Barring an Education

by Joe Gutierrez

Spring/Summer 2005

Imagine walking into a classroom where the teacher has a captive audience — literally. A classroom filled with students who could be functionally illiterate, have lower than normal IQs or are highly intelligent and, for whatever reason, never got a chance at education. You’re in a makeshift classroom — maybe a shower or a cramped room in the worst part of the building, where toilet piping runs through. The students are considered by many to be the dregs of society. They are inmates, prisoners and juvenile offenders. This is the world of Carolyn Eggleston and Thom Gehring, who have spent the better part of their professional lives working in correctional education.

Working as a team since 1975, when they met at a correctional education conference, and married in 1987, Eggleston and Gehring belong to a small group of educators around the country and the world dedicated to advancing and improving correctional education and helping people that most of society would like to forget. But the number of those incarcerated may be too large a figure to ignore.

At any given time, more than 2.1 million people are behind bars in correctional institutions around the country. Every year the law jails between 10 and 12 million people and releases about the same number, according to a study by Gail Spangenberg, president of the Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy. Many of these people have been caught up in something similar to a revolving door, being rearrested and re-incarcerated.

It’s a world where education is desperately needed and can help turn a person’s life around, said Gehring, who has been teaching, advising or consulting at correctional facilities since 1972. “These are people who education gave up on, or [who] gave up on education,” he said. “This is the last frontier in education. We do change lives, though — sadly — not everybody’s.”

It’s not a quixotic branch of education. The council’s study also showed that inmates in correctional education programs have substantially lower rates of rearrest after being released than those who leave prison without participating. But it’s an area that is regulated state by state, leaving each state to create or copy its own correctional education programs.

Eggleston, who is president of the International Correctional Education Association, and Gehring co-direct Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Correctional Education, which was created in 1991. The center helps veteran and prospective teachers who work in local, state, federal and private correctional facilities by providing training, historical perspectives, and teaching methods and showing them how to deal with prisoners in the classroom. And though the two professors teach in the predictable and safe spaces of a university campus, they still know what it’s like to teach at a prison or juvenile detention center. It can be an absurd, even bizarre setting that a typical teacher would never see in their classroom. They remember starting a class with few if any teaching materials or making do with makeshift classrooms. In Eggleston’s case, she once held classes in a shower room. “You teach where you can.”

Despite the work of educational groups and associations, teaching conditions are still abysmal at many institutions around the country as education and rehabilitation continue to be low priorities, Eggleston said. Too often teachers working in these prisons, jails or juvenile facilities are credentialed, but have no training in correctional education. “They don’t know that there are programs and organizations that can help, that there are peers and mentors going through or who have gone through what they are doing,” she said.

But learning how to teach in correctional facilities isn’t the lone major issue educators face right now. “America still has not decided if the prisons are the punishment for the people we send there or if they should be punished everyday,” said Eggleston, who, in 1975 became an educational specialist and diagnostician for the Department of Correctional Education in Virginia. And it doesn’t help, she added, that no states have a standard for teaching in correctional facilities.

That’s where the university’s Center for the Study of Correctional Education and associations such as the Correctional Education Association, based near Washington, D.C., come in. They’ve created standards and programs, conducted studies and pulled together other mentoring resources to support that wing of the teaching profession, Eggleston said. That work is critical, because, for many correctional educators, teaching at a prison or juvenile facility probably is not the profession to which they aspire. Indeed. Eggleston got into the field by applying for a better paying job. Gehring said he took the job because that was all that was available. And now the two find themselves in what has become for them an “avocation.”

They look at different areas of correctional education. Eggleston focuses on the special education aspect of correctional education, and is the former publisher and editor of the Journal of Correctional Education. Meanwhile, Gehring has focused on the history of correctional education and prison reform, and currently serves as the historian for the Correctional Education Association. The correctional education center offers coursework toward a master’s degree in correctional education that is tailored specifically for teaching in correctional facilities. The center also has two senior fellows who are instructors in CSUSB’s College of Education, professors Richard Ashcroft and Randall Wright.

