Current Affairs

The students are focused, animated and engaged. The teachers are thoughtful and responsive. Class discussion is probing and heartfelt. And there are no discipline problems.

It’s the spring semester of English 101 at San Quentin State Prison.

On a recent Thursday evening, the 18 students in the class were discussing three George Orwell essays.

“What was Orwell trying to say in ‘A Hanging’ when he mentioned a condemned man took the time to step aside to avoid a puddle on his path?” 35- year-old Abdul Waahid asked teaching assistant Bryan Ritter and the three other inmates in his discussion group.

“He’s about to be put to death,” concluded Waahid, of Greensboro, N.C. “And he still has enough dignity to avoid a puddle.”

There were countless other points to debate, often passionately, and everyone had something to say.

“Teaching at San Quentin has revitalized my teaching at S.F. State,” said Professor Judy Breen, 68, who has taught at State since 1969 and at the prison for two years. “I’m doing things freshly and differently.”

Breen is also doing something unprecedented at San Quentin — enlisting nine teaching assistants to work with the inmates in small groups, to create a symbiotic collision of worlds.

“I wanted to bring together students from very different university communities,” Breen said. “I thought they both had a lot of misconceptions about each other, and a great deal to learn from each other.”

The prisoners all wore blue, a color that Breen and her teaching assistants were told to avoid — just so the guards would know whom to shoot, someone said, only half-jokingly, if things got out of hand.

Breen’s presence dominated the room. Dressed in a salmon-colored shirt, white pants, scarf and beige sweater, she would have fit right in at a garden party. Brisk and breezy at the same time — and thoroughly in charge — she resembled a cross between Maggie Smith and Katharine Hepburn.

“Teaching at San Quentin is a little bit like having a late-life love affair,” Breen said later during a phone interview. “It’s recharged my life.”

Her class, which meets for 2 1/4 hours two nights a week, includes sex offenders, thieves, killers and kidnappers.

Dream students

“They’re kind of dream students,” said 39-year-old Jody Lewen, who runs the prison’s college program. “They’re the opposite of the way people imagine. They’re incredibly attentive and respectful, appreciative and hardworking.”

About 1,500 of the prison’s 6,000 inmates are eligible to take English 101 and the other college-level classes that can lead to an associate of arts degree through Patten University, a small nondenominational Christian college in Oakland that has been running the program since 1996.

They need a high school diploma or its equivalent and can’t be on Death Row, Lewen said. About 150 inmates are enrolled in the classes, which are run by volunteers since federal funds for prison education ended nationwide in 1994. San Quentin is the only on-site program in California that grants degrees to inmates.

Inmates can study everything from Indonesian colonial literature to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, said Lewen, and ethics is a requirement. Volunteers come from Bay Area colleges and universities, especially UC Berkeley, and usually have no idea what crimes their students committed.

“We have a policy that we don’t ask,” Lewen said. “It’s none of our business. But we tell everyone that if they’re not comfortable teaching people who killed people, they shouldn’t volunteer.”

Ritter, one of Breen’s teaching assistants, said he wouldn’t ask in any case.

“The answer will only bias you,” said Ritter, 29. “If your purpose is to educate, you educate. This sort of knowledge will get in the way.”

Students are medium-security prisoners; some of them are lifers.

“People still say to me, ‘Why are you teaching these guys? They’re never going to get out,’ ” Lewen said. “Well, my mother’s never going to get out of New York City. What difference does it make? … Everybody has the need to be intellectually stimulated.”

Breen’s English class began in late January and will end April 27. It was supposed to wrap up a week earlier, but a partial lockdown in the prison one night and an erroneous cell count another evening cut down on attendance.

9 teaching assistants

Although it’s the fifth class Breen has taught at San Quentin, bringing in the nine teaching assistants for eight sessions was something new. She figured she’d have trouble recruiting them, but she quickly got more than she needed — mostly from her courses on Shakespeare and on 17th century British metaphysical poets.

“I wanted the prisoners and S.F. State students to meet on a level playing field,” Breen said. “They sat in small groups together and read the same essays together.”

Everyone is learning

Both inmates and TAs are earning three credits. Breen said the inmates often show extraordinary oral skills, while the S.F. State students are more grounded in writing and composition.

“I’m not really a great English student, but Judy is breaking it down for me,” said inmate Henry Frank, 29, of Eureka. “Now I’m enjoying writing. In high school I’d skip out a lot. This class — I actually look forward to coming to it.”

College classes take place in the Education Center, where two prison guards are stationed at the entrance. The classrooms have linoleum floors, green blackboards and old-fashioned wooden desks, as well as large windows that open onto the hallways.

“One of the first things I thought, walking into the Education Center, was, ‘This looks a lot like S.F. State,’ ” said Breen, who admitted to being nervous initially. “The same institutional architecture. When I saw those heavy desks, I was so envious. Then I realized they were made like that so inmates couldn’t pick them up and throw them at me.”

