The JCI Prison Scholars Program

Blog

  • A rainy, yet poetic night at Jessup

    Words cannot adequately illustrate the positive energy coming from Jessup last night…but I will try to describe yesterday’s event.

    At 5:20PM I left the University of Baltimore (UB) to drive to my weekly Criminal Justice class at Jessup Correctional Institution (JCI). For the past few weeks 11 of my UB students attended joint classes with 24 incarcerated men at JCI. On a normal day it takes 30 minutes to drive to JCI….but last night’s monsoon resulted in a two hour commute for some of us. As I drove to JCI, stuck in endless traffic, I worried that I would never arrive in time for class. I questioned my decision not to cancel class, worried about students not showing up, worried that students would complain, and was convinced that our late arrival would result in not be permitted to enter the facility. I tried to calm myself by remembering that tonight’s class was especially important and that we must make every effort to get there.

    To my surprise, when I arrived I found all of my students waiting on me! I was moved that everyone made the extra effort to get to JCI, and that not a single one complained! Many students even left their homes or jobs early so they would arrive on time. I heard several students say they did not want to miss this class since it was our last one. After a few more obstacles getting through security (never a dull moment!) we eventually made our way through the prison grounds to the education building where our class is held. Of course Vince, one of our classmates, was there to greet us and rushed us toward the classroom.

    Like every week, our time together is short and often shortened further by various delays. So as we walked Vince quickly gave me the run down on how the “certificate ceremony” would go tonight. As we entered the classroom, all the JCI guys had already gathered in a circle formation. The UB students filled in the empty chairs in between the JCI students. We immediately proceeded with the ceremony. Vince – graciously leading the way – said a few words to get started. He creatively put together a power point slideshow that illustrated each student’s name as they were called up to receive the certificate. We started with the UB students first – the “Future Criminal Justice Reformers” as Vince labeled them. Robby was the first to be called up. Everyone cheered as Robby received his certificate and proceeded to jog around the circle giving high-fives to each and every student in the circle. This continued for the next few minutes as all UB students were recognized for their contribution to the class. Next, the JCI students – “the Experts” – were each acknowledged for their equal contribution to the class.

    After all students were recognized Shakkir presented Vince with a special award for his endless dedication and commitment to making the JCI Scholar Program so successful. Thoughtfully, the students also awarded me a certificate of appreciation. And lastly, a special certificate was awarded to me honoring my child in utero – an extremely touching moment that simply shows the endless thoughtfulness and compassion of this group. The energy in the room during the ceremony was phenomenal. For 30 minutes there was laughter, cheering, smiles, high-fives, and even a few football (touchdown) style dances. It was as if we all won the Nobel Peace Prize.

    To end the ceremony each student shared one or two words to express their feelings about the experience together. Bittersweet…humbling…open minded…optimistic…inspired…grateful…empowered. Who would have thought that in just a few weeks these two groups would blend so well, would work collaboratively, would pull together a final project with limited resources, would become classmates, and in the end would share similar emotions about an experience that allowed them to simply come together and share the learning process. This transformative learning experience is credited to the National Inside Out Prison Exchange Program – for without that program last night never would have transpired.

    (stay tuned for details on the students final projects…)

  • Rehabilitation vs. Retribution vs. Liberation, Part I: The Context of Violence

    Rehabilitation vs. Retribution vs. Liberation, Part I: The Context of Violence

    "Geese are Taking Over" by Fred Dunn (via Flickr)
    “Geese are Taking Over” by Fred Dunn (via Flickr)

    Everyone in the program was pretty excited to see a couple of our instructors, Drew Leder and Mikita Brottman, featured in an article – a cover article no less – in the Baltimore City Paper this week. It’s also wonderful to see some of our students, like Mr. Hardy and Mr. Fitzgerald, being named and given a voice, even if the Department of Corrections still reserves the right to restrict who may speak to reporters. And the article did a fine job of capturing the variety of those specific voices, rather than presenting the incarcerated men as an undifferentiated mass of “prisoners” – several of the unnamed students were immediately recognizable, just from the way Mr. Woods reproduced their cadences and attitudes on the page. One of our goals is to help humanize incarcerated individuals to the wider world – among the first questions we get from new people we tell about the program is usually some variation on “aren’t you scared?” (no) – and painting such a nuanced portrait of some of our classes is something a journalist is far better at than we philosophers

    But, since I am a philosopher, I wanted to talk a bit about the philosophy that I bring to teaching in and helping to coordinate the program, with respect to one of the issues that the article raises.

