Associate Professor of Sociology Rebecca Tiger taught a course, Sociological Imagination, during January term this year to 16 male inmates at the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility in Rutland, Vermont. It was her first experience teaching prisoners. The class sought to understand how individual experiences reflect our society. Julia Shumlin ’17.5, a sociology major, worked as Tiger’s teaching assistant. During the 2020 winter term, Tiger would like to teach a class that Middlebury students and prisoners take together.
Q: What attracts you to teaching prisoners and why is teaching them important?
RT: I am a scholar of punishment and a sociologist who takes the mandate to make my work “public” seriously. Teaching in prisons and jails allows me to bridge the distance these institutions create between inmates and people who are “free.” It takes work to gain access to these spaces, but in a country with the largest incarceration rate in the world, I think it’s important to make the effort to connect with people inside of carceral institutions to remind ourselves of the humanity of the people inside as well as the human cost to our emphasis on “public safety.” As I often say to my students: the massive expansion of prisons happened under our watch; it’s our responsibility to do something about it.
Q: What lessons did you learn from teaching the course?
RT: It’s hard to list everything. Flexibility is important. Jails are unpredictable environments with a lot of distractions, so you have to be able to adapt to these conditions to make sure that everyone has the best chance to learn in what can be a chaotic space. Teaming up with staff in the jail and drawing on their expertise helped ensure that the class was beneficial to the inmates as well as the institution.
Q: What made the course a success?
RT: The community high school educator at the jail, Chris Cosgrove, was enthusiastic and committed to ensuring that the course worked. He arranged many of the logistics and helped inmates with the readings outside of class, given my limited access to the jail.
The dedicated teaching assistant, Julia Shumlin ’17.5, was invaluable as well. Julia was involved in all stages of planning the course in in the fall, came into the jail for every class, and worked individually with students on their writing projects. She was also an important person for me to run ideas by about the class as we drove the hour to and from the jail together. I could not have taught this course without her.
I was also committed to making this work. I spent more than three years planning this course, educating myself about prison education, and gaining access to the jail. Early help from the College was important too. Tim Spears and the Fund for Innovation provided funds for me to get training in prison education and to plan the course. Andi Lloyd, dean of the faculty, provided much-needed resources to purchase books, notebooks, and pens for the students.
Lastly, the students made the course a success. They came to class amidst a lot of turmoil—uncertainty about their sentences (and some were facing lengthy ones) and anxiety about court dates—but were focused and engaged, asked excellent questions, and challenged me and Julia about why we were there. This type of course demands an honesty on the part of everyone involved that must be established quickly; we trusted each other and were eager to learn from each other.
Q: How did you pick the subject matter?
RT: I wanted to teach an introductory course and the core themes of sociology—inequality, social stratification, power, social control—seemed fitting for the location where I was teaching.
Q: Did you encounter any surprises?
RT: I was unaware how much things change in a jail and how fast. Inmates are often moved to other facilities on short notice, so sometimes a student who was there one day would be gone the next. Not being able to say goodbye, or continue conversations we had started, was very difficult and jarring.
I didn’t anticipate how quickly we would start having difficult conversations about race, class, and inequality. In the first class, the students asked tough questions that really challenged all of us to think critically about our core assumptions. I was pleasantly surprised that I could teach about anything—no topics were off limits.
Q: What would the Inside-Out classroom offer that the first course did not?
RT: The Inside-Out Prison Exchange model is based on a combined class, taught in a jail, where half the students are inmates and the other half are students from outside. An obvious difference is that half the class would be Middlebury students. In the Inside-Out model, developed by Lori Pompa at Temple University, you necessarily have to attend to the interactions between the inside and outside students and create an environment, through facilitated group activities, where people are encouraged to interact with each other to talk about important and difficult social issues.
There are logistical challenges—getting permission to bring outside students to the jail on a regular basis—as well as ones related to classroom dynamics. It’s imperative that outside students understand that their attendance is very important, that their presence at the jail requires the support of security staff, and that the course can be fulfilling but extremely challenging. The rewards are the chance for outside students to get a better understanding of the viewpoints of incarcerated students as well as allowing students on the inside access to college classes.
Q: Are you planning on offering an Inside-Out model class next winter term so Middlebury students would be able to take it?
RT: I’m on sabbatical in 2018–2019, so my hope is to offer the course in winter term 2020. There are still logistical challenges. While the superintendent of Marble Valley Correctional Facility was pleased with the success of the course I taught, bringing Middlebury students in regularly adds a level of complication to a closed and locked institution. I am working with the community high school educator to draft a proposal for an Inside-Out course that would have to be approved by the Vermont Department of Corrections before we could proceed. I am also looking for funds to support the cost of this course on an ongoing basis. My hope is for this course to be a regular part of the education curriculum in the jail and at Middlebury.
My broader goal is to start a Prison Education Program at Middlebury that offers a variety of programming at the jail. This would include Inside-Out courses, if approved. I am also pursuing possible connections with the Bread Loaf campus to offer readings in the jail by visiting writers as well as writing workshops for inmates.
Q: How common is it for colleges and universities to offer courses to prisoners, or prisoners and students?
RT: It’s hard to quantify exactly because there’s no central database and the programs differ in size. Hundreds of colleges do offer some kind of education in prison ranging from reading groups to individual classes to undergraduate and graduate degree-granting programs. Most of our peer institutions already offer courses in prisons, including Amherst, Bard, Bennington, Swarthmore, Vassar, and other liberal arts colleges where prison education is a robust and ongoing part of the curriculum that receives strong administrative support.
Q: What is the general trend in prison education—are these programs being cut or expanded?
RT: Prison education always faces challenges. The obvious one is: why should we put resources toward people who have committed crimes? When cutting education budgets, inmates aren’t necessarily a population around which society has much sympathy or concern so it’s easy to remove educational resources from them. But, there is a growing national conversation about the importance of prison education and media sources, such as the New York Times, regularly write editorials in support of it.
One emerging and interesting challenge is about who in prison deserves education. Some argue that the benefit of prison education is that it reduces recidivism. The US currently has over 100,000 people serving “death in prison” sentences: they will never leave prison. The conversation about why these people should have access to education challenges narratives that tie its utility to what people do when they are released. In a way, the conversation about the purpose of education for those who won’t get out dovetails with current conversations about the purpose of the liberal arts–do we have to tie our educational goals to specific outcomes or can we imagine that education and cultivating the life of the mind is its own benefit and a fundamental human right?
Q: Has the course had any overall effect on your teaching?
RT: The course at Marble Valley concluded at the start of February so I’m not sure yet about its effects on my teaching. I do talk about the experience with students in my Sociology of Punishment senior seminar. The course really showed me that you don’t need the ideal or perfect classroom conditions for good teaching and learning to occur. I taught men in an institution that is structurally designed to punish. The purpose of prison is to cause pain through the loss of liberty. But even in that environment, often chaotic and loud, surrounded by surveillance cameras and guards, we could learn. I can’t say how this discovery has affected my teaching, but it was transformative for me, so I’m sure it has.