My Experience Teaching in Prisons (part 1)

I've had a number of viewers asked me about my time teaching in prison which actually was my first full-time teaching job and went on for six years at Indiana State Prison so I've decided I'm going to start shooting some some videos about that I haven't really talked much about that on video just in some of my classes with some of my students from time to time mine on Prison students and I've done a few presentations here and there about it yeah conferences but for the most part I haven't actually sat down and just focused on what the experience of teaching in prison was like and I'm not going to try to hit everything in this single video so I think I'll do maybe a set of these talking about different aspects and this one I'm just going to tell you about what it was like when I first started out yeah and so a little bit of backtracking is necessary I finished up with my my graduate work in 2002 down at Southern Illinois University and by then I was kind of burnt out on being in school and I wanted to get out of Carbondale and I moved to Northwestern Indiana and just started looking for work up there applying in when I had that at that time I thought was a two mile radius actually I sent out things a little bit further because I was estimating how long it would actually take to drive to places wrong and one of the places that I applied to it was Ball State University and I didn't know at the time but Indiana back in the early 2000s was actually one of the nation's leader in prison education you hear a lot about you know other prison initiatives and about people teaching here and there but at that time Indiana was the state that probably had the most programs for its inmates and it wasn't very you know it wasn't super selective it was trying to get as many people into degree programs as possible and the idea was it was going to cover sitov ism and it really did have some influence sitov ism it's unfortunate that they don't have the the programs in place the way that they used to there were a lot of decisions that got made that cut those or you know shrunk them quite a bit anyway Ball State at that time he had about a hundred and thirty professors full-time professors who worked for extended education in the prison systems so they were all across the state of Indiana and I got a call from the chair of the philosophy and religious studies department saying hey we've got a job we need somebody to replace the person who just left up at Indiana State Prison which is Michigan City which was about an hour from where I was living at the time and a long ways from Ball State so Ball State was having a difficult time getting people to drive all the way up there that usually have to stay overnight and then they would teach you know one or two full days and then drive back down to Ball State so it was actually a good situation for me that particular prison any of the other prisons would have been at least two hours you know two and a half hours for me to drive and she you know the chair said are you interested in doing this you'd have to teach this wide array of classes but we looked at your your your CV and we looked at your cover letter then you seem like you'd be well equipped for this do you have any problem with teaching in an institutional setting and I said well you know I'm ex-military and I've lived in a lot of fairly you know unsavory or rough places so no I wouldn't really bother me too much so she said okay well sign you up and it was you know decent salary to start with so I took it on I'm going to sort of fast forward a little bit the next thing that I had to do was to go to orientation and I think you know we had an orientation at Ball State University so I did drive my phone out that was like two and a half hours from from where I was living but then we have an orientation at Indiana State Prison that was led by this this guy who'd been there for a long time as name's Gus and so I get there and I'm always you know arriving at places early because I you know I want to find out what's going on and make sure that I'm there on time so I was there maybe about 20 minutes early and there were quite a few other professors there for the orientation this was a yearly thing that we had to to do I would say there are probably about 25 to maybe 30 different professors there and so these were all the people who are going to be teaching at that prison that year and you had to go through a lot of Hoops you had to get background check you had to get fingerprinted you had to you know apply for four different things you had to go and get a badge that would allow you to get in and out of the prisons and some of that was being handled in the orientation some that we did we did beforehand the orientation was primarily to sort of touch base with us tell us about any new policy changes and then sort of assimilate those of us who hadn't been in the prison before and we showed up and you you know you'd go inside we met in this this locker room and I'll tell you a little bit about the structure of the prison in more detail a little bit later so and then we went through the first you know sort of security checkpoint area where you get your frisk you got you got to take all the things out of your pockets sometimes take your belt off definitely take your shoes off all that sort of stuff and then you have to go through a Sally point and you have to go through the captains office and then you go through these sets of cages that open and close and then we went to the chapel and that's where we have the orientation one of the things that Gus said that that he begins with every time is there's only two good things in prison that you can count on one is religion and the other is education everything else that these guys experience is at best mediocre and can get much much much much worse so this is something the education is something that many of these these men in the prison