The youngster appeared in front of my tiny “house” on an afternoon when I was short on patience and long on aggravation. All of his possessions were inside a pillowcase slung over his shoulder.
“I'm your new cellie,” he informed me. “Jackson's my name and crack's my game.”
“Perfect ...” I mumbled to myself, looking at a kid half my age, a “drive-up” in prison slang. Just what I needed, a 20-year-old street punk sharing my 5' x 9' cubicle.
He swaggered around the cellblock flaunting that hollow bravado common to many young men thrown into a predatory prison environment. No doubt he had heard gruesome stories about life in Texas prisons.
Fortunately, we worked different jobs, and different shifts, allowing occasional cell privacy. Quickly figuring out that I wasn't interested in his fictions, Jackson stayed on his bunk, pacified by television. There was no animosity on my part, just no interest in lame conversation.
One thing I did notice. He would perk up when the guard came around our cell at mail call. But there was never anything for Jackson. A couple of times he had commented sarcastically about all the letters I wrote, and the stack of magazines and books cluttering my shelf space.
A day came when Jackson did get a letter. Lying on my lower bunk, I could hear him above, rattling the pages while I flipped through a new magazine. He swung his bare feet off the upper bunk and hopped to the concrete floor, sitting down on the porcelain toilet.
With unusual meekness he asked, “Say man, you got a minute?”
“What for?”
“Would you read my momma's letter to me?”
I was just able to hold back the question—You can't read? But surprise surely registered on my face. It always comes as an astonishing revelation to encounter an adult American who is functionally illiterate.
“Sure,” I told him. The letter was two simple pages from a mother worried about her boy confined in a harsh world of bricks and bars. He was silent after I read the final few words: “We love you, son. Be careful and come home soon, Momma.”
“Would you help me write back to her?” he asked. Gone was the cocky criminal, replaced by a sad, vulnerable youngster barely out of his teens. I hesitated, then made a decision.
“Yeah, I'll write the letter, but it's going to cost you.”
“How much?” he asked suspiciously. Everything costs something in the penitentiary.
“An hour of your time, every night at lock up. You're gonna learn to read and write.”
He looked hard at me. “What's the catch?”
“You've got nothing but time,” I reminded him. “Might as well get something out of being here.”
“You won't tell nobody?” he asked sheepishly.
“Isn't anybody's business.”
“Deal!” he said, sticking out his hand to seal the bargain.
“Dear Momma ...”
Jackson obviously hadn't absorbed much in the six years he attended school. The basic alphabet was a cloudy concept. His written vocabulary was barely double digit.
But within a few weeks, two things were readily apparent: I had a lot to learn about patience, and Jackson was a very bright young man.
He attacked our project with determination. Instead of watching “Gilligan's Island” reruns, he practiced the alphabet, printing out page after page of characters, then progressing to short words. He copied countless sentences from magazines and tried to decipher the words syllable by syllable. I watched with amusement, and a little pride, as he discovered the magic of language.
One night he handed me a piece of notebook paper. “Would you check this out, Teach? I want it to be right.” Somewhere along the way he had nicknamed me Teach, certainly preferable to the “Pop” most youngsters shoot at us middle-aged cons.
“Dear Momma,” he had printed carefully in pencil, “This is my first letter to you. My friend Teach helps me learn words. I miss you and Nadine. Love, Mike.”
“It's perfect,” I told him. Jackson's wide smile of accomplishment let me glimpse what motivates many men and women to spend their lives in education.
That was several years ago. Jackson has long since gone back to “the world” on parole. During two years “inside,” he became an insatiable reader who kept a tattered paperback dictionary always within reach. Unlike most men who come to prison, he left a little better for the experience.
From Kindergarten to Crack Dealer
In 16 years of incarceration I've seen thousands of “Jacksons” come and go. Hiding behind a shoddy facade of brashness, they have little respect for themselves or anyone else. Their self-confidence is remarkably fragile.
Diagnostic testing by Texas prison personnel indicates that the average education level of an inmate is shy of the 6th grade. That discouraging estimate is most likely too optimistic, judging from the people I've encountered while living here. According to U.S. Justice Department statistics, the majority have committed nonviolent property or drug-related crimes.
Surrounded by these failed young people (their average age is 24), I have often asked myself what has happened out there in the world? The 19-year-old eating next to me in the chow hall may be a burglar now, or a car thief, or worse. But how did that happen?
There was a day when these young men were 6-year-olds going to school each day, playing ball in the park, and riding bikes up and down neighborhood streets. Once upon a time they were kids. When did they become armed robbers and crack dealers? At what critical instant in time were they transformed into criminals?
Without opening a tangled can of sociological and economic worms, it is obvious that somebody, somewhere, let these kids down. At some point they fell through the cracks in our educational system. They grew to young adulthood with no interest in literature or history, tying their dreams instead to icons in shoe commercials. Their comprehension of geography is limited to the mean streets of Houston or Dallas, their heros a product of incessant media fusillades.
More than a million persons now reside in America's jails and prisons, a 50 percent increase in little more than a decade. The majority of inmates are barely literate. Mentioning Thomas Paine, Scott Fitzgerald, or Franklin Roosevelt brings only the vaguest hint of recognition to their faces. Simple geometry and basic chemistry might as well be foreign languages.
Whatever happened when they were young, it is too late to point fingers of blame. Those children are history. But it is not too late to save the kids now taking those first important steps into the educational process.
In the economically troubled '90s, when parents are often too busy or too disinterested, teachers have an increasingly vital role in forming the value systems of young persons. First, teachers themselves must never discount their own impact as role models. And second, instructors can provide fertile young minds with real heros to admire in a time of fantasy and violence. The tremendous accomplishments of an Albert Einstein or a Barbara Jordan, presented with fervor to youngsters, can launch a new generation of aspirations.
Build Minds, Not Prisons
How can this best be accomplished? By teaching from the heart. By hooking kids on the magic of words, challenging them to learn from the mistakes historians record. By addicting them to the infinite harmonies of mathematics. By infecting them with the desire to know, before they can become entangled with cocaine and commercialism.
Awareness is an automatic consequence of education: the more we know, the more we examine and question. Knowledge breeds confidence and self-esteem. Children captivated by the learning process will more closely dissect the shallow values of those who would lead them astray. Instead of falling into the web of contrived media culture, motivated young students will challenge and explore, stepping into adulthood as independent, creative thinkers.
In lieu of society building prisons to incarcerate its failures of the future, educators can build minds. If every year a single child could be derailed from a life of crime by each teacher in America, the impact would be tremendous.
Teachers are sculptors of our tomorrows. They have, as Horace Mann knew, an awesome responsibility. The father of modern educational theory, knowing that teachers mold lives, said with his final breath, “Be ashamed to die until you have served humanity.”