But there is one constant in correctional education: Instructors have to be constantly aware — aware of their surroundings, aware of the potential for harm as a matter of survival. “It can be very intimidating going behind bars to teach. Walking through and hearing three or four gates slam behind you is a difficult thing to deal with,” Eggleston said. “Remember, these people didn’t get locked up because they couldn’t do fractions.” Yet many of the prisoners in correctional education share one thing in common with most students at a typical college — the desire to learn. At most facilities, the inmates in classes want to be there. They could earn money working at jobs in the prison, but instead choose to be in a classroom, Gehring said. “School is looked upon like a job assignment, but they do not get paid for attending.”

That desire for an education can help not only the inmate but also society in general, according to a study by Audrey Bazos and Jessica Hausman from the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. The study compared the rates of rearrest, reconviction and reincarceration of inmates in Maryland, Minnesota and Ohio compared to those inmates who did not participate in educational programs three years after their release. The comparison found that $1 million spent to incarcerate prevented about 350 crimes, while the same amount of money spent on correctional education prevented about 600 crimes. Also, the study found that for every $1 million a state spends on correctional education, the state will save about $600,000 in future correctional costs, because it helps prevent the reincarceration of inmates.

For the inmates themselves, it’s a chance to get an education on literacy development – reading, writing, math or a vocational education – learning a trade that can be used once they are released, according to the UCLA study. It’s also where, said the study, inmates can learn behavioral skills that will help them reintegrate into society or can “learn how to live a crime-free life by participating in education courses.”

One of Gehring’s first assignments in working with inmates was as an instructor at a correctional institution for young adult males. His classes consisted of inmates who were all taking hormone shots as one of the steps toward gender change. They would dress in drag and wear makeup in preparation for becoming females. The only book Gehring had to teach these inmates were phrase books on dining out in every language. “So I handed out the book and used parts of it to teach – how to read, comprehend, anything from the book that could be used to create a reading lesson,” Gehring said. “The students were wonderful students. They even gave me fashion tips,” he said, laughing.

Students also protect their education. While Eggleston was teaching at one prison, a riot broke out. Though the riot happened in another part of the facility, her students hid her under a table and told her to stay there. Two of her students watched by the classroom door to warn of and ward off any potential violence to civilians. Gehring had his own encounter. While consulting at a facility in British Columbia, he went to lunch with an administrator. As they walked down a corridor on their return, several inmates followed them, while another group of inmates walked ahead of them. “I thought, ‘uh oh, this could be something,’ but they stopped us and told us to wait. They said that another inmate had planted contraband in the administrator’s office and that they were getting rid of it and dealing with the inmate,” Gehring said. “They were protecting us, but also protecting the program that they didn’t want to lose. Teaching in prison is, however, safer than teaching in public high schools today.”

Many of the inmates at these facilities begin to understand more about themselves away from a gang or criminal background. “Many of them are in their 20s and never expected to live a full life. Most of their friends are dead,” Eggleston said. “They begin to understand that they do have some choices and their lives can take a different path and that education is a path.” The correctional education movement, said Gehring, who with Eggleston has written a history on the topic, began in 1789, when clergyman William Rogers offered to teach at a jail in Philadelphia. The prison warden agreed, but fearing a potential riot, he ordered two guards to attend the class with a loaded cannon trained on the convicts. During the 1880s and '90s, in Elmira, NY, Elmira Reformatory Superintendent Zebulon Brockway put in education programs for prisoners. The education staff consisted of doctors, professors and teachers. Their goals included providing a link between academic, social and vocational learning, remedial instruction and diet and exercise prescribed by the institutional physician. Even before World War I a group setting up public schools looked at correctional education to see if certain practices would work in regular school settings. Correctional education was, for them, the laboratory where theories could be tested. Those that succeeded could be made to work at regular schools.

Interest in correctional education bloomed because “public school educators know that their colleagues in correctional education successfully address the same programs that they themselves find so frustrating every day.” As an example, teachers at prisons or juvenile detention centers work with students who have dropped out of school, have poor learning habits, or have learning, emotional or drug problems, but still learn, Gehring and Eggleston wrote in the history. But the bottom line is that it always comes back to teachers, Eggleston said. Good teachers can be found to make programs work and at the end of the day teachers at these facilities are no different than their peers who teach in regular schools. They, too, want to see their students succeed.