really look forward to and threw themselves into I have a little bit of a digression here I want to tell you about something else as well I showed up and I was dressed in suit and tie and I generally taught while I was working in the prison if I wasn't in a suit and tie and at least a jacket and tie because for me there well there were several reasons for this I I generally dress up when I'm in the classroom anyway even today you know 10 years later and I do it in part because I want to convey that what we're engaged in is a serious academic pursuit that we're not just screwing around or something like that and I think it's also in part a reaction against the kind of let's dress everything down you know a dress everybody by first name kind of stuff that that the baby boomer generation of professors kind of brought in and turned into a virtue I didn't like that when I was a student I thought there needs to actually be some legitimate distance between student and professor that the professor should be not necessarily like you know somebody who's who's up on some lofty plateau and you can't possibly reach them but they're supposed to be you know knowledgeable professional provide you with an ideal that you can then climb to and they're supposed to help you out in that way but but they have to be up there not just bringing everything down and making everything totally easy and and formal and I actually took a lot of flack from my colleagues for years for for dressing up you know they didn't like the fact that even more high I think in part because that made them feel like they were dressed up enough and a part they had that ideology okay we're here to like you know to be these moles within the system and we're gonna we're gonna liberate people's minds and all that I didn't buy into that at all I'm not you know I'm not a sort of get a law-and-order conservative to that but I don't buy any of the liberal you know all these poor prisoners there they're just totally oppressed were there to help them you know free their minds from the system I don't buy any of that stuff either and actually the prisoners hated that sort of thing too they found that very patronizing very demeaning and very alienating ironically because these people are the ones who are always talking about alienation right Hey long digression there's a connection between what you wear and what you project I don't want to project to these guys that you know these were real college classes yeah you know and some people kind of dumb their classes down but that happens on campus too Mike taught my classes is if these were you know the same class that I was teaching here as would be taught any anywhere else and I extended that to how I conducted myself in the classroom well I have wore all those sorts of things there's a story that I've told in other cases too that kind of represents the other extreme there was one professor before I came on the scene who would always wear like golf shirts and you know casual wear in coming into the prison and then one day he was actually wearing a suit and tie and he wasn't I don't think he was from Ball State he was from some other place and his students he asked him why are you so dressed up you know coming to our class and he said well after this I'm leaving and then I'm going to teach my real students and that really stuck with them this impression that they were not the the real students that they you know what they were doing there was kind of Mickey Mouse and making things easy to sort of make work kind of stuff and that you know that's destructive to any sort of education so anyway back to that to the orientation there there's long orientation and then we were clear to teach so I should tell you a little bit about Indiana State Prison before I tell you about what it was like to teach there just some kind of general stuff Indiana State Prison if you've seen lockup extended-stay you've probably seen some episode of shot at Indiana Prison and it's a very old place it's one of the oldest prisons in Indiana and it's been rebuilt in a lot of ways you know here and there but the foundations are you know over 150 years old and some of its in good shape some of its not not in such good shape you know it's it's like Gus said when we came in you know think of the Shawshank Redemption rather than odds odds is this really nice high tech fairly clean place Shawshank Redemption just bricks and barbed wire everywhere that's the way the Indiana State Prison is in old bars that have been painted like hundreds of times you know so much that they're there there's just a thickness of paint on almost lacquered on for two years now Indiana State Prison was also a maximum-security prison and it was a little bit unusual in that it's not just a maximum-security prison it's also the prison in Indiana where death row is housed we didn't have any contact with death row as a matter of fact the other prisoners generally don't either but it was there and that's where they held the execution so every once in a while there would be an execution and everything that'd be totally locked down and we wouldn't have we wouldn't have class and it would change the dynamic of the class someone and I could talk about that in some other video you know how they well the prisoners felt about this at least how they communicated that to me what we talked about those sorts of things so a maximum-security prison it's designed to keep people in and it's designed to keep people not just in as like one big box but it's designed to like choke off all the different possible ways of movement to try to keep them from hurting each other or engaging in other sorts of you know illegal or subversive activities now you you can't actually make any prison completely secure and you can't actually keep any of these guys short of putting them into a Supermax which was all different kind of animal you can't really totally control people instead the best you can