By Amelia Pape
As overcrowding in U.S. prisons becomes more and more of an issue, the movement for prison reform gains momentum. A program planting the seeds for such reform is the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which was brought to our campus in 2009 by SLU English Professor Bob Cowser and has catalyzed change within our community and beyond.
According to David Krueger, the interim assistant director for the nation-wide Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, the program brings together college students and incarcerated students for a course which is held in a correctional facility. The courses are “really focused on open, constructive communications,” says Krueger, and that people are challenged in some profound ways.
Krueger describes the program as “a deeply humanizing experience because that prison wall is a barrier that leads us to objectify and dehumanize people on the other side of it.” This program provides the firsthand experiential learning that makes humanization possible.
Samantha Glazier, a SLU chemistry professor who teaches one of these courses, notes that the students and inmates who are a part of this program “are just people who are interested in challenge and want to do something a little different and see what they haven’t seen before—know people they haven’t known before.” For all those involved “it’s a great big eye-opening [experience],” she says.
James Pape has worked closely with correctional facilities and kids and families of kids at risk of being incarcerated. According to him, “from the inmates’ perspective, if you’re in prison and that’s all you know, or if that’s what your experience is, then you’re going to have difficulty being successful when you get out of prison because you won’t have the skills for citizenship.”
All of the types of life skills that the program teaches “can translate into success on the outside and there’s a lot of data out there that proves that higher education—offering educational opportunities to incarcerated people—greatly lowers rates of recidivism, or the risk of going back to jail or prison again,” says Krueger.
Glazier says that the students inside are “just hungry to change the pattern of their lives” and education is a way for them to feel like they belong. It’s about how you identify yourself and she says that “they are taught to think of themselves as prisoners only and being defined by that.” She believes that having this opportunity allows those on the inside to see that they are students and the intellectual equals of these college students who are now their peers.
Pape makes a similar point that “there’s a mystique about college if you’ve never been, and it can be frightening.” He says that once you’ve experienced it and it becomes known, it becomes normal and it becomes achievable.
Bob Cowser, the English professor who brought the program here to St. Lawrence, says that one of the most important things about the program “is not only delivering a college education to incarcerated people but also acknowledging the community that we live in.” This community-based learning “is a way of acknowledging that those men were there and that they had things to offer us and we had things to offer them,” says Cowser. He believes that the program is important for those on the outside too and that “there’s interaction and reciprocal benefit going both ways—we learn so much from [the people on the inside].”
Glazier also points out that it is not just the students in the class experiencing growth, but also our community as a whole. She believes that the ripple effect is in play here, and as students go out into the world or even just back home they bring their new perspective and knowledge with them and it spreads.
Not only is this program an important step for the individuals involved, but also for our society as a whole. According to Pape, “the only way to get rid of prejudice is through more education and exposure to different people and seeing them as human beings—putting a face to a person and not just having them be a prisoner or not just having them be a college kid, but having them be a real person, flesh and blood, that thinks and feels similar to the way we do.”
Through voting and through attitudes, this program and programs like it could be a real asset to solving some of the problems we have with our prison system. In fact, Krueger sees prison reform as a natural byproduct of this Inside-Out Program.