Prison teaching caps off an academic career

A volunteer finds real learning inside the walls.

Inmates study for their GEDs in a county jail (not the institution described in this post). Photo © Marc Schultz. Used by permission of the Daily Gazette, Schenectady, NY.

One of the first changes I made after my daughter left for college more than a decade ago was to sign up as a volunteer to teach English to immigrants. ESL teaching drew on language skills I had – I was an editor, after all – yet was tantalizingly different from anything I’d ever done. Could I manage to stand up in front of a classroom of students? I didn’t know. But it turned out I could, and 10 years later I was still doing it, finding it much more fun than editing had ever been.

Third age women are the stalwarts of many volunteer programs, especially those that meet human needs. The chance to turn decades of experience and skills toward work that is important but doesn’t pay anything can be a gift of this period of life.

My longtime friend Betsy recently retired from a tenured position teaching African history at a private university. She’s now a volunteer tutor in a college degree–granting program inside a medium-security state prison. She notes, “The other volunteers are predominantly women – mostly middle-aged and still working, but some older. There are also a handful of women who are undergraduate students. Based on what I’ve learned from the community service center in my former university and from my own experience, I think there’s a clear pattern of women being more engaged than men in many kinds of volunteer work.”

Betsy visits the prison two or three times a week. She also has caregiving responsibilities, driving three hours each weekend to assist her parents, who are in their 90s. And she continues mentoring and consulting in her academic field. I asked Betsy to tell me about her experiences “inside.” The conversation has been shortened and anonymized, as she’s not at liberty to name the prison, the college that runs the prison education program, or the university where she taught during her career.

CATHY: I’ve never been inside a prison. The idea seems intimidating to me. So I have to ask, are you ever scared – of prisoners, of guards, of being locked in?

BETSY: No, I never have been. I work with a select group that’s probably unlike the general prison population in many ways, though they have things in common – their convictions and sentences and so forth. But I have never met a more respectful, polite, solicitous group of men than the inmates I’ve worked with. They call me “Miss Betsy,” and they open doors for me, grab chairs and books out of my arms to carry them, and thank me. Interestingly, the officers are the same way – very friendly. I had not expected that.

CATHY: How do you explain it?

BETSY: The people in this program were on a waiting list for years. Many of them were convicted as teenagers and have been in prison for decades – some for nearly half a century. Many are now middle-aged or even senior citizens. They’ve had time to reflect on their lives, on their youth, on that one moment when they made a bad decision that changed the course of their lives. Most want to make their lives meaningful and to influence children and grandchildren, whom they may know only from visits or phone calls. They want to have a role in mentoring them so they don’t make the same mistakes.

They show gratitude even though I’m not looking to be thanked. They say, we know you’re volunteering here, you’re not getting paid, you could be doing other things. I say, well, there’s really nothing else that I’d consider this rewarding and this important.

I know it sounds clichéd, but I do feel that I’m getting as much, if not more, out of this than they are. Just seeing a different side of life and seeing the struggles people contend with. It makes me question myself and my first-world privilege and my first-world complaints about minuscule inconveniences. I feel it has calmed me down and made me more patient. Some guys have said, well, I’m coming up for parole, but so far, it hasn’t worked. I can come up again in two years. They say that as if it’s just a couple of days.

CATHY: You retired from college teaching two and a half years ago. When did you get the idea of prison teaching?

BETSY: Almost 30 years ago, I was asked to talk about African history in a different facility, a city jail. I talked about the great states of precolonial West Africa, showing that not everybody was living in a mud hut in the jungle, the kind of stereotypes many outsiders have of Africa. These were states with complex bureaucracies and universities, the centers of civilizations in their time. The inmates of the jail were disproportionately African American, and they were fascinated and asked good questions. They were far more interested than most of the students I taught at my private institution. I was struck by that and I thought, wow, this is something I’d like to do one day.