do is kind of try to minimize the the likely things that are gonna happen that's that's what they did at ISP but ISP actually had quite a bit of freedom and a lot of the guys who are up there were happier being at is be than they would be at other prisons down state because those there's a whole whole conversation there that we could have as well who are the guys who were in the president who are the guys who are in my classes well most of them were there for very serious offenses typically murder that was probably the most common offense so I'm kidnapping some people were there for for rape then there was a you know two other kind of classes of people actually three so one class of people that were sort of separate from the general population were the child molesters and there were some child molesters up at Indiana State Prison they tried to you know sort of keep to themselves as much as they could because it is dangerous to be to be one of those in prison especially when you're in with a bunch of murderers right um the other thing we were there were some drug offenses some like really high sentence drug offenses that were in that prison as well not you know the rest of these were all violent offenses these were nonviolent offenses sometimes they had other things on their record like a burglary or something like that but some people were in there because they got caught with an awful lot of drugs and then there were some people who were in there in part because they their security level was raised they they got it originally for kind of small things but then they were aggressive they escaped or you know things like that and so they're there security level got bumped up and they got sent to a maximum-security prison that was kind of rare I'll tell you about one case of one guy though that I knew that was really kind of sad he was a young guy really smart guy who was in some of my classes and then he got transferred to up to another prison and while he was in jail he wasn't actually even in prison originally he was just in jail he had done a misdemeanor and he fell in with two older guys who convinced him that they'd break out and they could actually get away and do that so even though he only had a short time left on his jail sentence he was kind of young and dumb and he he broke up with these guys of course all of them got caught and now breaking out of jail that's a felony he'd go to prison for that so he got a long sentence compared to his jail sentence for breaking out of jail and he was serving part of that indiana state prison and then he was in some of my classes and i really enjoyed having him in my classes because like i said he was a really bright guy and he wanted to learn he wanted to further his education before i tell you about what it was like to teach these guys i should tell you about the the environment itself so there's two main things i'll tell you about in this video one is just like what it was like to go through and get into the education building and that what the actual classrooms were like so you can use this by sort of point of comparison to whatever your educational experience is like so you get to indiana state prison you park your cutter in a lot put your cell phone in the car anything else that you can't possibly bring in you you leave in the car including any any money over twenty bucks and then you you you know pick up your dossier or whatever you're keeping your stuff in and you walk through the gate past the big walls and these these big walls really were big giant massive walls that had concertina wire on the top and you know you're walking through you can see the different towers that they have observers and also rifle in them just in case something would happen so you go in and it's this this really big structure you go through the through the front gate and then they have a little area off to the side where there's lockers you know and that's mostly for people who are like visiting about prisoner but some professors would put things into the lockers and then you would have to go through the the main checkpoint so what the main checkpoint they're these big buckets it's kind of like going to the airport these days you know for me making the transition to the the TSA regulations and and metal detectors and the x-ray machines and all that sort of stuff that didn't really bother me because I was used to doing that on a daily basis teaching at the prison what really bothered me about it was waiting for all the all the Yahoo's in line who didn't know how to do this sort of thing and would hold up the line you know they'd forget to take their shoes off until the last minute so you would have these buckets and you would you would and you also have little little smaller metal buckets that you would put all your change and you know take off my watch and anything else and my ring you know I used to carry a classroom all the time everything would go into that as a matter of fact I quit wearing a necklace because I would have to take that off and that would be be kind of a pain so instead I would do that you have to take your shoes off your shoes go into the box your jacket of course comes off everything else that that could possibly be checked goes goes in there and you would also put all of your books supplies all that all that would have to go through a an x-ray machine and so there'd be a guard doing that you'd walk through a metal detector and you might set it off if you do you got to go back through again and then after that there would be a guard he would Pat you down and these were fairly cursory for us they Pat they they would check the the people who were visiting the prisoners a lot more thoroughly than us but I mean there were some people who still got in trouble during during this process from time to time and there were some screw-ups you know I knew a guy who several times he was a smoker and he brought through a lighter and nobody caught it and