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57 Fed. Probation 34 (1993)
College Education in Prisons: The Inmates' Perspectives

handle is hein.journals/fedpro57 and id is 312 raw text is: College Education in Prisons: The Inmates' Perspectives By AHmAD ToOTOONCHI* Assistant Professor, Department of Business Administration, Frostburg State University Introduction T WAS the end of August 1990. I had just come back from a long summer vacation. I received a telephone call from my department chair asking me if I would be willing to teach an organizational behavior course at the Maryland Correctional Insti- tution. My immediate response was yes. I want you to know that it is a medium to maximum secu- rity prison, he said. It does not really matter to me, I replied. It did not matter to me because I was more interested in seeing what a group of inmates would have to share with me in class than concerned for security. They are generally considered to be the bad guys of society, and I was eager to see their attitudes as students in an organizational behavior class. The course was scheduled, and I started teaching the class in the first week of September 1990. I had 25 students in my class whom I found to be enthusiastic, eager to learn, hard working, knowledgeable, and very participative in class discussion about organizational, social, and human issues. Their attitudes toward the course and class activities were so positive that, most of the time, I had to remind myself that I was teaching in a prison and that the students were all prisoners. Weeks passed by, and by the end of the semester I had become so close to my students that I began to think very seriously about the effects of college education on the inmates' lives after they completed their sen- tences. I got to know a group of individuals with tremendous potential to become positive forces in so- ciety, but their talents and energies had been used in a wrong direction which led them to where they were now-prison. This study is focused on college education that is offered in correctional institutions to redirect inmates' attitudes, talents, and energy toward a more meaning- ful purpose in the future. Though few of us on the outside have much of an understanding about the context in which prison education functions, it is widely acknowledged that modern prisons (especially *The author wishes to thank the following for their contri- butions in completing this research paper: Nazanin Tootoon- chi, his wife; Elizabeth Barker, professor of English, Boston University; Carolyn Suman, educational director, Maryland Correctional Training Center;, Calvin Hubbard, an inmate at the Maryland Correctional Training Center who graduated with a bachelor's of science degree in business administra- tion from Frostburg State University; and Jerry Chesser, the author's friend and colleague. maximum security institutions) constitute an anomic, dangerous, and hostile environment (Collins, 1988). The FBI's annual Uniform Crime Reports document the grim statistics which give the U.S. by far the highest crime rate in the western world. The U.S. also sentences more people to prison, and for longer peri- ods, than almost any other country (Clark & Lehr- man, 1980). According to the Corrections Year Book, on January 1, 1990, there were a total of 747,991 inmates in Federal and state prisons, jails, and other facilities in the United States. Of this number, 24 percent were serving life sentences or sentences of 20 years or more. Less than one percent (0.3 percent) were sentenced to death, which leaves about 66 percent serving sen- tences of 20 years or less. The average age of inmates admitted to adult institutions in 1989 was 29.6 years. This means that 66 percent of the inmates will have a big portion of their lives to live in society after being released from prison. What will they do in order to begin a new life? Will they be able to survive or compete in a highly competi- tive environment without going back to their old ways of living that sent them to prison in the first place? How can they be prevented from returning to prison? There are no easy answers to these questions, but some behaviorists and social scientists believe that educating prisoners is one of the best ways, if not the only way, to prepare inmates for life after prison. Inmates of today's prisons are not only offenders serving a judicial punishment specified in their sen- tences, they are also delinquents marked out for treat- ment and correction within the penal system. The penalties imposed do not simply punish offenders for what they have done by depriving them of their lib- erty; the purpose is also to correct what they are and prepare them for eventual return to normal society (Collins, 1988). Advocates and practitioners of education behind bars operate within the purview of the rehabilitative approach to incarceration, which stresses that the function of prisons is to induce criminals to turn their backs on crime (through education, vocational train- ing, counseling, drug treatment, etc.) and reenter so- ciety cured (Corcoran, 1985). To build new, decent lives after serving years in prison requires some abilities and skills without which released individuals will not be able to cope with the Vol. 57, No. 4

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