    (more…)

  • City Paper Feature Article

    Our founder Drew Leder and one of our faculty, Mikita Brottman, are featured in a City Paper feature article this week! Congrats to them, and check out the article!

    (Though, to be fair, to get to our classrooms we actually cross a yard with quite a wide expanse of sky framed by razor wire!)

     

     

  • Monday Morning Statshot

    Mr. Greco, the clerk to Ms. Schroeder, the JCI Librarian who organizes most of our logistics on the JCI side, has recently compiled some summary information on our program over the past few years, that I think is pretty impressive. In a nutshell, since 2010, folks involved with the JCI Scholars Program, and a number of the predecessor programs that we’ve built on, have taught 38 courses, and involved fifteen faculty. We don’t have good numbers on students, but we’re looking forward to having slots for about 160 students this summer, and we’ve been teaching similar numbers each semester for a while. Mr. Greco estimates that we’ve taught about 1,300 student slots (not that many students, as many students have been with the program many years and take a course almost every “semester”) and put in 2,112 volunteer hours.

    In addition, a similar (but unaffiliated) program, Partners in Philosophy, has taught six courses involving grad students and a rotating roster of Washington College professors.

    For those who want more detail, here’s Mr. Greco’s accounting of what we’ve taught (excluding the Partners in Philosophy numbers):

    Courses

    • Creating a Peaceful Soul (Leder)
    • How We Decide (Leder)
    • Awakening Joy (Leder)
    • Awakening the Heroes Within (Leder)
    • The Soul Knows No Bars (Leder)
    • Tao Te Ching (Leder)
    • Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” (Leder)
    • Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” (Leder)
    • Soul Food (Leder)
    • Law and Society (Brown)
    • Business Law I (Brown)
    • Business Law II (Brown)
    • Issues in American Law (Brown)
    • Literature (Lobo)
    • Restorative Justice (Sabin/Lawrence)
    • Introduction to Formal Reasoning (Brunson)
    • Faith & Reason (Brunson)
    • Epistemology (Brunson)
    • Philosophy (Brunson)
    • Thinking Between Past and Future (Miller)
    • The Philosophers’ Handbook I (Miller)
    • The Philosophers’ Handbook II (Miller)
    • Game Theory and Game Design (Miller/Levine)
    • Writing (Hall)
    • Media Theory (Ball)
    • Political Theory and Political Narrative (Levine)
    • Violence (Levine/Miller)
    • Touchstones (Brottman)
    • Basic Writing (Brottman)
    • Psychology (Brottman)
    • Literature I (Brottman)
    • Literature II (Brottman)
    • Literature III (Brottman)
    • The Stoics (Golden)
    • Civil Rights (Donaldson)
    • History of Economic Thought (Donaldson/Houston)
    • Philosophy (Houston)
    • Criminal Justice (Cantora)

    Faculty

    • Prof. Drew Leder (Loyola)
    • Fr. Timothy Brown (Loyola)
    • Prof. Mikita Brottman (MICA)
    • Dr. Rachel Donaldson
    • Dr. Joshua Houston
    • Prof. Andrea Cantora (University of Baltimore)
    • Dr. Joshua Miller
    • Prof. Daniel Levine (University of Maryland)
    • Dr. Daniel Brunson (Morgan State)
    • Dr. Christian Golden (Georgetown)
    • Prof. Ed Sabin (Loyola)
    • Prof. Jared Ball (Morgan State)
    • Mr. Joseph Hall
    • Ms. Phyllis Lawrence (Loyola)

  • We’re on Twitter!

