It began with a tentative, almost furtive, request. A young face, glancing up and down the hall, a quiet voice: “You must have some decent books. Do you loan them out? I've read everything Michener wrote. But there's nothing in the library I want to read.”
Little wonder. The sparse collection here included a few Harlequin romances, 30 or 40 tattered volumes of Reader's Digest condensed books, a set of hymnals, a half dozen Bibles. My friend had obviously read his Micheners in another time and place.
Over the next few months, with permission from the administration, four of us met to formulate a campaign. Visiting preachers were asked to collect books from their congregations. The local newspaper was persuaded to run a front page story. Used books began to materialize at the office door—cartons, bundles, plastic shopping bags full of them.
Realizing belatedly what we already knew—that this campaign would work if we simply did it—the maintenance crew built the shelves that had been promised. One morning, I heard drills and hammers and saws; my Michener friend rushed past with a couple of two-by-fours, a broad grin on his face. Those evenings when we could work, our group sorted the loot by genre, coded their spines with colored duct tape, and grouped them by category for hassle-free browsing. And still they came. More shelves were built—some 40 feet of them to date, holding more than 2,000 volumes.
And whenever our team was allowed to meet in the library, we noticed, with quiet satisfaction, the gaps in the solid rows of books that proved they were being borrowed. Then the jailer would return us to our cells and lock us down.
My own cell is 6 1/2 cement blocks wide by 12 1/2 blocks long. No windows. Its grey walls and grey cement floor are illuminated by a single overhead bulb. A metal cot the width of an Amtrak economy class roomette sleeper is bolted to the floor.
Seasons pass unseen. This evening as I write, new daffodils outside are disappearing under fresh snow. I have not seen this, but the guard has told me it is so. As the time crawls by, I have been struck by the number of ways that life inside this place mimics that in the public schools in which I taught. That would be no news to Erving Goffman, but it has hit me like a brick.
A Mirror of Our Values
One obvious parallel is the cast of characters. To a certain extent, the procedures of a local jail are influenced by a state board, as are those of the local schools. More directly, the two institutions are overseen by county commissioners and a board, whose agents, respectively, are the sheriff and the deputies, and the principals and their assistants. The jailers are the teachers, the runarounds are the aides, the inmates are the students. And all are driven by the demands and values of the voting public they serve. As Jean Harris wrote, “Prisons, like schools, do not create values; they mirror them, something the average citizen is not comfortable being told” (1988).
The fact that those demands and values are in conflict is the primary reason there is no national prison philosophy, just as there is no national education philosophy. Which butts us right up against the central parallel between the two institutions: their agony over a philosophy to embrace. The options for each look very similar, and, with inevitable variations, they sort into three clusters, which could be called responsive, rigid, and rootless.
To the responsive side one would gather those prisons and schools that believe the end product of their efforts should be men and women who both integrate and activate the disciplines in the real world; who know how to approach and apply new information; and who want to make a positive contribution to a humane and environmentally sensitive society.
Staff members within such institutions believe that their captive populations are basically “good.” The methods of interaction that they employ are democratic and collaborative—methods that model desired outcomes. These methods have historical roots that validate their efforts: turn-of-the-century prison reformers, or the John Deweys. Prisons call such efforts rehabilitation; schools call them Education (upper case “E” because the agenda is broad and its methods idealistic).
To the rigid side are collected the prisons and schools that strive for an end product that educationally is well grounded in basic skills and facts—ready to go on to college or enter the work force—and socially is docile or malleable. These institutions believe that many goals embraced by the responsive group (parenting skills, interpersonal relationships) serve only to distract from the business at hand.
Staff members in these institutions operate from the conviction that their population is flawed: “Turn your backs on them for an instant and they'll steal everything that's not nailed down; they'll destroy the building and themselves.” Treatments that many outside would regard as inhumane are easily justified. In prisons: “They're criminals, for God's sake. They've lost their rights. Violence? Deprivation? It's no less than they deserve.” In these types of schools it's not so different: “They're kids, for God's sake. They don't have any rights yet. They haven't earned better treatment, and if they got it, they'd abuse it.”
As with the responsive side, there are deep historical roots. Prisons call this punishment; schools call it education (lower case “e” because it's more limited in its aspirations).
A third, huge grouping of prisons and schools has no clearly defined operating philosophy and thus is rootless. Jailers/teachers do what they want within broad boundaries. Some are flexible in their approach; some aren't. Some are generous; others aren't. Some will try a new strategy; some won't.