For the teaching assistants’ four-week visit, she chose Orwell’s “Marrakech,” “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” partly because they were rich enough to stand up to a month of scrutiny and partly because Orwell dealt with crime, violence, remorse and terrible choices.

Ritter said he came away impressed by the “level of proper intellectual debate” in the class.

“They easily separate themselves from their analysis or argument — a rather complex and unattainable concept for most adults ‘on the outside,’ ” he said. “They are terribly eager to learn.”

It’s an eagerness reflected in their faces, in rushing down the stairs to get to class.

‘They want to be here’

“You see their expressions,” said guard J. Beebe, who works at the Education Center’s entry checkpoint. “They want to be here.”

Inmate Abraham Glasper, 35, said San Quentin’s college students realize there’s more to life than being in prison.

“This puts you in a better position to not come back,” said Glasper, who’s from Baton Rouge, La.

Glasper, Frank and Waahid were in teaching assistant Ritter’s discussion group, along with inmate Chuck Hopple, of Santa Clara, the oldest of the five.

New pleasure discovered

At age 51, he’d discovered something new: “There’s some pleasure in learning,” he said. “It’s enjoyable and it’s fun.”

It’s also very time-consuming, Waahid said. And that is a good thing, as far as he’s concerned.

“It helps you stay away from the problems in the yard,” he said.

As for Breen, she said the classes always keep her off balance, with questions and assumptions she would never have expected. She likes it that way.

“San Quentin students have had life experiences that sometimes have made them deeply reflective, with time on their hands to think,” she said. “They often have lived hard lives and made bad choices and suffered heavy consequences — which gives classroom discussions an edge you rarely have at State.”

Attribution: This originally appeared on SFGate on March 29, 2004. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Prison college programs, decimated by a ‘94 crime bill, have begun a slow comeback. As more people of color attend classes behind bars, the politics of prison education are once again up for debate.

Ten women are scattered, two to a table, facing the chalkboard, tentatively sharing feedback on last week’s reading assignment: Nietzsche’s conception of aristocratic morality, and its mirror opposite the morality of the slave. The professor resumes his explanation of the text, jiggling chalk in his hand like he’s about to roll a pair of dice. He has a fuzzy, prematurely balding head, and wire-rimmed glasses. He is wearing brown cords, a black flannel button-down, and he has little hoop earrings in both ears.

“Nietzsche talks about his own upbringing, his skepticism towards morality and the origins of the nature of good and evil—”\ A woman with clipped, graying hair and drug-store eyeglasses breaks in. She’s wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. “So, who are ‘the bad’?”

“The weak,” the professor explains, “are at the mercy of the more brave, more courageous, more powerful. So the poor redefine the strong, powerful people as bad. Good becomes evil and bad becomes good. ”

“I dig that,” the woman says, cracking a smile. A few students cough out nervous laughs. And then an almost imperceptible shift occurs. All 10 women loosen their posture, like someone just opened an air valve.

It’s midway through the fall semester for Professor Jeffrey Paris’ philosophy class, and the lofty material—which elsewhere might read pretty dry—has rich layers of meaning for these aging undergraduates, who are under medium security lockdown at the Northern California Women’s Facility (NCWF) in Stockton, California.

For some taxpayers, the very existence of on-site programs like the accredited bachelor’s degree at NCWF is contentious. In fact, prison colleges were all but decimated in 1994 when Congress passed a crime bill eliminating Pell Grants for incarcerated men and women. In the past few years, college

programs have begun a sluggish comeback—primarily at the behest of volunteer professors and grad students, and under the sponsorship of private, religious institutions. Nationally, the only higher education program that ’s still publicly funded is for youthful offenders.

Though it’s a struggle for the private and government sectors to agree on the details, it seems prison colleges will ultimately survive the loss of federal funding. As stricter sentencing laws take hold, more Americans—and disproportionately more men and women of color—will attend school behind bars. Though Hollywood would have us believe otherwise, intellectual discussions are more of an everyday occurence than shower hookups and prison breaks. So the question that remains unsettled, the unspoken question in Professor Paris’ class, is, what is useful and meaningful content for the prison classroom? What should be the goal of a college education for convicted felons who may never be released?

At the men’s program at San Quentin, now in its sixth year, opinions on the matter vary drastically:

“We should be able to talk about whatever we want as long as people aren’t cutting the bars and jumping the walls,” says Rahman, a 50 year-old graduate of the San Quentin program, now in his 22nd consecutive year in custody.

“Keep everybody really, really busy,” Department of Corrections spokesman, Bob Martinez, told the Associated Press in March, 2001.

“If we’re going to run this program it should be like a high-quality liberal arts college that we would want to send our kids to or that we would want to go to ourselves,” says UC Berkeley graduate student, Jody Lewen, the volunteer director of the San Quentin program.

