During the 2017-2018 academic year, a group of Pitt students traveled from Oakland to the SCI Fayette maximum security prison once a week. They were not going there because they had committed crimes, and they were not going there to volunteer—they were going there to learn. For the past two semesters, Pitt’s recently formed the Pitt Prison Education Project (PPEP) has offered courses based on the model of the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program. Through the PPEP, college students and incarcerated students take a college course together, led by trained faculty.
The Inside Out Prison Exchange Program is a national program that has grown rapidly over the past 20 years. It has trained over 800 instructors nationwide. The courses cover a wide range of subjects from the humanities to the sciences. At Pitt this past fall, Professor Shalini Puri taught the literature course, Imagining Social Justice, and this past spring, Assistant Professor Cory Holding taught the Composition/Public and Professional Writing course, Writing for Change. “I love teaching all of my students, and I don’t think I ever had a student I didn’t love to teach,” said Holding. “I love to teach all sorts of different students specifically for their individualities and their personal goals and their personal gifts and baggage related to writing. To be honest, the students at the prison and their process of writing don’t feel terribly different from the students here.”
The courses operated like any other small seminar at Pitt. Classes to date have consisted of 16 Pitt students and 16 incarcerated students. The professors encouraged open discussions, and the students collaborated in small and large groups. They studied plays, fiction, and poetry; guest speakers even visited on occasion. Recently, the program hosted nationally famous figures: poet Fred Moten and actor-activist Rhodessa Jones held workshops, and acclaimed actor and director Daniel Beaty gave a performance.
“It was a unique and amazing experience, but my biggest surprise was how similar it was to a normal class at Pitt,” said Pitt student Rosemary, who took both courses. “I feel like I went into it thinking it was going to be a radically different experience, when it was just a class and we all contributed in the same way that we do at Pitt. It was really interesting that the main difference was that some people were a little bit older.”
“We ask kind of difficult questions around crime, victimization, and I think one of the things that’s very interesting is students found a lot more common ground than they expected,” said Shalini Puri of her experience teaching Imagining Social Justice. “On the one hand, there’s this incredible diversity of experience, which they did expect, but there were also all of these ways in which they found common ground, and that also was really empowering.”
But why even have Pitt students at the table with prisoners? There are programs that offer classes solely for prisoners, so what is the benefit of having Pitt students join them? First, it’s a breath of fresh air for the prisoners to interact with those outside of the prison. Second, it allows Pitt students to learn about a population that’s otherwise often invisible to society at large. Also, when these two different groups come together, they learn how to see things from each other’s perspectives.
“It is putting diversity into practice and putting diversity as a form of potential knowledge into practice,” said Puri. “You have a group that has typically had very poor access to quality education interacting with a group of university students. These are two groups that largely have been segregated, and you put them into conversation and see the kinds of rethinking of assumptions that takes place. You know from literature how powerful point of view can be to understanding and how powerful the imagination can be at solving problems.”
“For me, the productivity of that experiment wouldn’t have to be Pitt students and incarcerated people,” said Holding. “It could be Pitt students and Pitt teachers, or the community and Pitt students. I think you can get to places conversationally and critically just by having people from as many life experiences or different backgrounds as possible.”
There’s an array of benefits the Pitt students receive from the PPEP. The “outside” students’ majors have ranged from English to political science, anthropology, psychology, urban studies, social work, and philosophy. Some felt that the course would help them in their future careers, while others felt it would be an interesting way to fulfill a general education requirement. However, all of them took the course because they were interested in social justice or activism in some form or another.
“What drew me in was the idea that you could just interact with individuals who, based on how the system often functions, are often seen as lesser and dehumanized, and the idea that we can have a class where it’s so easy to talk to them because they’re just people,” said Emily, who took Writing for Change. “That’s the realization a lot of people aren’t able to make. That’s what really drew me to it.”
“I’ve always had an interest in social justice and the content matter of the course, and also I’ve always wanted to get to know different types of people, and I think prisoners are an incredibly vulnerable population that I care about fighting for—for shorter sentences and fair treatment,” said Elias, who took Imagining Social Justice. “So I thought it would be a really great opportunity to learn from them and learn with them, and it was great.”
