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Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program opens eyes and minds for OSU Newark students

Posted on | January 6, 2010 | 2,289 views | 1 Comment

By Julia Harris

Southeastern Correctional Institution in Lancaster is a blocky complex of buildings surrounded by fences that is home to more than 1,500 inmates. It covers almost 1,400 acres, employs 368 people and costs Ohio taxpayers about $29.5 million per year to maintain.

And last quarter, it moonlighted as a classroom for 10 Ohio State Newark students, who spent 90 minutes there each week with 10 offenders, or “inside students,” for a course on the criminal justice system.

“I’d been taking my students to SCI for tours since I started at Newark,” said Angela Harvey, an assistant professor of sociology who taught SOC 294S: Corrections at the prison. “I started to think it would be great if we could have a whole class out there so they could get a better idea of what our society does in terms of incarceration.”

Not one to let a good idea go unimplemented, Harvey secured a Service Learning Course Development grant through the Office of Outreach and Engagement and used that funding to become trained as an instructor in the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.

The program, based at Temple University, brings college students behind prison walls to engage as peers in intensive, seminar-style academic courses with incarcerated men (and women). It is designed to give university students an opportunity to reconsider their assumptions about the criminal justice system, while also letting the “inside students” express their life experiences and be heard, respected and challenged.

The national program has been around since 1997, but last quarter was the first time Harvey took the helm at an Inside-Out course with Newark students, and getting the venture off the ground was a challenge in itself.

“I had to meet individually with all 10 of the guys on the inside and have them fill out a questionnaire. All the Newark students had to get extensive background checks too,” Harvey said.

Further complicating the issue was the fact that SCI is roughly 45 minutes away from Newark. Not all the students had reliable transportation, and prison officials were strict about having everyone arrive together and at the same time. Harvey credits Newark Dean/Director William MacDonald for allowing the class to pile into the university’s Titans bus — normally reserved for athletics events — and head down to the prison together.

Once the logistics were resolved, attention turned to setting the ground rules of interaction in the class.

“Everyone basically had to sign a contract that established a code of anonymity, since we’re not allowed to use last names or maintain any kind of contact with the inside students after the course ends,” Harvey says.

Other ground rules for the course included sitting in a circle with inside students sitting next to outside students, which Harvey says is a way to break down the artificial barriers between “us” and “them.” Rules of respectful conduct specified that no one could use inappropriate or labeling language, everyone had to participate in discussions and all students were expected to give their full attention to whomever was speaking.

High expectations extended, of course, to the coursework itself. Harvey admits the load was a bit heavy. “Everyone was expected to read about 150 pages a week, they wrote papers every single week, they did a group project and a final paper,” she says.

Even though there was some complaining — primarily, Harvey noted with a laugh, from the university students — the workload seemed to pay off.

Kelli Woods, a junior majoring in psychology, said the extra effort made her that much more engaged in the course. “It was hard writing as many papers as we did, but this course has taught me much more than information about the criminal justice system,” she says. “I’ve learned how to develop my own opinions, I became a better writer because of all those required papers and my conceptions changed about people who are incarcerated.”

Her experiences are exactly what Harvey was going for, even as she insists that the Inside-Out program isn’t about doing therapy or “fixing” anyone. She points out the sobering statistic that an estimated one in 25 adults in Ohio are under some kind of correctional supervision, a reflection of the fact that the United States incarcerates more of its population than any other country in the world.

“Most of the people we incarcerate are drug offenders or property offenders, and yet what do we do when they get out? They can’t vote, they can’t carry a firearm, they have a hard time finding a job, yet we expect them to work, stay away from anyone who’s on parole and live where we tell them,” Harvey says.

“The crux of it is, people who are going into the field of criminology or sociology need to really understand the people they’re going to be working with.  Inside-Out is about planting seeds, it’s about social justice.”

A new perspective

Erica Ward, a senior majoring in psychology, was one of the students in Angela Harvey’s course.

“The inside guys had so much insight and depth in their responses. We had to be on our toes every week. I also learned a lot about myself, my own strengths and weaknesses, insecurities and prejudices. I think everyone needs to be put into situations where they are suddenly the minority. I think we all need the cultural exposure.”

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