“The point of these programs is to put a lid on things,” says Dylan Rodriguez, an Ethnic Studies professor at UC Riverside, whose doctoral research focused on prison politics. “These education programs allow prisoners just enough space to blow off some steam, but not enough to blow the lid off.”

Radical Beginnings: The Legacy of Attica
The current curriculum debate seems rather tame given the groundbreaking events that brought prison colleges programs into being. The earliest program on record is the University of Maryland at Maryland Penitentiary, established in 1953. The course offerings at Maryland and a handful of other programs that followed were sparse. None of them granted degrees. In 1965, Congress passed the Higher Education Act, allowing inmates access to tuition assistance. But even with this backing, only about 3,000 inmates —less than one percent of the population—had participated in some form of post-secondary education by 1967. Most who did took correspondence courses.

What catalyzed the on-site education movement, what made it a household issue was the uprising at Attica State Prison in New York. On September 9, 1971, Attica inmates, who had been living in squalid conditions, took the prison guards hostage. Their demands included minimum-wage payment for their labor (they were earning 30 cents a day), better medical treatment, more black and Spanish-speaking guards, and access to education. During the standoff, inmate spokesmen invited in doctors and journalists to see their living conditions, assess the health of the hostages, and ultimately broadcast to the world what would transpire in the coming days. After several days of negotiations between inmate leaders and the state government, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered in the National Guard. The Guardsmen stormed the gates, discharging 2,200 bullets in nine minutes. When the smoke and tear gas cleared, 29 inmates and 10 prison guards had been killed, all, according to autopsy reports, by gunshot wounds inflicted by the National Guardsmen.

Attica was a watershed for national prison reform. It swayed public opinion towards the notion of a rehabilitative, rather than punitive, function for so-called “correctional institutions.” Attica also awoke prison officials to the fact that with or without institutional support, prisoners would get an education. Long before the uprising, incarcerated intellectuals around the country had begun educating their brothers and sisters on the inside, often about the nuts and bolts of radical liberation struggles. Wardens began to rethink their programming: offering government-sponsored education at all levels became a higher priority.

“The institution of formal college and high school education programs was a direct response to the prison-education circles initiated by inmates,” says Dylan Rodriguez.

A core group of surviving Attica inmates who were transferred to New York’s Green Haven facility set up a “think tank” of self-educated inmate scholars who began teaching younger inmates. The think tank set the groundwork for programs in New York prisons today, like the inmate liaison committee that handles grievances between inmates and officers, and the pre-release center, where inmates are connected with community contacts to help them complete their studies and find jobs on the outside.

In the spirit of inmate educators before them, Al-Jaami and Rahman at San Quentin tutor their peers to this day. “We’ve got grandfathers that have graduated up under us. It’s a beautiful thing when they finally take that step,” Al-Jaami says. “We turn out more GED graduates than the prison,” says Rahman.

In collaboration with prison administrators and community members, the Green Haven think tank set up a four-year bachelor’s program funded by Pell Grants and run through Marist College, a Catholic institution in Poughkeepsie. The first two classes in the inaugural year, 1973, were Economics and Urban Planning. Prison scholars began encouraging their fellow inmates to register for classes.

Lateef Islam, then a 21-year-old inmate at Green Haven, remembers some of the Attica vets convincing him that, although he was a ninth grade dropout, he could handle even the most cerebral topics. “We had teachers coming in who were amazed by the articulation, by the way we thought, by what we had already developed without a formal education,” says Islam.

In The Last Graduation, Barbara Zahm’s documentary about the last degrees conferred under Pell Grants, Professor James Brady sums up the classroom environment he’d become accustomed to at Green Haven: “These guys want to drain every bit of information you have. They see books as full of gold. They ask every question they can ask until the bell rings.”

College Degrees: An Antidote for Recidivism?
In 1987, the Bureau of Prisons documented that the more education an inmate received, the less likely he was to return to prison. More recent studies have also found significantly lower recidivism rates—ranging from 1 to 15.5 percent—for inmates who participated in higher education programs.

Intellectual curiosity and hope cannot be quantified. But James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who directed mental health services in the Massachusetts prison system for many years, believes education is a quantifiable form of violence prevention. In his book, Preventing Violence, Dr. Gilligan writes, “Education is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not a person will be violent.”

Gilligan tracked 200 inmates serving time for violent crimes, including murder, rape, and armed robbery, over a 25-year period to determine which programs in the Massachusetts prisons were most effective in preventing recidivism. College was the only program with a 100-percent success rate: not a single inmate who earned a college degree had been re-incarcerated for a new crime.

