THREE DECADES AGO I did a four-year stint behind bars. I wasn’t incarcerated—I worked as a correctional officer at the maximum security jail for the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Clearwater, Fla. It wasn’t a career I planned on pursuing.
After high school, I couldn’t afford higher education. I earned an associate’s degree from the local community college, working initially at a video game arcade, then at a factory my dad owned. At the time, I was thinking about a career in law, so my mother and stepfather, both of whom were patrol deputies, suggested that I apply for a job at local law enforcement agencies in order to pay my way through school; the sheriff’s department where they worked ended up hiring me. That’s how I earned my bachelor’s degree while working full time as one of the youngest correctional officers at the jail.
During the semesters I worked the night shift at the jail, I took classes during the day; when I worked the day shift, I took night classes. The contrast between the classrooms and the battleship gray corridors lined with steel-barred cells was striking. At the time, I did not like the jail job; I couldn’t wait until I could “escape” to graduate school.
THAT WAS A long time ago. I did make it to graduate school, though I wound up studying theological ethics, not law, and eventually became a professor. But those four years in a Florida jail were a formative time for me—a time that continues to inform my teaching and writing.
Those memories grew especially vivid last year while I was teaching an ethics course for corrections officers and staff at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center. The maximum security facility, located 60 miles south of St. Louis in the small town of Bonne Terre, is Missouri’s largest state prison, holding more than 2,600 inmates.
The course I taught is part of Saint Louis University’s prison program, which offers an associate’s degree both for inmates and those who work in the prison. It is the only on-site prison education program in the U.S. that serves two underserved populations: people incarcerated and prison employees.
With regard to the first population, the United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the free world. The U.S. has 6 percent of the world’s population but incarcerates 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners. With more than 2 million persons in federal, state, and local jails and prisons, our nation’s corrections system is increasingly known as “hyper-incarceration.” More money is spent per year on building and maintaining prisons than on public schools. Compared to whites, African Americans and Latinos carry a disproportionate burden of being sentenced to prison. Many inmates are also functionally illiterate and poor.
And what do these inmates learn in prison? They don’t necessarily learn a corrective lesson of remorse and renewed civic consciousness. “So-called ‘correctional facilities’ are rife with practices of violence and degradation,” writes theologian James Samuel Logan in Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment. “Since violence breeds violence, prisons and jails can therefore hardly avoid their current social function as preservers and producers”—not correctors—“of violence.” Or, as Logan quotes one ex-offender, “Prison is a school and violence is the curriculum.” This is particularly troubling given that 75 percent of new inmates are imprisoned for nonviolent crimes.
Approximately 95 percent of the incarcerated are released back into society at some point, but many of them find it nearly impossible to find gainful employment. Half of them return to prison within three years.
There’s a solution to this vicious cycle: education. Providing education to the incarcerated not only helps inmates to turn their lives around and find jobs after their release, but it significantly reduces the rate of repeated offense, or recidivism. Though participation in any level of education has been proven to reduce inmates’ likelihood of repeated offense, a 2005 study conducted among Ohio inmates found that college-level education was particularly effective, reducing the likelihood of recidivism for inmates who participated by roughly 62 percent. What’s more, these reduced rates of recidivism actually save taxpayers money. “The direct costs of reincarceration were far greater than the direct costs of providing correctional education,” concluded a 2014 report from the Rand Corporation sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. Even using conservative estimates, the report found that “correctional education programs appear to far exceed the break-even point in reducing the risk of reincarceration.”
Several years ago one of my colleagues, Kenneth Parker, a theologian specializing in 19th century church history, became inspired to start the prison program at Saint Louis University. Supported by the university administration, which views the program as consonant with its mission as a Jesuit, Catholic university seeking to “transform society in the spirit of the gospels,” as well as by the Missouri Department of Corrections, the program began as a certificate in theology for 15 incarcerated men (300 applied). When the first class of inmates graduated in 2010, many expressed deep gratitude. Even lifers, who will not be released into society, are making a positive difference within the prison, mentoring fellow inmates. And as Bill Keller noted in a New York Times column, corrections officers “believe such programs lower the explosive tensions in prisons.”
