the other day on the subject of drugs. Even though some can be smuggled in, inmates get clean in prison.
Nevertheless, I’ve heard inmates converse longingly about how much they’re looking forward to their first high–the shot they’re going to take, the first rock of crack or the first fat doobie they’ll smoke, the first cigarette, the first 12-pack.
In prison, you can’t get enough drugs to satisfy an addiction, so why does a drug addict who has been clean while in prison usually go right back to the drugs upon release? Why, when millions of people have struggled to quit smoking, do inmates go right back to smoking when they leave, even though they can’t smoke in prison?
The lifer tells me it’s the difference between deciding to quit and having it taken from you. When you have it taken from you, the addiction hangs in the closet with your civilian clothes, ready to be put on with the rest of the outfit when you leave.
The drug-centered life is reinforced by conversations like the ones I’ve heard. There are active anti-addiction programs in prison, but they don’t seem to work for very many inmates. Prisoners will choose the “Therapeutic Community” only because they get a few more privileges there.
The lifer tells me that most of the addiction programs are operated by people who have never known a deep psychological craving for a drug, despite their other credentials. Without that knowledge, he believes, it’s hard to attain empathy with a drug user who is clean only because the supply has been cut off. The programs available try to replace drug cravings with spiritual strength and finding purpose in one’s life. I’ll talk to the counselor to get some success stories.
Permalink
05.16.10
Posted in Teaching in prison at 9:30 am by Administrator
They spend their waking lives in navy blue sweats, unless they’re in “Seg,” or segregation—what they used to call solitary, where they wear clean, white jumpsuits that say “SEGREGATION” across the back and spend 23 hours a day in their cells. They buy their own jogging, walking or basketball shoes with the small change they earn on their jobs, from the commissary. They can’t even take good shoes as gifts from home.
_______________________________________________
Everyone is an artist in prison. You have the time. You have very little but time. You might have a job and you might have school. But mostly, you have time. If you want to be an artist, you have the time to become very good at it.
If you have a lot of talent and the time to find ingenious ways to make ink from stolen pens, markers, paint, etc., you go into the tattoo business, sharing your talent and Hep C viruses from previous customers through needles that can be made from paper clips or any thin, round piece of metal. You are compensated with money or favors for depictions of gang loyalty, pretty faces or fear-inducing imagery that you etch into arms from shoulder to fingertip, legs, all parts of shaved heads, chests and abdomens. A young inmate with a long sentence inevitably emerges as a tattoo gallery, complete with a case of incurable Hep C, which is a mark of manhood.
_______________________________________________
If you have between three and 10 years on your sentence and you don’t have a GED you have to go to school, which is a great irony. One of the reasons you’re here is because you always hated school—a daily six-hour eternity where they barked lots of words at you that you didn’t really understand and had no reason to make the effort to figure out. Now it’s three hours of eternity, especially if your attitude toward school never changed, and the teacher is still the enemy.
______________________________________________
The young guys still come in with something to prove and many still try to prove whatever it is until the day they walk out. You soon learn that the loud ones are seldom the ones who take action. They talk about it a lot. They make punching gestures and go “Boom” as they imitate the motion they say they made, or watched someone else make in a major fight—and they’re all major. It’s almost as much of an achievement to watch one as to win one. The loud ones get into mouth trouble, smarting off to a guard who smarts off back to them. After the exchange of threats, the guard writes them up, which costs them “good time”—days taken off their sentences.
You watch the quiet ones whose eyes smolder as their lips stay shut, though. One day, if you’re a teacher, you look at your class roster and see them listed in seg. That’s where they go when they get caught fighting, often after some time in medical to get wounds treated.
Permalink