For inmates with release dates, Gilligan’s findings bode well. But in California, even straight-A students leave their parole hearings ungratified. Governor Gray Davis has not approved a single prisoner for parole. Jared Sexton, an Ethnic Studies graduate student at UC Berkeley, says he’s teaching men who know they’ll be locked up for a long time. “The desire to have meaningful interactions, to challenge oneself intellectually and academically, wards against the deadening effect of prison. But to think they’re working on developing resumés—preparing themselves for upward mobility and social climbing—is delusional.”

The Price and Color of an Education
At the height of the college renaissance in the ’80s, the penal system could boast a total of 350 programs in 45 states. By the mid- ’90s, there were fewer than 10 programs. In the interim, Senate heavyweight Jesse Helms and his colleagues drummed up an avalanche of tough-on-crime sentiment, leading constituents to believe that by dipping into the Pell coffers, inmates were depleting federal funding earmarked for students on the outside. In reality, all students in need, including inmates who qualified, could land a Pell Grant.

Lateef Islam says the 1994 bill cutting grants ultimately hurt the crime-fearing citizens Helms and company wanted to protect. “The reality is these people are gonna come back out. They want the same opportunities as everyone else, to have a piece of the American pie. The only way they know to do that is by preying on law-abiding citizens. The best argument for college is that it gives them a real opportunity.”

Islam’s own trajectory and those of other Green Haven alums solidly illustrate this point. Upon leaving Green Haven with 15 college credits, Islam completed his degree, began graduate coursework, and joined the Marist faculty as an adjunct professor. He now runs a youth services program. Many former Green Haven inmates work with youth. One is the dean of students at an alternative middle school, another works for IBM. Some are ministers. One man is a physician. A woman Islam knows from another prison program is an attorney in Buffalo. “And you have some guys that don’t have prestigious jobs, but they are employed, raising a family, paying taxes.”

It costs the state 10 times more to incarcerate inmates than to educate them. Forty-eight-year-old Lemonta McBroom, who has spent 25 years in prison, is just two classes shy of a degree at San Quentin. He says that he doesn’t feel beholden to anyone for this privilege. “It’s not like our college education is free, because you have to be incarcerated to get it.”

Educators hoping to revive prison colleges in the post-Pell Grant-era had to hustle supplies and forgo funding. In 1996, Naomi Janowitz, now the chair of religious studies at UC Davis, came to the San Quentin administrators with an idea. Patten College, which had run programs at 13 prisons under Pell Grants, was interested in starting up an Associate of Arts degree. Janowitz said she would find professors and administer the program. The warden at the time told her, “You sure as hell can’t do it with taxpayer money. But if you can make it happen for free, go ahead.”

“Not everybody’s in favor of inmate education,” says Janowitz. She settled on two basic criteria for the San Quentin program, and for the bachelor’s program she later set up at the NCWF: “Nobody can make any money off it and anybody who qualifies should be admitted.”

Since the rise, fall, and resurgence of college programs, the profile of participants has shifted. According to U.S. Census data, 60 percent of prison inmates are African American or Latino; whereas, just 13 percent of college graduates are African American or Latino. Graduate student Sidney Dietz, a Navaho who has taught geometry at both San Quentin and NCWF, says his prison classrooms are always more diverse than classes on the outside. “I’m always proud to have Native students, and I like to think they’re proud of me. But they’re over-represented in prison classrooms.”

According to data from The Sentencing Project, between 1980 and 2001 the population of women in prison increased 654 percent (most recent entrants were incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses). A study at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility showed that the population of women inadequately served by the New York public schools on the outside—low-income African Americans and Latinas—were the same demographic group, ages 17-58, pursuing a college education behind bars.

Prison undergraduates are frequently the first in their families to graduate from college. These inmates are the role models held up for their children and grandchildren struggling with school on the outside.

Ethnic Studies Debate in Prison
A year ago, four students churned up the curriculum debate at San Quentin. Their story offers a glimpse into the bigger question programs must answer. After class one evening, Viet “Mike” Ngo and Eddy Zheng handed a list of the group’s demands to the program director, Jody Lewen. The document urged the college to add an ethnic studies elective and establish an academic advisory committee representing “various cultural, political, and social viewpoints” to determine future electives.

Nothing momentous in the annals of free-world student activism, certainly nothing risky compared with what went down at Attica.

But after word got out to the correctional staff, the men’s cells were searched, correspondence with likeminded TAs was confiscated, and before the close of the semester, the prison had barred the four signatories from all classes and extra-curricular programming, transferred two of them to other prisons, and placed three—all Asian Americans—in solitary confinement where they remain at print time.

Lewen says at the root of the episode was a conflict between academic culture and prison culture. “To be educated is to become a critical thinker and dissent. It’s what you want your students to do. But then they do it, and they get sledgehammered. In prison, all challenges to authority are intrinsically threatening. We follow all kinds of stupid rules because we want [the administration] to trust us. They have no legal obligation to allow our program to run.”