he'd be in the education building he'd be like Oh God got you know I've got contraband and this is like big contraband but usually it would go that way and then you'd have to wait show your ID and they would open up this massive door and you would walk through the Sally point and there is a an officer behind bulletproof glass and two sets of doors then usually he would you know look you over and you'd hold your ID up and then he'd open the next door after the first one was closed everything involves like you know before they opened in one door the other door closes and then you would go under the captain's office through through this this other but but every once in a while kind of at random they might actually open up this other door and then send you in to be searched more thoroughly not quite a strip search you'd have to strip down to your underwear and then they'd ask you a lot of questions and then you know you just get put everything back together and go go through but I guess they they probably caught some some people that way I never actually saw anyone get caught but that's what they would do if there's anything suspicious or sometimes you know just at random hey when you go through to the captain's office and there'd be a lot of officers kind of knowing and laughter while I get to know all the staff and that wasn't that was kind of nice it was fairly friendly but then you had to give the captain your driver's license and they would hold that while you were in there you still had your prison ID and the reason why they had that driver's license is they needed to know who was in there like a riot broke out of course there was some sort of natural disaster they'd be able to identify it this is this person here then you would go into this this kind of cage and depending on which direction you were going and after the door would close the other the other gate would open and you would go out into the yard and the yard is kind of like this it's not one big you know giant yard it's a whole whole complex of like passages and yards and different places and it was a pretty you know straight shot to the education building go to the education building there'd be a guard there with a you know massive key for a massive lock that would have to unlock that door and then you would go up and then they'd lock the door behind you the very you know security conscious and I you know I never had any problem with that myself because again I understood the purpose behind it I don't have that kind of ideology of you know power is oppressive or anything like that and I'm ex-military so I'm used to being around people who are you who are ready to use deadly force if necessary but but generally aren't going to be doing anything like that so we go up the stairs and that would be in the education building it was one big like circle with you know a couple of offices here in a lot of classrooms and then there was one central place where the the clerk was and we'd get our sheets and I'm not sure what these sheets were called our couches that's what they were we'd we get our count sheets each day and it would you know list all the prisoners and there and we'd have to like count them off at the beginning of class because part of the thing that part of what they do in the prison is they want to know where everybody is at any given point in time so you actually have to have somebody you know physically saying that person is actually here so you'd get your stuff and and by you know by a few weeks in I realized that in order to do these prison sessions because they were very long I needed something you know like I first I bring in soda but the soda didn't help because the the sugar kind of coats your vocal cords and so I started bringing I had a tea a plastic tea cup that I used and I would heat up water and bring in tea and then I you know drink tea and I also used coughed rums Ricola get to my classroom and I'd start setting up and then guys would start coming in and one thing I should tell you about this to the classes were all supposed to be seminar style so that means ideally two and a half hours once a week and the reason that they had to do things this way rather than you know like the normal college thing where you'd have like you know two times a week or three times a week for a shorter period it was a prison so education had to fit into the prison schedule and there were certain like courses of time and you know it would vary from time to time so like when I first started you could be guaranteed that morning classes would start on time and you might actually get extra time lunch classes we're really iffy and you probably wouldn't get your full two-and-a-half hours probably closer to two or an hour and a half and then the evening classes you would generally get about two hours maybe two and a half hours if nothing gets screwed up but there you know things could come along and interfere like you know maybe somebody screwed up a count and then now everybody's got to go back to their selves and you never see you have to be ready to adjust to that kind of stuff and that took a little doing on my part at first the other thing that that imposed was you had to be able to talk with these guys for two and a half hours straight no break and we were we were discouraged from allowing prisoners to like leave the classroom for any any reason because there's only one guard in the building I've never really made a big deal of that song professor who like really crack down on them because you know to Nayef hours a long time if you need to pass room to hold it all right and that's not conducive to people learning so I should talking about the classrooms now so the classrooms range at first from not so bad to terrible and you didn't want to get the terrible classrooms yeah and that you know you could like talk with the right person and you're trying to make it you know make sure that you'd actually get a decent classroom some of