    Yay? Anyway, if you’d like to follow our work that way, you can find us @JCIPSP.

  • Another Game Theory Reflection

    We had an interesting session of Game Theory and Game Design yesterday, but I’ll let Josh tell you about it (if we had trouble getting dice in, I think the materials for Mr. Twist’s favorite game – Kiss the Girls – are going to be even more of an issue). In the meanwhile, here’s another short reflection piece from one of our students.

    S.T.M. writes:*

    When I first came into this “Game Theory” class, I didn’t understand the purpose of teaching such a class. My first impression was “What could they possibly teach a person about the theory of a game such as ‘Tic Tac Toe,’ ‘Checkers,’ or any of the everyday games that people play. Then I started listening to Prof. Levine and Prof. Miller explain the logic and calculation of such “Games of Chance.” Then I had an “AHA moment” and began to see how these “Theories” are actually used in the Judicial system and the Criminal Justice System. One of the theories, “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” is the exact theory they use in the Criminal Justice System to get 65%-75% rate for plea bargaining in most criminal cases. I began to see how even military leaders use these theories to determine “Collateral Damage” prior to reaching their possible objective. It was very interesting and enlightening. It’s amazing how some of the simplest things have such an extraordinary effect on the way things are run in the society or even the world.

    I have to say, the game “Go,” I still don’t see the logic and purpose for it. Maybe if there were some instructions**, but I just don’t get that game. But the game of “Forbidden Island,” this was not only interesting but it was fun. This game changed my whole attitude about competition in a game. It forced me to restrain my drive to be the “King of the Hill” and change it to a team or community mentality. This game helps remove the selfishness that is the center of our present society’s attitude to one of “Cooperation for Survival for All.” I could actually see a society change mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually if this principle was the moral and guiding principle. As much as I hate being punished and suffering for the actions of another person, when I look at the overall picture of this social principle it would be very beneficial to any culture of people who use it.

    Now that I have some insight into the theory of the game, I realized that the “Department of Corrections” is now using this theory as a form of discipline in its system. And it’s working. However, the laws of the “Jungle” still apply, the men of the jungle now apply the “Stop, Think, and Discuss method” before they respond. It has been beneficial for the environment, but they still have to be alert for abuse of power and those who have the authority must remember that it doesn’t take much to wake up the Monster if it’s pushed too far. Overall, I find this class very interesting and look forward to our new game “Diplomacy.”***

    ——-

    * As always, this is a transcription of the student’s writing – I’ve just fixed a couple minor grammatical and typographical issues.

    ** This refers to a problem we had with the Go sets. To get materials that are not books, papers, or other things that obviously belong in a classroom through security clearance, we’re often asked to order things from Amazon and have them shipped directly to the prison library rather than bringing them in ourselves. So, that’s what we did with the Go sets – but we didn’t realize that they showed up without any printed rules in them, and we didn’t think to check the sets for instructions before we sent the guys off to try playing during their “study hall” (we showed them the game and talked about its logic, but by drawing Go problems on the board, rather than with the sets). So, our bad. We did – when we realized this – go over the rules again and write them down with the guys, but it was still a source of understandable frustration.

    *** Sorry, Mr. Shakkir! I’m afraid Diplomacy undoes all the social lessons of Forbidden Island…

  • Drew Leder on Why He Teaches in Prison

    Drew Leder writes:

    Why do I teach in prison? Well, I’ll give an answer (that might not seem so interesting) – because prison teaching is itself interesting. In oh so many ways.

    The men who I work with, some 30-40 in my classes, not counting 5-10 of my undergraduates I bring with me, are passionately interested in what we are studying. This could be a volume of Jungian-style psychology on finding the hero-stories that have guided your life. It could be a book on the latest research exploring how we make (and botch up) decisions. Or the Tao te Ching, the ancient Chinese text for finding balance in a world not even the ruler can control. Or Epictetus’ Handbook, by the crippled Roman slave who taught a Stoicism focused on mastery of mental states.