Several years ago, I was approached by another college in my city that was offering degrees through a prison program. They wanted me to teach an African history course. I said when I retire, in just a few years, I would love to do it. But when I finally retired, they offered me a different course that I wasn’t qualified to teach, a Black identity course. I’m a historian of Africa, the continent – not the Caribbean, not African American history in North America. And I’m not Black. It would be presumptuous for me, an old white woman, to go in and pontificate about that. So I said no. Then I found out that they had a volunteer academic tutoring program, including writing tutors. I thought, well, I’ve written books and articles. I know how to come up with a thesis, look for evidence, evaluate sources, and write coherently.

So that’s what I’m doing, tutoring students who might have an assignment in their writing class, or maybe in a political science or sociology or history course. The students work hard. They don’t say, as my former students at my university might say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with this paper! I stayed up all night writing it!” The prison students will go over their work laboriously, week after week, draft after draft. They listen intently and implement, or challenge, my suggestions.

CATHY: How long do you spend with an individual student? Do you just discuss their writing issues orally, or do you look at their drafts?

BETSY: It’s supposed to be 15 minutes. But if there’s no one else waiting, it can be considerably longer. They’ll bring me a printed draft usually. They have access to computers with word processing, but no internet.

CATHY: Tell me about the inmates. Do they have to have a GED or a high school diploma to be in this program?

BETSY: Yes. But some of them earned their GEDs inside. Others had high school or even college or community college experience on the outside.

CATHY: What are their goals in being in this program and seeking help with their writing? Are they focused on the degree they can earn? Or is it intellectual curiosity? Or something to pass the time?

BETSY: I think it’s a combination. If they think they’re getting out relatively soon, they’re obviously thinking about what future they could have. It’s hard to be a convicted felon and get a job. Any training that’s available, they do – computer certificates, auto mechanics. Some people who have graduated have started their own projects to provide role models for youth, helping other people who have been released from prison get their feet on the ground, to stop the terrible recidivism rate. One man told me that when he gets out, he wants to get an MBA, and he was asking my advice on that. So there are some people who are looking forward to being released in a short time, which means a few years down the road.

CATHY: Their concept of time differs.

BETSY: Yeah. Others feel like they’re going to be in there for a long, long time. They want the stimulation and an escape from the other aspects of prison that are so horrible. And they want to avoid the purposelessness they see in many of the other inmates. The students in the program have become a real community. You can see how well they know each other, how much they care about each other. They’re constantly helping one another if a tutor isn’t available. I’ve seen people helping one another with Spanish, or math if they’re a bit ahead. Lots of collaborative work, and no one tells them to do it. They just do it. I think it’s beautiful to see that kind of interaction.

CATHY: You mentioned some differences between teaching these inmates and teaching college students during your career.

BETSY: The students at my private university were 18 to 21, 22 years of age. And the old cliché – youth is wasted on the young – I felt that too often. Obviously I had some students who were deeply engaged and very serious. They were a joy, and I’ve stayed in touch with them. But I had more than I wished who just took my course to fulfill a requirement. They weren’t particularly interested. They skipped class. Some partied from the middle of the week, if not before. Some complained about having to write drafts of papers. Not that it happened often, but I did get students who essentially felt that my salary was paid by their parents, so I should be at their beck and call.

CATHY: And the prisoners?

BETSY: They’re engaged. They’re hard-working. So far, there’s only one who sometimes gets frustrated with my suggestions. He fights back a little bit. I say, well, you don’t have to do this, but this is why I think it would be a good idea. He’ll come back later and say, yeah, it is better. You were right. I mean, he jokes with me.

The students inside come up with some amazing essays, which give me insight into their lives, their backgrounds. In their history and political science courses, they might write about mass incarceration or voting restrictions or the lot of ex-felons. They really care about these topics.

CATHY: How has this experience changed your views about teaching and learning? And how does it fit into your plans for your third age?

BETSY: It has allowed me to do what I’ve always taken great joy in doing, but haven’t done as much as I would have wished over the decades of my career. That is personal interaction, one-on-one, collaborative learning. I never liked to lecture at students, ending with a perfunctory: Do you have any questions? But I did more lecturing than I wanted. The prison tutoring suits how I believe learning happens. And I learn from the things students say, the insights they have. I tell them that. And I think it pleases them when I say they’re giving me something. So the reciprocity has been really nice.