In the midst of the turmoil, Eddy Zheng wrote an editorial for Hardboiled, the Asian/ Pacific American student newspaper at UC Berkeley, about the need for Asian and Asian American studies: “How can Lewen expect me and other prisoners to maximize our potential when she is restricting our freedom to learn and speak freely and treating us as inferiors?”

Antonio Cediel, now a school superintendent in Boston, taught Mexican history and twentieth century U.S. history at San Quentin. He remembers Sean McPhetridge, then-director of the college for the Department of Corrections, informing him of curriculum materials he couldn’t bring in: “Stuff to do with the Panthers, the Native American movement, the Crow Dog memoir. I felt a little frustrated, but I understood the political tightrope that was being walked to keep the program going.”

The tightrope walk is more perilous from the student perspective. “When I started in ’98, we were really at liberty to discuss the topics we wanted to discuss,” says Al-Jaami, a San Quentin graduate. “But in the back of my mind I knew at any given time a person could be called in or taken to account for any paper they wrote.”

Class Dismissed
The buildings at NCWF are clustered around a pockmarked lawn. Day and night gophers and rabbits hop through several concentric fences onto the lawn and scuttle out again.

For professors new to the arrangement, teaching behind bars is an adjustment

“I’m pretty present in terms of the fact that this is a prison. How can you sit in a room of 10 or 12 people who are being punished without talking about the reality of the fact?” says Jeffrey Paris. ‘On the other hand, it’s not a class about prison education—it’s about college-level philosophy.”

Down the hall from Professor Paris, Professor Cayce Dumont’s English class is wrapping up for the night. Dumont explains the assignment: “Write a persuasive essay, based on personal experience, about the purpose of prison. Which system of punishment is best? Deterrence? Incapacitation? Rehabilitation?” The students jot down some final notes.

“OK, we’re done. You can go now,” Dumont says.

A few students get up. A bulky woman with a mullet, who’s been vocal in class, slumps back in her chair, twirling a pencil through her fingers.

“They don’t ever want to leave,” the professor tells the visiting reporter.

No, we don’t,” the prisoner answers. 

Attribution: This originally appeared on ColorLines on March 15, 2003. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

SAN QUENTIN —  Sixteen men wait for Donna Woll’s college-level psychology class to begin in classroom No. 7. Some glance at the walls, decorated with construction paper cutouts that proclaim: “No one is good at everything, but everyone is good at something,” and “Cuando es mi fecha de salida?” (When is my release date?)

The students wear slate blue uniforms. Teachers must pass two security checkpoints before entering, and guards occasionally look in. Students thumb their 2-pound textbooks delicately, because damage or loss of the $40 books means 80 hours of work to replace them.

The students are inmates at San Quentin State Penitentiary, and they are lucky to be in the only prison in the state that offers college classes on its grounds — though Ironwood State Prison in Blythe recently began satellite transmission of courses from a nearby community college.

Two decades ago, when he was 17, Olish Tunstall began a life sentence for a murder in the San Bernardino suburb where he grew up. A succession of prison transfers brought him to the state’s oldest lockup, and classroom No. 7.

“When I was growing up, my parents looked to me to be the one to go to college. I really disappointed them by coming to prison. But it’s a way for me to give something back,” Tunstall said. Math is his favorite subject, and he hopes to become an X-ray technician, should he win parole.

Studies show that prison education can be the deciding factor in improving an inmate’s future after parole.

San Quentin’s warden, Jeanne Woodford, said inmates who get degrees are less likely to return to jail and more likely to be good parents. “We need to break the cycle,” she said. “We need to stop this growing trend of needing more prisons.”

She has an unusual ally.

In 1989, Patten College — a nondenominational Christian college in west Oakland — began a biblical studies-ministry certificate program, offering courses in the Old and New Testaments and “Evangelism and Outreach” at prisons throughout the state. More than 600 inmates at 13 prisons enrolled. And in 1993, after intense lobbying, Patten won state accreditation for an associate’s degree program at San Quentin in liberal studies, which includes English, math, history, psychology and philosophy. Since 1998, Patten has conferred 37 associate’s degrees at San Quentin.

“Higher education prepares inmates to get out, so society can say, ‘Come and be my neighbor,’ ” said Patten College President Gary Moncher, who has taught a dozen courses at San Quentin. “It’s in society’s interest.”

But as Patten’s efforts got started, victims’ rights groups and the government turned against such programs. In 1993, then-Gov. Pete Wilson signed a bill revoking state funds for inmates’ higher education. And in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton signed legislation by then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) that eliminated the federal scholarship Pell Grants for inmates. With the main funding for such classes gone, the percentage of prisons nationwide offering associate’s degree programs dropped from 71% in 1994 to 37% in 1998, and the percentage of prisons offering bachelor’s degree programs dropped from 48% in 1994 to 20% in 1998, according to Richard Tewksbury, an expert who has studied higher education in the nation’s prisons. More than 350 college programs at prisons nationwide were scrapped.

