The most fulfilling job I have ever completed is GED tutor at Oregon State Penitentiary. I had better paying jobs, easier jobs and much more prestigious jobs, but none more rewarding. I was an inmate, just like my students. My pay was about $90 per month.
The reward was seeing students who had struggled with school all their lives earn the equivalent of a high school diploma. The prison held a graduation ceremony in the visiting room so family could attend. I cried when Rodney’s name was called to come get his certificate and his grandma stood up and yelled “my baby did it!” Rodney was serving a life sentence. He struggled for years to get the GED, just so he could make his grandma proud. It worked.
As I moved along to different prisons, I noticed something. By and large, prisoners are thirsty for educational opportunities. In addition to GED, prisoners could take college level courses (in person and by correspondence), treatment programs and vocational tech certification classes. Almost all of these offerings had long waiting lists, so the lucky students tended to take the courses quite seriously. Most of the coursework carried little to no actual benefits. Few resulted in time off the sentence or more immediate rewards.
My experience was recently reinforced via a Wall Street Journal opinion piece written by Brooke Allen (“College Should Be More Like Prison”, WSJ 3/6/2023.) Ms. Allen teaches a variety of college-level humanities courses in a maximum security prison. She really does a far better job than I at delineating the reasons why prisoners are such motivated students.
Allen calls her students “highly motivated and hard-working” and boldly states that “they would hold their own in any graduate seminar”. She supports this by noting that the prisoner-students tend to read each assigned item two or three times, enjoy discussions even if they do not agree with the reading or the author, support each other’s learning, and are unable to cheat because they have no cell phones or access to the internet. All papers are handwritten.
Allen also enjoys teaching in the prison because there are no faculty meetings, overbearing administration, boring committee assignments, cranky parents or even students who complain about grades.
Because her article is an opinion piece in a conservative newspaper, she takes the opportunity to contrast her prison-students with current “real” college students. So, the article comes off as a complaint about wokeism on university campuses — pretty standard whining for the Wall Street Journal. I note that Ms. Allen is listed as a reviewer of books and films, but I suppose we can assume she at least has some past experience with the real college teaching she now finds paling in contrast to her prison teaching job. It would have been refreshing if she used her experience to support the concept of restorative justice or just plain rehabilitation of prisoners. After all, her students are displaying the capacity to learn and grow. Perhaps their sentences could accommodate their growth?
Either way, Ms. Allen showed some courage in going to bat for her students. In doing so, she reminded me about my most fulfilling job.
Posted by Drevil, 3/10/2023
I just wanted to add that I have a sister doing time in Connecticut and she says pretty much the same thing about how valuable education is for her. She’s also told me that her fellow inmates are as thirsty for learning as she is.
Thanks for writing this.