Their institution is just there; its routines reflect a little bit of this, a little bit of that. If there is a central mission to its existence, it is linked to a societal plea: “Just keep them off the streets. We don't really care what you do while you have them.”
It is this impulse that the new superintendent of the Chicago public schools played upon, perhaps unwittingly, when she said on a recent television talk show, “If we don't get the money we need from the legislature, Chicago's schools will go into receivership, and there will be 410,000 kids on the street.” Just the thought of it is enough to silence all discussion of loftier goals and send a collective shudder through the populace. Same with prisons.
In their most responsible forms, both the responsive and the rigid options are driven by goals and procedures against which routines and rules are regularly examined. Such specific expression of the vision is critical, for it provides a certain clarity. It enables people to say, “We say we want rehabilitation, but then we express that goal through a staff-designed roadside trash removal program that is so demeaning that it has the opposite of the intended effect.” Or, “We say we want Education, but when visitors come to our school, they see rooms full of kids doing repetitious seatwork. Let's look at that practice against the principles we all agreed to employ; and then either document it, evaluate the results, and revise accordingly—or change our vision.” The ideal, in other words, generates yardsticks that are much more than high-minded statements drafted for the sake of appearance, or in order to receive accreditation.
The Genie Escapes the Bottle
One does not have to see mission statements to determine which of the three groupings an institution is inclined toward. One has only to hang out and observe the practices. Both of the public schools where I spent 26 years teaching, and the prison where I have spent nearly a year, made the same choice; and again, the parallels are startling. All physical movement of inmates, like students, for example, is restricted and monitored. Three times a week, for one hour, weather permitting, the inmates here are guided down a narrow hall to a fenced-in cage outdoors, which once served as a parking lot for four cars. From outside the fence, a guard watches us as closely as a 3rd grade teacher would patrol a playground.
This pervasive scrutiny extends to every aspect of the inmate's life, just as it did to the lives of the students I taught. As in schools, the rules and routines here are devised with no input from the inmates. The rare supplemental programs exist here only because some outside authority mandates them. Such is the case with the small GED class offered on Monday evenings. The attitude of the jailers toward such programs makes it clear they would be immensely unburdened if they “just went away.”
Most requests from inmates—and students—if not dismissed outright, are debated endlessly by the authorities, usually with the same conclusion. Out in the yard are a few weights for those making a futile attempt to stay in shape. One week, when rain confined us indoors for six days, an inmate requested permission to bring a 40-pound barbell into his cell. The request was debated for days. “If he has a weight, other inmates will want the same privilege. If we put him and the weight in the bullpen so everyone can have access, there might be a fight.” Finally the answer came down from on high: “We regret to inform you that after careful consideration of your request....”
If several inmates had been brought into a discussion about use of the weights indoors, a quick compromise might have unfolded, but the opportunity never arose. Occasionally in a school or prison, one comes across some attempt at a “representative democracy”—token student or inmate representatives on an advisory council—but only rarely does it have any power.
In here, the threat of punishment hangs over the building like a whip. Naive inmates who have a “What can they do to me? I'm already in prison” attitude are warned of solitary confinement. Those who refuse to cooperate are simply sent to another institution. My schools had parallel, though certainly less severe, options: in-school suspension and alternative schools.
Based on the above examples, one might conclude that these institutions are rigid. That conclusion, however, ignores a blatant discrepancy—an aberration that the definition will not accommodate. In here, that ugly duckling is the library project; in the schools where I taught, it was the existence of programs like Foxfire. In a rigid structure, none would have been allowed, for in these cases, the projects were designed and executed by the captive populations, who were allowed by the administration to confront the fact that they can make a contribution to the quality of life therein. The genie, in other words, was allowed to escape the bottle.
To complete the classification, then, one must deal with the fact of the genie. In a responsive situation, such programs would be the norm. In a rigid institution, one simply would not find them, unless they were carefully crafted manipulations disguised to fool the population into a more willing acceptance of the larger, rigid agenda. In a rootless prison or school, such projects might be allowed as long as they wouldn't “put the ship on the reef.” If the institution were inclined to actually move toward one of the other two choices, though, a project like the library would be a defining moment: “Let's take a close look at this thing and see why it was successful, and then apply those lessons to the rest of our work”; or “That's enough of that garbage. Now everybody's going to want to do such things.”