For Patten College, this meant the loss of an annual $8,000 government grant to educate each inmate. Patten pushed ahead anyway, using an all-volunteer faculty. UC Berkeley PhD-holders and candidates in molecular and cellular biology, physics, comparative literature and sociology teach prisoners basic math, Spanish, physics, South African history, world religions and a host of other offerings.

These volunteers regularly brave a final warning before passing the third set of iron gates into the prison’s inner reaches. “If there is a hostage situation here at San Quentin, we will not negotiate your release.” “I understand,” they reply.

Woll, who has volunteered to teach the psychology class five times, said such education is an opportunity for inmates “to test their own ideas, and a way to build self-esteem. School has often been a source of failure for inmates, but here they see they can do it.”

Class discussions about the theoretical material often trigger insights by the inmates into their own pasts and behavior patterns.

“The therapist in me encourages that,” Woll said.

Teachers assign essays, papers, and written short responses to improve students’ reading and writing skills — common problem areas, teachers said. “I don’t make it easier for them,” Woll said. “I say: ‘If you are going to get an education, you have to make a sacrifice.’ I know they make lots of sacrifices, but I don’t think that making it easier for them in the long run will help them.”

So Woll prepares her students for the rigors of a reading assignment on psychotropics and human conditioning.

Nearby, English professor Judith Breen drills her students on clarifying mangled sentences. “Then the classroom couldn’t be found,” reads one inmate from a pile of green photocopies. He pauses a moment. “He couldn’t find the classroom,” he translates.

For inmate Jesse Reed, 43, the associate’s degree in liberal studies he earned while doing time will give him a start on the bachelor’s in communications he plans to pursue if he wins parole in August. “I didn’t feel like I could compete in society,” said Reed, who is serving a life sentence for a murder he committed during a botched armed robbery. The victim’s family has written two letters calling for his release, Reed said. “But this gives me hope. It’s allowed me to be able to do things I didn’t think I could.”

Attribution: This originally appeared on the Los Angeles Times on February 12, 2003. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

At the end of their first college class the other evening in San Quentin, several prisoners in blue dungarees – new inmates – were greeted by a few “lifers” who had encouraged them to give the school a try. The veterans gave the rookies handshakes and hugs.

Three nights a week, San Quentin offers college classes – including courses in history, philosophy, physics and critical thinking – for about 120 inmates. It is the only fully accredited college program in the California prison system.

Inmates, who insist that their studies will aid their re-entry into the outside world, look forward to this respite from their dingy cells. Instructors describe the inmate-students as hungry for knowledge and grateful for those who volunteer to teach them.

Sound like an ivory tower?

“We need to develop strategies to help inmates change their lives so that we don’t create more victims out there,” said Jeanne Woodford, the warden of San Quentin for the past three years.

Besides taking college classes, inmates can learn to read and write at San Quentin. There are programs to earn a high school equivalency certificate and to acquire a vocational skill. Substance abuse, anger management, and parenting workshops are also available. And there are sports programs and religious activities, such as Bible study, meditation and choir.

“When you ask people whether prisons should have more programs, the knee- jerk reaction is, no,” Woodford said. “But when you explain that the purpose of our programs is to hold inmates accountable for their behavior, there’s a great deal of support.”

Woodford’s main goal is to deter future crimes. But perhaps as important, she wants to create positive role models for inmates’ children.

Roughly half of San Quentin’s inmates have kids, and the same can be said of the statewide prison population. According to the warden, studies indicate that 60 percent of the offspring of California’s inmates become felons.

State prisons have a duty, the warden insists, to educate and retool inmates – if only to reduce the likelihood that tens of thousands of children will follow their parents into lives of crime.

Woodford, 46, is one of a new generation of prison officials who is attempting to redefine what it means to be tough on criminals.

The warden doesn’t want to coddle inmates or allow them to fritter away their time. She wants to drag them into classes and workshops – to make a dent in their lives and give them a shot at survival in the outside world.

“San Quentin has always had programs,” Woodford said. “All I’ve done as warden is to expand on programs and to get inmates to the programs. Most of this is done without any expense to the taxpayers.”

Prisons often serve as crime schools. Younger inmates learn from veterans how to become career criminals. Gang members are forced to remain in their gangs. There is little chance for inmates to break the mold. Peer pressure, pride and ignorance keep many inmates out of programs that would otherwise help prepare them for parole.

Woodford wants to create a climate where prisoners learn to lead more productive lives. She wants to foster new role models so that younger inmates can learn from, and avoid the mistakes of, old-timers. Typically, inmates ignore the advice of prison guards, but they listen to other inmates.

Like most of its programs, San Quentin’s college classes rely on volunteers.

