This blog was written by Tian An Wong as part of his work for the Hub Affiliates program.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
When I was an undergraduate student, I took an Inside-Out class at a women’s correctional facility in New York State. Half of the approximately 20-person class consisted of ‘inside’ (incarcerated) students, and the other half were ‘outside’ students from my college. The course was team-taught by two professors in the Sociology and Women’s Studies Departments respectively, on the topic of family, gender, and policy. It was an eye-opening experience, both in the physical process of traveling to, entering into, and taking a class in prison, and also in the relational aspect of learning with and from people so seemingly different—and in many ways wiser—than my college peers.
The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program was founded by Lori Pompa in 1997, through Temple University, based on the suggestion of Paul Perry, who was incarcerated at SCI-Dallas. Its stated aim is to facilitate “dialogue and education across profound social differences through courses held inside prison, involving students from a higher education setting and incarcerated students.” It has since grown into an international program, with 76 trainings of more than 1200 professors from over 250 colleges in 47 states and 12 countries, having run approximately 700 courses for 60,000 students to date.
In Fall 2007, 14 UM-Dearborn students enrolled in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange class taught by Sociology Professor Lora Lempert; joined by 14 men at the Ryan Correctional Facility in Detroit. The Inside-Out program at UM-Dearborn now offers an Inside-Out Exchange class every Fall and Winter Term in Sociology and Criminal Justice.
Needless to say, I was excited to learn that the Inside-Out program was well-established when I joined as a (mathematics) faculty member in Fall 2020. But some changes had taken place since its beginning in 2007: First, the Ryan Correctional Facility closed this year, though the Inside-Out program has been running at the Macomb Correctional Facility for the past few years; second, and perhaps more importantly, outside access to prisons has been completely closed since the COVID-19 pandemic. Prisons have been well-known to be hotspots of coronavirus infections, though most recently vaccination rates in prisons have sometimes exceeded that of the states they are located in.
Nonetheless, I was able to participate in a virtual Inside-Out training last month, where trainees met virtually with “coaches,” formerly incarcerated Inside-Out alumni. (Before, the training would be done in person at a prison with coaches on the inside.) The training was intensive but extremely rewarding. My session was led by Lori Pompa herself, co-facilitated by Jeri Kirby from Fairmont State University and five coaches. We met virtually from 10am to 5pm (with breaks), Sunday to Friday for one full week.
The training was a blend of hands-on activities that partly attempted to simulate activities that would be done in a regular Inside-Out class, activities that work to break down barriers between inside and outside students and challenge assumptions that each party may have about the other. Indeed, the week was structured in such a way as to mimic a condensed version of an Inside-Out class. We began the week with a gauntlet of ice-breaking and norm-setting exercises, discussing topics such as brave spaces, identity, and privilege, then moved onto logistical aspects of running an Inside-Out class and developing an in-class activity as our “final group project.” The practice of developing an activity was important in working through ideas and assumptions about what may or may not work well (or at all) in a prison setting.
On the last day, we also workshopped ideas on what we might teach as an Inside-Out class. While the program is often viewed in the context of criminal justice and sociology, various other courses have been taught, ranging from poetry to history to, yes, mathematics. For example, I was able to have discussions on how a math-related class might be taught: learning to interpret and critique statistics, how data can be biased, misused, and manipulated, and the social history of datasets, such as from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI.
While the virtual environment removed the physical experience of entering into a prison, we were still able to have crucial discussions on the issues that arise during this process, which is an important component of the course. Through the process of entering into a prison, which is the literal site of the carceral state, you are forced to confront it on its terms: obeying prescribed dress-codes for men and women, being sorted as either men or women when passing through security, convincing the prison administration that you pose no threat to the security of the prison or its day-to-day operations.
Yet, one of the goals of the program is to humanize the people who are incarcerated within the system. We do not enter into the prison to study the people there in yet another dehumanizing act, but rather to learn with and from them. One of the Inside-Out rules is to never inquire into the reason as to why any individual person is inside. While this may seem surprising, both inside and outside students are interviewed by the instructors and then selected to participate in the class. Moreover, contact between inside and outside students after the end of the course is also forbidden, in order to safeguard against problems that may arise. On the other hand, alumni on the inside and outside have often continued to organize meetings on their own, called Think Tanks, where they are able to continue their intellectual pursuits.
The Inside-Out program puts people together who would otherwise never have contact. While the program has no explicit aims to reform or abolish the prison system, it is quietly revolutionary in the way that it changes the lives of both the inside and outside students. Within the long history of seemingly faraway dreams to defund the police and end mass incarceration, to abolish both the military and prison industrial complexes, lies the plain fact that lives continue to be lived on the inside, with hope and resilience in an atmosphere of surveillance and violence. There is no substitute for this contact.
I hope to be able to teach an Inside-Out class in the near future, to put my training to good use.
Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash
Estimated reading time from Niram