In my experience in basically rootless but rigid-leaning places, the moment a truly collaborative program blooms in the institutional crabgrass, a move has been made to prevent its spread, to explain it away as a fluke. Despite initial administrative enthusiasm here for the library, it took only a few days to realize that once it was done, the inmates wanted to use it, and that inconvenienced the jailers who had to lock and unlock the cells. Thus regulations had to be imposed: “Henceforth, the library can only be used before supper, and only on those days which are not visitors' days, and only for an hour at a time, and then only at the pleasure of the jailer.” Since there is only one jailer whom it pleases, the library now stands pretty much unused, and subsequent initiatives from the inmate team for new projects have been ignored. Despite national acclaim, the principles behind the Foxfire program did not spread within the school.
In the case of both projects, the rigid-leaning administrators should have been able to foresee the problems before giving permission, which raises an interesting question: “Why did they say yes?”
Assuming that they did foresee potential problems and assuming that at least part of the reason for permission was an “it will be good for the inmates/students” impulse, one can hypothesize three other factors at least.
First, the project would cost the prison/school virtually nothing. The library project needed only some lumber, which was stockpiled in the county shop anyway; and the labor to build the shelves was provided by inmates on community service. Foxfire paid its own way through community donations and sales.
Second, the project would not disrupt the ordinary routines. Library activities were at the pleasure of jailers; Foxfire business in the beginning was conducted primarily after school hours.
Third, the project would generate good public relations and media attention for the overall institution, and positive attention of any sort is welcomed in a climate where prisons and schools are favorite targets for criticism, either separately, or joined: “When schools fail, prisons swell.”
In other words, in the absence of that yardstick, it was hard to say no. Then the genie was out.
Fulfilling the Hunger Within
More responsive institutions believe that the wiser course is to take the energy that powers such work and spread it. The enthusiasm that swelled in response to the library and Foxfire was nourished by water drawn from a deep, cold well that exists in nearly all humans: the desire to make a difference, to be involved in work that matters, to feel a sense of belonging and efficacy. As Viktor Frankl, Nazi death camp survivor and world-renowned psychiatrist wrote, “Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life. [What he needs is] the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task” (1984).
That hunger can be fulfilled through either socially responsible or antisocial pursuits. One finds meaning through career and relationships with similarly committed colleagues; one joins a gang, earns the colors, and helps dominate a neighborhood. In positive or negative ways, though, that hunger will find an outlet, or the individual dies inside.
The schools and prisons I have known frustrate that impulse to seek meaning, and the reaction of much of the captive population is identical in each: “Let's do something instead of sitting around.” Of course, they are doing plenty. In here they are watching television and reading magazines—for years; in school they are listening to teachers talk and taking notes—for years. But that's not the doing they are hungry for. They want work that lifts the spirit and is bigger than any of the individuals separately involved.
I wouldn't have believed that of prisoners before I was incarcerated. Now I am sure of it. Once the library project was under way, inmates who spent their days alternately sleeping and whining came to life. In the mornings they would shout down the hall toward my cell, with childlike enthusiasm, “Did any more books come in today? See if you can get us out so we can do some work.” And months later, a team member wrote me from the state prison to which he had been taken: “I really miss the library construction days and the color coding of the books we used to do up there in county jail.”
I wouldn't have believed it of teenagers, either. If my teaching career is destined to stand for anything, I hope it is remembered not for an attempt to talk kids into doing wonderful work, but to respond to their innate desire to do so. Certainly one of many such high points would be the team of 9th and 10th graders I worked with who, by the time they graduated, had created three separate books published by Doubleday: A Foxfire Christmas, Foxfire: 25 years, and Foxfire 10.
In schools across the country, thousands of teachers have had a similar revelation: students in whom no teachers or administrators have placed much confidence get involved in a program they help shape, and are transformed to the amazement of the adult skeptics all around them. Principals like Dennis Littkey and Deborah Meier and George Wood know, as does the staff of the Harlem Boys Choir School, and as do reformers like Ted Sizer and Ann Lieberman and Linda Darling-Hammond and their staffs.
In their most complex and elegant forms, such efforts are not supplementary to the educational program but, rather, are direct expressions of the curriculum in action: a publishing operation that is the means by which literacy and math is taught; a recycling program that is not something the PTA thought would be nice for the school to do but that has kids thoughtfully doing science. Work that has a simultaneous triple agenda: first, to teach basic skills and content. Second, to address a key deficiency identified in inmates by the American Correctional Association (and common in public school studies as well): “Offenders' cognitive skills have been identified as a major reason for incarceration.... Offenders fail to identify problems, identify alternatives, select solutions, and carry out their choices.” Act responsibly, in other words (February 1993).
And third, to channel that human hunger into meaningful work. To rehabilitate. To Educate. To rearrange people's molecules.