    Whatever we read, the men are interested, passionately engaged, and ready to apply the material to their own lives. How to build a good life as a “lifer”? How, while serving long time, to have time serve you? How, while being confined for decades on in a tiny cell, in a locked tier, in a razor-wire-fringed maximum-security prison – how to expand space and take flight? The men not only wish to survive in these tough surroundings – they wish to flourish, and need the resources, personal and intellectual, that will aid their quest. So they are passionately interested in our quest-ions and texts in a way my Loyola undergraduates rarely are. (Those undergrads who accompany me into prison learn something about how to learn.)

    And all this interest makes me interested. I can choose texts and questions I really want to teach, less hampered by my conventional menu of college courses. I can converse with men from a very different background and life-experience than mine, and hear their unexpected viewpoints. At the same time, I learn about myself. If they can apply Buddhist methods to find happiness in their (incarcerated) here and now, who am I to mope around my luxurious house?

    Prison teaching is one of the most interesting pedagogical experiences I’ve ever had. That’s why I’m still at it some 22 years after first tentatively poking in a toe.

    “Interest” is an interesting word. Start with “inter.” It can mean “to deposit a dead body in a tomb.” In many ways, this is what our criminal criminal justice system does, with its harsh use of extended and discriminatory prison sentences. But the men – and the more enlightened prison administrators and staff – look beyond this and refuse to be the land of the walking dead. They choose life.

    “Inter”, as a prefix, also means “between.” The word “interest” is actually from the Latin interesse, whose root meaning is to “be between,” and which also can be translated as “to concern, make a difference, be of importance.” (Hence “interest also takes on financial meanings.) The men I teach are “between” – between enslavement and freedom, imperatives of their past street-life, and their dreamed-of future; indeed between life and death, for those serving long sentences. And yet that “between” is where interesting things happen. Socrates taught in that in-between place, the agora, or Athenian marketplace, where people mingled, and he used the method of dia-logue, that is the speaking (logos) that only emerges between (dia) two living souls.

    So, yes these classes are interesting – they exist in the between-world where our discussions, like the Latin interesse,  “concern, make a difference, are of importance.” At least I hope so, and this is what the men confirm time and again, time and again.

  • Violence (4/18/14)

    So, the Violence class. I’ve wanted to teach a course like this for a while, for two reasons. First, it’s a matter of professional interest to me – especially to look at violence as a phenomenon that cross-cuts issues that are often academically stove-piped (e.g., war, psychology of trauma, domestic violence). Second, it’s an issue that I thought would be of particular interest to our students, and on which they might have some important insights to share.

    This past Friday, our topic was sexual violence. We were reading (/should have read) some excerpts from Brison’s Aftermath, along with a USIP Special Report on the motivations of Mai Mai militia members who commit rapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Griffin’s “Rape: the All-American Crime.” We’d also just finished a session on “terror,” where we read Scarry’s chapter on torture – with the intent that there would be some links between her analysis of the silencing and identity-destroying effects of torture and those effects of sexual violence on women, particularly the way these effects impact women beyond the class of direct victims of overt sexual violence.

    It was a tough class and highlighted some of the ways I feel like I haven’t been able to make this course in general the kind of class it should be.

    It wasn’t tough in the sense that it led to hard, painful conversations. Quite the opposite, actually. The one topic that the guys really seemed interested in there was talking about the details of the war (that’s not unusual – my plan over the summer is to note this clear line of interest and teach a class on the Congo wars). For the rest of the time, it was hard to get anyone to talk.

