I stood at the classroom window inside McNeil Island Corrections Center in south Puget Sound and watched the sea darken from azure to indigo. The trees across the Sound looked black even before the light left them. Had it been a clear day, Mount Rainier would have been fading from view in the darkening night.
Daffodils and tulips bloomed in weed-free flower beds along perfectly edged lawns on the grounds below me. A sudden shower darkened the khaki shirts and pants of men dashing from their living units to classes. Few of them ever glanced toward the sea. A heavy chain-link fence topped with razor-barbed concertina wire separated them from the Sound, and from the society against which they’d offended. The men knew the sea was out there, but even approaching the fence for a closer look was off limits.
Those headed toward my classroom were enrolled in Parenting From a Distance, a course I developed while teaching women at Washington Corrections Center for Women in the 1980s, and tailored for needs of inmate fathers in the 1990s.
I’d taught various parent and family education courses on a community college campus prior to going inside the women’s prison, and found it challenging and rewarding. Why did I leave the relative ease of teaching post highschool students to spend eighteen years of my career with murderers, rapists, child abusers, drug addicts, thieves, and marauders? Why did I invest my own time and energy developing curriculum and writing textbooks tailored for inmate students’ needs?
There are, I suppose, several answers. I found humanity in a microcosm, a challenge I couldn’t resist, an opportunity to make a difference that reached beyond the prison classroom to the communities where inmates’ families lived. And there are the statistics–those impersonal numbers on lists, charts, and diagrams that are easy to ignore unless you have a reason to read them.
I found the reason when I went inside. Over 95 percent of all convicted felons return to their homes, families, communities. Over 80 percent of them are parents. All of them are sons or daughters. None of them were born criminal; something happened to them as they grew and developed. I’m not pointing fingers at their families or communities, though the statistics tell us that inmates tend to be functionally illiterate, often learning disabled, from dysfunctional homes with a history of abuse. An accumulation of negative life experiences leave them with little to draw on to compete and survive in the “real” world.
One of my former students at McNeil Island sent me a lengthy Kite–an Inmate Request to Staff Member form. He’d missed an appointment to meet with me in my office because his prison construction job had kept him late. He was waiting for a transfer to a work-release facility, and concerned we might not meet again, though he’d completed his course work on his own time.
At the end of the Kite, he wrote a paragraph about his personal awareness and understanding that developed as he learned about parenting and family matters. “My actions and choices landed me here,” he wrote. He went on to say his ex-wife had a right to feel deserted and angry. So did his boys. He followed tenets of the distance parenting course work, and his own good sense, in reaching out to his ex-wife and sons, and making legal arrangements to see and support the boys. He thanked me for helping him learn and understand. I thanked him for trusting the process enough to learn.
Prison classrooms look much like college or high school classrooms. Teachers personalize them with posters and assorted items meant to encourage learning. My McNeil Island classroom included a poster that read BLAMING OTHERS FOR YOUR CRIME AND INCARCERATION KEEPS YOU A VICTIM. Every student who registered for one of the parent and family education courses or creative writing classes I taught wrote at least one paragraph on that topic as part of a Writing to Clarify Thinking activity. Those who came into my classroom with limited writing skills, but who were fathers concerned for their children, were allowed to deliver their thoughts orally.
In the process of teaching inmates some basics of parenting, family history and patterns, child development, and writing skills, I gained insight into their lives. They acted out for attention as children, got spanked or whipped or knocked up the side of the head to teach them a lesson. As the got a little older, they gravitated toward gangs where they found the structure that is so integral to a child’s development, especially from age six to twelve. They also found the nurture necessary to balance structure: their gang members were their “homies,” their family. They functioned in their own way, started families of their own before they were able to support themselves, and then did “what a man has to do” to see to his own. Then ended up in prison.
There are over 1.5 million children in the United States with a parent in prison, and another half-million with a parent in jail. (In general, those with less than a year to serve do their time in jail, those with a year or more go to prison.)
Why did I choose to teach the courses I did inside the prison fence? Because I am an advocate for the rights of children of incarcerated parents. Because I believe all prison education, not just parenting and family courses, makes a difference for all of society. Because over 95 percent of all convicted felons return to our homes, families, and communities.
© 2011 Jan Walker