Such work, though, the hallmark of responsive institutions, remains relatively rare.
Why Few Flowers Grow in Concrete
Why? Here again, the reasons both prisons and schools give are parallel. In fact, the arguments against such initiatives by prison officials could easily be placed into the mouths of those who argue against school restructuring.
There are those administrators, for example, who genuinely believe in the opposing, rigid philosophy. With experience, research, and statistics to reinforce their chosen direction, they are consciously working to make their rigid approach even more effective. They are running the West Points of the prison or the public school system, and as long as they are having West Point-like results, few will argue with them.
The institutions I'm familiar with, however, are not West Points, and their reasons for leaning toward the rigid seem less out of thoughtful conviction then out of a desire for ease of operation; less like philosophy and more like excuse.
Some are staff related: “A more responsive style would be an improvement, but with the current demands on staff already, I can't ask them to do more.” Or, “Half my staff members wouldn't agree with such changes. They'd fight them all the way.” Or, “Our staff doesn't know how to do what you're talking about, and the amount of time and effort it would take to retrain them would be staggering.” (Okay. One has to ask, though, who is the institution supposed to serve: the staff and its convenient routines or the captive population? And if a staff doesn't know how, then when and where would one propose it learn?)
Some are financial: “We'd have to add substantially to our staff, not to mention extra funds for materials and supplies. Where's the additional money supposed to come from?” (Okay, but the responsive initiatives I'm familiar with have not cost the institution itself any additional funds. Human and financial resources have simply been allocated differently, or additional funds have come from new sources such as donations or revenue from the sale of products.)
Some reasons are unproved assumptions like, “Inmates won't take it seriously. They'll abuse the spirit of cooperation.” (Okay, but although both inmates and students are wondrously adept at “conning” authority, I've seen much less of that happening in a responsive atmosphere, where inmates and students monitor one another, than I have in a rigid atmosphere where both inmates and students pull any stunt they can think of to get out of an unpleasant situation. In here, for example, the inmates were so aware that the library project they had conceived of and initiated was an important experiment that they were excessively attentive to the rules and regulations of the jail. And it is important to note that this team consisted of a forger and two men facing life sentences for murder. (I've seen the same thing happen hundreds of times with students who most teachers wouldn't allow to get a drink of water unsupervised.)
Some are conclusions based on unhappy experience: “You have to understand; this just does not work with our type of inmate/kid. They want to be told what to do. They just want to do their time/get their grades and go home.” Or, “We tried this once, but it turned into chaos.” This response is a tough one because the pain of failure is often so raw and fresh, and because the reasons for failure are usually so multifaceted and site specific, but let me take a quick crack at some of the most common:
Some jailers and teachers enter the field without high ideals. It's a job. When a new, complex approach is forced on them, their attempt to implement it is so half-hearted that it is doomed to failure.
Many, many jailers and teachers, though, enter prisons and classrooms with the highest ideals. A more responsive approach is attractive to them because it is often consistent with their ideals, and thus they are particularly vulnerable. They want so much for a collegial, positive approach to work that when it fails—when they ask inmates or students for their ideas, and they sit there mystified and silent—the jailers and teachers are crushed, resentful, sometimes even vindictive. And believe me, I understand. As a teacher, I've been there. Nothing hurts worse than to put all your energy into creating a great experience for kids and then have them laugh at you, or let you down.
Usually there are logical reasons for the failure, though; reasons that will surface upon calm examination with the participants. The inmates/students couldn't come up with great ideas because they didn't know how. The work degenerated because something was wrong in the design process (somehow it had become the teacher's project instead of theirs), and they no longer valued the work. Or, never having done anything like this, they didn't have the personal strategies to keep the work moving. All those reasons, by the way, are among the strongest arguments for a responsive approach. If inmates/students can't make mistakes on their leaders, and acquire through mistakes the thinking skills they lack, then they may be condemned to be the kinds of people who cannot act responsibly without being told exactly what to do.
Ultimately, though, arguments against a responsive approach come down to the fact that most jailers/teachers have never experienced it themselves as either students or professionals. They don't have a clue as to what it looks like when it's going well, much less how to make it happen. Need confirmation? Talk to anyone deeply involved in prison reform or school restructuring.
Turning the System Upside Down
So why bother to be more responsive? Well, for starters, the arguments that say “Don't bother us” have the end result of creating a great deal of bother indeed.