these classrooms were actually used for a GED they have other things you know prior to college and then some of them were used just for college classrooms and some of the classrooms could fit a lot of guys some could only fit like you know 20 and that was really packing them in close so generally the classrooms would of course have one door in you know and that was it and then there'd be a chalkboard at the very end and be like a desk and so I put all my stuff on the desk and I'd have the chalkboard to work with some had a small chalkboards I've had a big chalkboard I mean if guys had to leave for some reason they'd go out the back which was good as it didn't disrupt things too much some of the classrooms are huge and actually one was one gigantic classroom that was partitioned off which didn't work very well at all and one thing that you can say about almost all the classrooms they were noisy really really noisy part of the reason was you know it was summer and there was no air-conditioning so we had to have the windows open and that meant that you know all the sound from the outside was coming in and sometimes I could hear the other professors you know she had the students from you know one of their other classrooms and then once they actually got an air-conditioner that thing was so noisy that you'd have to shout over of course once it got cold though there was the heater and he had a shout over that so it was it was sometimes difficult to make yourself understood you had to learn how to project your voice very well how to listen another thing that that you could say about these classrooms the chalkboards were terrible they've been written on so many times that a lot of the actual truck the background on the chocolate was like flaking off there were some chalkboards that were so bad like when I was teaching logic I would actually bring in sidewalk chalk you know the big thick stuff so I could write on it and it would actually be legible for my students and they were constantly playing this trying to catch up using the you know the budgetary resources that they had to try to repair some of the chalkboards but if you got the wrong classroom you you've got a really crappy chalkboard the other thing I should mention too is chalk was rationed we have very very limited supplies and so one of the things you have to do is like scrounge chalk and then I would go to the clerk yeah you know at the beginning of some classes that you got a piece of chalk for me and it gave me one piece is he gonna make this last so you learned the economy the prison students themselves they had to do all of their writing for the most part by hand on paper that they had and that paper they were only given a limited supply but they were given a limited supply of pens everything was very scarce the other thing was that they were they were provided with textbooks but the textbooks had to come from Ball State's central extended education warehouse and we were limited to what was available in that warehouse we could request new things every once in a while and every once in a while you'd actually get something new that could be useful the guy managed to get Kofi's introduction for logic for the logic class but for the most part you were stuck with whatever they had and they might not have enough textbooks before I started some other professors actually counted having to use no textbooks just put notes up for the students and explain the material to them like you know one of my friends who taught philosophy there thought you know intro to philosophy and he was just like here's what Plato taught and if you were able to get this dialogue this is what you would see in that dialogue just imagine that's sort of teaching it's very very very old method of teaching to do that sort of thing by the time that I came in we had textbooks some of them were okay some of them weren't so good I find myself on myself having to make a lot of handouts for my students to arrange the material so that they could understand it well yeah and you know some of the classes I talk over and over and over again so I could reuse those handouts some of them I only taught a few times so you know I actually still have almost all of these handouts but they're all in old formats gonna work perfect rather than the word so let me tell you about the the students that the students were all over the man there were there were guys who a lot of guys have gotten their GEDs in the prison but that didn't mean that they weren't very smart there were some guys who really were not you know suited for college but I would say that was a very very small percentage most of these guys were it wasn't intelligence necessarily that was was the issue it was two other things one was just you know preparation for college in a lack of what we call cultural literacy and that could be a big handicap you know and I tried to sort of fill in those gaps as much as I could with with some of these guys I mean they tended to be pretty pretty appreciative of that you know they wanted most of these guys really wanted to they really saw education as something vital for themselves part of their the process of turning their lives around the other thing was motivation some guys were were less motivated some guys are very motivated some you know clearly we're all only in it because you would get a time cut if you got your associate's degree to get a year off your sentence and you would get two extra years off your sentence if you got a BA so you know going for years of college that you know kind of kills some time and you get another three years off your sentence as a result I saw a lot of guys who I know started precisely to get the time cuts who about halfway through the process something changed something clicked something you know realigned for them and they started saying oh yeah this is really good for me this is something I want to continue I wish I would have realized these last two years