A federal law from the mid-1990s restricts the use of tax dollars to provide higher education to inmates.

Nonetheless, studies show that education programs can save taxpayers millions of dollars in reincarceration costs. According to the federal Bureau of Prisons, inmates who attend high school and college classes while in prison are substantially less likely to re-enter prison once released, and the holders of college degrees are the least likely to re-enter prison.

Criminal justice experts praise San Quentin’s recent efforts, but contend that the prison is not doing nearly enough. They stress that only about 25 percent of San Quentin’s mainline inmates participate in its education programs.

Of the prison’s 6,000 inmates, about 3,500 are temporarily housed at the so- called Reception Center – where they are evaluated then transferred to other prisons. Of the remainder, about 600 inmates participate daily in the prison’s classes. Several hundred inmates are also involved in workshops on topics related to health, drugs and parenting.

But the prison’s GED (high school equivalency) program funded by the state is so popular that it sometimes has a two-month waiting list for inmates.

“The principal business of the California prison system from 1980 to quite recently was growing,” said Frank Zimring, a criminal-law professor at the University of California at Berkeley‘s Boalt Hall School of Law. “It was growing so fast that the prisons didn’t have time to do anything else. No one would suggest that it’s been a Golden Age for programs. . . .

“But I hear the warden at San Quentin is a spark plug, that she’s doing great things. Somebody like her could end up having real problems in the system – or running it.”

San Quentin is one of the oldest prisons in the United States, and has the nation’s largest death row. Some of its brick buildings date to the early 1850s, when the prison was built; its paint is peeling; some of its walls are crumbling.

And occasionally, there are rumblings from politicians and bureaucrats who would like to see the prison torn down. Recently, a Marin County task force was formed to consider new uses for the bayfront property if San Quentin is closed, such as proposals for a transit hub and housing.

Still, volunteers and staff in the prison’s programs try to turn inmates’ lives around. San Quentin has a head start on California’s other lockups: There is a tradition of community involvement in the Bay Area prison.

“I think the prison is located right where it should be. It’s in a metropolitan area,” the warden said. “It’s important that society knows what goes on in our prisons. . . . Prisons are a community problem – because inmates are going to parole to these communities, and they are going to impact these communities, positively or negatively.”

About 80 percent of inmates released from San Quentin are paroled to Bay Area counties.

Many of the state’s 32 other prisons – isolated from urban areas in sites such as Susanville and Wasco – have absorbed huge increases in inmate population in recent years. Those prisons have fewer programs for inmates.

“The state used to define success as keeping people out of prison,” said Andy Hsia-Coron, the vice chairman of Smart on Crime, a group that tries to influence prison policy. “A few decades ago, California’s return rate (for inmates) was about 50 percent. Now, it’s somewhere above 70 percent. And they define success as keeping people in prison. . . .

“We’ve been caught in the trap of politicians competing over who’s tougher on crime and what’s more punitive, rather than looking at what can be done to reduce crime and prepare people to stay out of prison,” he said.

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San Quentin’s peer counselors address bus loads of inmates in orange jumpsuits who are being processed in the Reception Center. The new arrivals are presented with facts about HIV. They are urged to get tested for the virus and to avoid unprotected sex and the sharing of needles.

“Now and then I see a light come on in somebody’s eyes,” said peer counselor Carl Irons of San Francisco, who is serving a life sentence for murder. “I try to let them know that they can take control of their lives.”

Since 1986, Centerforce, a Marin nonprofit agency, has trained hundreds of inmates to serve as peer educators. The prison has five paid positions for them.

The program “helped me to get up in front of people, to have confidence,” said peer counselor James McDonald of San Jose, who is serving time for selling drugs. “I go home in a couple of months. I haven’t been here for a long time, but I’ve learned a lot.”

George Dykstra, a volunteer teacher in one of the prison’s literacy programs, said: “We’ve had a lot of guys go on to get their GEDs. Some of them couldn’t read a McDonald’s menu before. Now they can read classics like ‘Moby Dick‘ in an abridged form.”

In an English as a second language class, inmates whose native tongue is Spanish learn to read and write English.

“This is a great group of guys. They’re very hard workers,” said instructor Davia Moore, a member of the prison staff.

One of her students, Jorge Amezcua of Pixley (Tulare County), takes two English classes a day. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on the last Monday of every month. And he takes part in the Father’s Program, a parenting class that, among other things, encourages inmates to read to their children in San Quentin’s visiting room.

Amezcua, who has nine children, is serving time for child abuse. He credits the parenting program with helping him to learn how to control his anger. Due to be released in eight months, he plans to look for work as a mechanic or a field worker.

San Quentin’s associate of arts degree program has been run, since its inception in 1996, by Patten College, an evangelical school in Oakland, which has set up a fund for the program. Twelve instructors and 40 teaching assistants, many of whom are graduate students and faculty from the University of California at Berkeley, also oversee study halls and tutoring sessions.