In the absence of an environment that inspires and engages, inmates and students soon ask, “Is this all there is?” For inmates, it comes after the shock of incarceration is replaced by a numb throbbing in the soul. Having suffered as much self-loathing as he or she can stand, an inmate finally asks, “Now what do I do? Spend the next five years staring at a wall?” For students, it comes with the realization that most courses are driven by the same flat, grey routines. The student says, “I'm supposed to spend how many years doing this? You are kidding, right?”
At this flashpoint, both populations divide into parallel subgroups:
One is made up of drones—those who for whatever reason grit their teeth and endure. They shuffle through the days without enthusiasm, doing what they are told, holding grimly to an expectation of some vague reward, but largely convinced that the time they are actually serving is life on hold. A second group becomes overly resentful, doing all it can to undermine the system and make life miserable for those in charge. A third group embraces the situation, as bad as it may be, as an opportunity for personal improvement despite obstacles that would impede progress or even discourage such behavior. They are the jailhouse birdmen, the Thomas Mertons, or the students every teacher dreams about but also dreads, knowing how poorly he or she will serve them.
Setting the third group aside, one finds that for the vast majority, the phrase “life in prison” or “life in school” is an oxymoron. It is life in a basic sense: a heart beats, blood flows, a brain records and processes stimuli and forms perceptions and attitudes. But it's life at the —s, stripped of contact with nature, normal human interaction, celebration—those elements that give us reason to anticipate tomorrow with laughter, to stay alive.
In fact, in a county jail like this one, most inmates do not get up when morning comes. Just as many students hate to go to school, so, too, inmates can't stand the thought of it—“Get up? What for?”—and they sleep until suppertime when the television programs are slightly more stimulating. One of my best friends here, a man convicted of aggravated assault and a double murder, says, “When I was outside I slept six hours a day. Always on the job and doing things with my wife and kid. In here, I sleep 15 hours a day; it's the only way to escape.”
Denied anything of substance to do, inmates are quickly reduced to a state of infantilism, obsessive desire for instant gratification (“I want a Tylenol/a Coke/a stamp/a phone call—now!)” and, often not finding satisfaction, an attitude of perpetual snivelling and griping. Wars coalesce around trivia: “The son of a bitch broke my comb!” The endless hassles simply lead to more rules, feeding an endless spiral of stupidity. As the guards become more impatient, some even turn to cruelty, which simply intensifies the frustrations on both sides—all of this evil stew kept in simmering, bubbling check by force and by the simple threat of having to do more time.
And then one day you wake up to a terrible realization: you are getting used to noise, obscenity, stupidity, the random and unpredictable lightning flashes of petty vindictiveness, the absence of joy, the utter extinction of love. You find the environment reinforcing terrible habits like conning, bumming, lying, bragging, manipulating. Like a character out of Kafka, you are being transformed into something coarse and insensitive—encased in scales instead of skin.
You and the other inmates, in fact, have become the proud creations of the environment itself. The jailers have created a dependent population that is sometimes passive, sometimes petulant and petty, sometimes rebellious and devious. They have actually caused the behaviors they abhor.
It is not so different in schools I have known. More than all this, however, is an effect that may be far worse. In an environment that is not purposeful and positive, inmates—and students—may come to believe that such an environment is not a possibility; or if it does exist, they couldn't be part of it. That they are doomed to a life that is second-class at best, and possibly, criminal.
I used to laugh when a kid said, “This place is like a prison.” I won't ever laugh at that again. Rather I'll wonder why so many schools treat students like prisoners when they haven't committed any crimes.
I suppose I could be more enthusiastic about the more rootless, rigid leaning of most schools and prisons if the end results were more persuasive, and the rates of recidivism, and the national test scores, and the ethical and creative calibre of graduates were moving in the directions we hope for. And I suppose I could be more enthusiastic if I had not actually seen, through the lens of a career, the results of work in more responsive environments when we as inmates, or as teachers, with our students, sit exhausted, grinning at one another in the joy of a race well run—a race that, though difficult, may literally and figuratively have just saved our lives. Granted, it may not work for all, but if we had a vaccine that cured AIDS in one third of the sufferers to whom it was given, and it had no negative side effects on the others, would we withhold it?
Every early elementary school classroom is full of embryonic criminals. It's as natural for little kids to lie and steal as it is for them to breathe. They cheat, fight, show disrespect, and harass each other sexually as free of guilt as if they had just eaten a hot dog. Until intervention. The only question becomes, then, what style?
It is the same question prison administrators must ask. The fact is that no matter what their crime, most prisoners will get out. So will the students. And when they emerge from captivity, what does society receive? The fact is that the two institutions are in bed together. And they are producing offspring.