I've been kind of screwing around not measuring up to my potential and I've got two years left that I can actually you know really work hard and get as much of this out of this as I can so a lot of guys go through this or the transformation which I think there's something really good for them not just in terms of education but in terms of moral Reformation so anyway very wide range of abilities one of the things I really liked about Indiana State Prison I'll talk more about this some some other video so I'll just touch on it here was that there was what I would call a culture of education not just in the education department but in the cellblocks there were a lot of guys Ballston had been there for 20 or so there were a lot of guys would go on through the program a lot of older guys would kind of guide the younger guys and say this is something good for you and you know quit screwing around and don't mess with those professors you know show them respect pay attention and so there was a real value on education there's a kind of continuity there that really supported our work and our role in interacting with these guys and these guys many of them work very hard after their studies with very little to use you know in very tough circumstances I know a lot of people you know express views that why are we giving these guys a free education in prison people who say that sort of stuff generally haven't had much contact with prison education and seeing how many hoops these guys have to jump through and how hard they they actually have to work at least in the in the places that I've seen what else to talk about oh yeah that's that's sort of a good place to leave love I wanted to end by talking about something that I particularly liked about about teaching for Ball State in any M State Prison and that culture of education is one thing when you feel yourself part of a larger project something that's really meaningful something that is actually making things better even if there's a lot of setbacks there's a lot of lot a little you know inconveniences and you know indignities that you have to put up with that brings the kind of focus to your life and you know that that's part of what made the experience of teaching in prison meaningful for me the other thing that I really liked and I guess you know in part this is kind of self-centered but it also was a benefit to my students I get an opportunity to teach over 20 different classes while I was there cuz I had to teach philosophy and religious studies classes and we only have minors but I think I taught about seven seven or eight different religious studies classes I know I taught at least 12 or 13 different philosophy classes because we had to cover the entire curriculum there was me and one other guy who was who is part-time at that prison then mostly at another prison so I'm teaching a four to five classes sometimes six classes per semester at that prison and there were a lot of guys who wanted to take these these class and some of them were staple classes like intro to philosophy how to teach and then religion in American culture and world religions those are like staple classes you know they satisfy the core requirement but all the rest of them satisfied you know electives or minor requirements and so I have that like a core of guys who would just keep on taking classes and keep on taking classes and that allowed me to get to teach stuff that if I'd been in another you know four-year on-campus institution I would have been sort of pigeonhole that but like the guy who just teaches ethics and modern philosophy or I'm the guy who teaches you know critical thinking and intro and Ancients and I wouldn't have gotten to teach all of this stuff let alone to teach in two different disciplines it made me do a lot of work because I had to research because you know I'm very conscientious I had to research constantly to be able to provide my students with the best education possible and the best materials that they could learn from and it made me really grow as a professor myself there were there are other ways that it made me grow to you know I'm gonna put up with with guys who are kind of rough around the edges who knocked off a lot of my on rough edges but I really like the fact that I got to teach so many different classes and that there were guys who are interested in this stuff there was only one class that I offered that I was I was sad that it didn't make I wanted to teach a class on Allister McIntyre's after virtue and they were all sorts of screw-ups with the registration that time around and we didn't get it we had four students we needed five students to make that class of that class too offered but there were other classes that I got to keep today I probably would have never gotten to teach anywhere else because there have been somebody else specialising in that like American philosophy for example you know I got to teach a class on that so the minute I got to design a class and I got to research a class and I got to have students we interacted with them I got to see what works and what doesn't work so next time around if I've ever offered the opportunity to do something like that I know what I would do so it was a really good experience for me a little overall so this is already pretty long that's where I'm gonna leave off I can do more videos about the experience of teaching in prison about other aspects of it but that's where all we've offered

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 10,927

Rating: 4.8956523 out of 5

Keywords: Sadler, Prisons, Prisoners, Indiana State Prison, Prison Teaching, Crime, Education, College, University, Philosophy, Religion, Community, Student, School, Classes, Chalkboards, Inmates, Philosopher, Talk, Lecture, Ethics, Prison Conditions, Indiana, Michigan City, Ball State University, Prison Education

Id: yeXJ1BlB9NI

Length: 38min 28sec (2308 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2013