Despite their positive expectations going into the course, many students have learned even more than they could ever have imagined. The Pitt students emphasized how the course made them more politically active and aware of privilege. How people think of prisoners is often abstract until they interact directly with them. The Pitt students have met people that they would not likely have met in any other circumstance, and they learned from them. They’ve learned to be grateful for the little things, as well as for recognizing how much they have in common with the people who are incarcerated.
“Being more aware and cognizant than ever of how incredibly privileged we are to have the basic sense of freedom that we have is extremely powerful,” said Emily. “I love to go on runs. So every time I go on a run, I think now more than ever ‘How insane is it that I have a body that
allows me to run, and I’m free to run to any location I want to?’—and I just stop there and think I’m so immensely grateful for this.”
With these lessons in gratitude, the students were increasingly excited to attend class each week. Many students agreed that they have valued time more than in a normal course. They once folded slips of paper for an activity on the hour-long bus ride over rather than waste even a minute of in-class time.
“I think my sense of time is different now,” said Imagining Social Justice student, Liz. “One of the main sentiments we took away was that we make use of our time in that we have happy lives and do meaningful work. And that’s something you hear and know that you should do anyway, but it has a different kind of weight when it’s coming from a friend who really does want that from you and who really knows what they would do with their time if they could.” The program is instilling hope and opportunity for the “inside” students. Some people may be skeptical when first hearing about a program that gives prisoners an education, but the University has supported the program, recognizing its benefits for the students and society. Studies show that it’s cheaper to educate prisoners because it helps them stay out of prison, rather than spending tax dollars for some to keep coming back. Puri said she got into the program because “if there’s a correlation between education and crime, why not fix the educational side of it?"
“Incarceration is not free either, and education is much cheaper,” said Puri. “The other thing to think about is, if people are going to be released, wouldn’t it be better if they could spend the time they have there to be able to learn, so when they come back into society they can integrate better and have more opportunities?”
All of the "inside" students agree that this program has been a life-changing process, writing nothing but positive responses in their end-of-the-semester reflections:
“Over a 78-day period, we spent 12 classes and a performance together that brought us roughly 30 hours of interaction. Those 30 hours that I shared with the other 32 people in the classroom have done more for me personally in self-growth, in reconnecting and relating to others, and in preparing me to rejoin society one day than anything provided by the state in the other 192,834 hours I have been imprisoned so far.”
“This course helped me view people from different races, different backgrounds, in a better light. The professor knew how to meld 32 minds and help them work as one. Helped us see and understand each other. The knowledge that we received was brought to us in a way that even someone like myself, a tenth-grade dropout, can learn and understand just as a college student. She gave you hope, she is empowering. Now I want to go to school, and value education more than I ever had before.”
“I never got to do anything like this on the outside. This program gave me a reason to open up with people. Before this class I just spent my days waiting to die. This program made me want to live again.”
With the PPEP’s current success, there are many goals for the future. At the moment, Pitt does not grant formal academic credit to “inside” students, but the PPEP is looking for ways to get “inside” students full academic credit for the work they do. Currently, they receive a certificate that says they’ve done the equivalent of three college credits, in the hope that, if they are able to attend college, they will be able to convert it retroactively into credits. The instructors and students aspire to host more “inside-only” courses, start a literary magazine, and offer a wider selection of disciplines of study. Also, they wish to host minicourses, day-long workshops, and sample classes where people don’t have to commit to a full term but can attend once or twice just to see what the PPEP is like.“I think that this is a really good opportunity to meet and talk to people you’re made to not see and made to not think about because of the system,” said Rosemary. “I think it’s a really important thing I hope Pitt does forever and get more students get to experience.”
For more information about the Pitt Prison Education Project and the courses it will be offering, contact spuri@pitt.edu or ppep@pitt.edu.
—Kelly Dasta
Kelly Dasta is a junior majoring in English writing and communication rhetoric, and along with being an intern at The Fifth Floor, she’s the vice president of Her Campus Pitt, the fiction editor for The Three Rivers Review, and a tutor at the Writing Center.