But prisoners aren’t the only ones who can earn degrees at the prison in Bonne Terre. When Parker first mentioned that he wanted to start the prison program, I thought that it would be great if we could offer courses to the second “underserved” population: the employees. After all, many corrections officers come from a background similar to mine and have only a high school diploma. Offering the degree to employees, I told Parker, would mitigate resentment toward inmates who would be getting access to a degree the guards themselves couldn’t afford.
Plus, just as we should not demonize offenders, we need to remember that police, corrections officers, and other staff in the criminal justice system are persons too. In Good Punishment? Logan reminds readers that jail and prison personnel—who are also “doing time,” albeit in eight-hour shifts—bear the scars of imprisonment too. Correctional officers experience tremendous stress, and the job is also dangerous, with many who are physically and verbally assaulted. Their divorce rate is high and so is their suicide rate. The job is a thankless one, and the atmosphere can have a corrosive effect on them. So an education for them might improve their work and their lives.
My students agree. “This program has not only given me a chance to improve my education, but also gave me the unexpected gift of revitalizing my love of knowledge,” said Officer Charles D. Parrot, one of my students. “Without the SLU prison program, I might never have gone back to college; now I have new goals in my career and life that have come from this.”
Another student, Angie Rinker-Lugo, put it this way: “Every person has plans for their own life, but when I look back at the road behind me, it has all these twists and turns that got me to where I am now. I was fortunate enough to earn a living as an office support assistant in corrections without a college degree. This program has given me an opportunity to accomplish something I didn’t see achievable for my future ... an AA degree through a prestigious college like Saint Louis University. Now looking back at how far I have come with the program, I realize that I will go farther than I would have ever thought possible.”
Weekly classes address a range of controversial topics, including same-sex marriage, vegetarianism, abortion, and, yes, capital punishment. Since Bonne Terre is where state executions are done, this latter issue hit close to home. We covered “ethics avoidance disorders,” such as rationalizing or offhand self-justification, which Elon University philosopher Anthony Weston defines as “an automatic excuse-making or defensiveness.” The students honestly wrestled with the moral arguments about the death penalty and other issues, and their views are not necessarily what might be expected.
They learn to be suspicious of easy labeling and bumper-sticker style slogans. They appreciate getting the facts and learning how to better interpret the data. We practice creative thinking and reframing problems: “Why not refocus at least part of our energies toward reducing the number of murders in the first place?” We read about a “prison-ashram project” created by Bo Lozoff to enable “prisoners to treat their prisons as ashrams,” and we tried to imagine what a prison that does more than function as a warehouse might look like—not only for the incarcerated but for the employees. What if prisons were more like the biblical cities of refuge, we wondered. What if the prison program could really be about restorative justice, and what if it not only made a positive difference in the lives of offenders and staff, but also for victims of crime? We discussed how scholarships could be partially funded by inmates through their work at the prison so that the children of victims of violent crime could attend college.
Students also take courses in other disciplines such as biology, composition, and mathematics. At times they also struggle, not only with academic work but also trying to juggle it with their job and their family responsibilities. The cohort I taught will graduate this coming fall, and the associate’s degree they receive will be well earned.
THOUGH THERE WERE 350 college-in-prison programs in the U.S. in 1984, only a handful still exist, the consequences of President Bill Clinton cutting Pell grants for prisoners in 1994. Successful programs, such as the Bard Prison Initiative in New York, have gotten well-deserved attention, but when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a plan last year to underwrite college courses in 10 state prisons, it was met with opposition. “It should be ‘do the crime, do the time,’” said state Sen. George D. Maziarz, “not ‘do the crime, earn a degree.’”
But what Maziarz and others opposed to prison education programs don’t realize is that offenders are already learning plenty while doing the time—lessons of violence, not contrition. So too are many corrections officers and prison staff. And for the sake of all involved as well as for society, learning should be something that lowers the rate of repeated offense, not raises it.
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