    I suspect – though I don’t know – that part of the problem is that this might be a bit too close to home, while at the same time not being close enough to home, for our students. On the one hand, a constant weird dynamic in the class is that I am a student of violence but my life has been largely untouched by it – this is, of course, not the case for a lot of the guys in the class. On the other, Josh and I made a conscious choice not to have a reading that was directly focused on something like prison rape, for fear that it would be too direct an approach for some of the men (we have at least one student we know to be in prison for rape, so that’s pretty direct, but prison rape is a present threat for at least some of them) – despite the fact that it’s a serious problem, with recent statistics indicating that the number of sexual assaults in prisons (mostly of men) is about even with the number of assaults in the entire nation outside of prisons (both are estimated to be on the order of 200,000 per year).

    But, mostly, it was me trying to fill time by talking, and a bit of that professorial, “so, do you see Griffin’s argument? Does it make sense to you?” getting vague assent.

    In addition, I worry that I have not used this class as a strong enough platform for engaging on the moral issues that are directly relevant. For example, two sessions ago when we talked about the way that militaries maintain themselves, one of the readings was about the idea that masculinity is a social construction intended to make militaries possible. One of our students basically pushed the – horrible – line that women can’t be allowed into the military because then it’s inevitable that men will rape them. Josh and I both tried to bring the student to understand that that was a pretty backwards way of looking at the problem, but given that more students seemed to be nodding along with him than with us, I fear we failed entirely.

    I don’t want to remove blame from my teaching style (or from guys not doing all the readings, and so clamming up – perhaps a side effect of making the reading load a bit too heavy for this class). But our hesitancy to go directly after the issue of prison rape may also have been part of the problem. The most fruitful conversation I had was after class had officially ended, with two of the guys in the class who have been in prison longer-term (though, they are also guys with whom I have a longer and deeper relationship than many of their classmates, so that may be part of the equation).

    In a nutshell, they told me two things. First, they said that the kind of rape that happens at least in their prison, has changed over the past decade or so. As they described it, it used to be that it was pretty common for sexual predators to straight-up roam the halls and just grab people who might be out of sight of the guards (as a side note, they focused entirely on rape of incarcerated men by other incarcerated men, though the stats I cited above indicate that a huge amount of abuse is by correctional officers). Now, they said, predators had to operate by “trickery,” and described a more common practice as a guy known to be a predator befriending a new guy and convincing him to transfer to share a cell.

    Second, when I asked, “so what do you think changed?” their answer was that it was the beneficial effect of the programs that now exist in JCI, like the Alternatives to Violence Project, and the volunteer college courses that we teach. I can’t verify that! But, walking out of a class where I was feeling a bit of a failure as a teacher, it was a nice thought to have.

  • History of Economic Thought (4/18/14)

    Rachel Donaldson writes:

    In class we have been reading Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers and this week we read the chapter on Thorstein Veblen. We began by discussing how Veblen’s economic views intersected with earlier economic theorists like Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and Marx.

    Specifically, we examined how Veblen’s view that taking pride in work is a part of human nature shared similarities with Marx’s understanding of labor as the essence of humans’ species being. We then situated Veblen in his historical context, discussing how his views also reflected ideas embedded in the American Populist movement of the late 19th century, particularly the idea of producerism.

    Much of the rest of class was spent discussing the idea of conspicuous consumption as it existed in Veblen’s era and how it is manifested today. Heilbroner referenced Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown in this chapter and I brought in a copy of this study, which we incorporated into our larger discussion. I also passed around a copy of Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America to provide a historical perspective on Veblen’s era and a copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt as an example of a cultural commentary on consumption. The student-scholars’ interest in these books has led me to consider the possibility of creating a rotating library of books relevant to the class for my summer course—but I will have to see if this is possible. 

  • Criminal Justice Class Update

    Since February our class of 25 students has gathered weekly to discuss questions around “what is crime?”; “why do people engage in crime?”; and “how might we prevent crime?” Students have responded to these questions through a series of essays and in-class discussion. Our last three class sessions included a group of 11 University of Baltimore undergraduate and graduate students. Both groups of students read the same material and discuss issues around crime, sentencing, and prevention. Next week both groups of students will join together to develop a group proposal to create a program in one of three areas: alternative to incarceration program, reentry program, or crime prevention program. Students will present their projects in class on April 30th.