“All prisons in California should have programs like this,” said Jody Lewen,

the director of San Quentin’s college classes. “It would save the taxpayers millions of dollars. Education is the most effective tool for combating recidivism because it helps make inmates employable and turns them into advocates for education within their own families and communities. They can help their kids with homework, encourage family and friends to finish or go back to school. By doing that, they impact the next generation.”

Lewen, a graduate student in rhetoric, says that inmates are as diverse as the outside population.

“Prisons are full of people with potential and a capacity to learn and recover,” Lewen said. “Most people don’t commit crimes because they are mean. They do it because they know or believe they have no other option. Education gives them other options. Even people with histories of extreme violence can benefit enormously from the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of their own destructive behavior and to think critically about their own lives.”

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Inmates with good behavior and a high school education may take the prison’s college courses. The prison is seeking volunteers to track the recidivism rate of these students.

“The college program gives us something to look forward to in life,” said Therrin Clark of Tulare, who is due to be paroled next month after serving 18 months for auto theft. “They open our eyes to things we hadn’t seen before.”

Reading materials for the critical thinking class include Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Bush v. Gore election case. “They are among the most motivated and grateful students I’ve experienced,” said Sumedha Ariely, a visiting Cambridge scholar and teaching assistant.

“I no longer think the way I used to think. I believe that I can achieve,” said inmate-student Maurice Caldwell of East Palo Alto, who is serving time for burglary and has been in and out of prison for a decade. “When I first started, I felt like a kindergartner. But my peers encouraged me. They said, ‘Don’t give up.’ “

For those soon to be paroled, the prerelease program offers three weeks of classes on job skills, interviews, relationships and drug counseling.

“This is the stuff you need to learn in order to be a success out there,” inmate-teacher Nel Butler of Los Angeles tells a “re-entry” class of 27 prisoners.

Butler, who earns $34 a month as a teacher, said later that it gives him “a feeling like I’m actually doing something, helping somebody.”

Brian Shipp of Pleasant Hill, who is serving a life sentence for kidnap and robbery, has taught re-entry classes for two years. He also tutors inmates who are learning to read, and he has taken part in the Squires program, which advises at-risk teens from the Bay Area how to stay out of prison.

“I’ve made my mistakes,” Shipp said. “But for me, as a human being, I have to give. . . . It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had.”

In the Prison Industries Center, inmates have low-paying jobs making and assembling furniture such as office chairs that are sold to state agencies and nonprofits.

“A lot of them come with no experience. ” said Wendy Holmes, an industrial supervisor. “When they leave here, they feel good because they have a skill.”

Eric Rhoads of Crescent City (Del Norte County) took a break from his job spraying a water-based stain on furniture.

“If you want to accomplish something here, I think the administration will help you,” said Rhoads, who has been incarcerated since 1994 for stealing an $80,000 tractor. “If you want to be a blithering idiot, you can do that.”

Rhoads is scheduled to be released later this month.

The prison’s other vocational training programs include dry cleaning, plumbing, auto body, machine shop and printing.

Oakland businesswoman Gwen Jones, who has worked as a volunteer instructor at San Quentin and other prisons for four decades, said she has hired nearly 100 parolees at her manufacturing plant in the past nine years.

Her company, which makes fire trucks and beverage trailers, has a waiting list for ex-felons who want to be trained as welders, electricians and assemblers. “We live in a very unforgiving society,” she said. “I just believe that everyone deserves a second chance.”

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Woodford, born and raised in Sonoma County, began her law enforcement studies with the idea of becoming a youth counselor. She majored in criminal justice at Sonoma State University. But after graduating in 1978, she found that San Quentin State Prison was among the few places hiring. She took a job as a corrections officer.

“It’s a really tough job, and I think it’s probably one of the most misunderstood positions,” Woodford said. “You’re here to provide for public protection. That sounds simple if you say it fast. But it means that, you not only need to maintain a secure facility, but to prevent inmates from hurting each other and to assist inmates who want to improve their lives.”

Through the years, Woodford has refined her thinking on what prisons could and should be doing – and the practical realities. “I’m not advocating that the state needs to bring me a bunch of money for programs,” she said.

Criminal justice experts insist that warehousing prisoners will not make the streets safer. Unless inmates are educated and their destructive behavior patterns changed, they are very likely to return to prison.

California’s high rate of recidivism is expensive. It costs the state $25, 607 a year to house an inmate. In 1980, California prisons had 23,000 inmates. Today, the state prison system has 161,000 prisoners.

With an operating budget of $4.8 billion, the California Department of Corrections spends more money on prisons than the state spends on higher education.

Gov. Gray Davis oversees the largest prison-building program in the United States. But funds are scarce for prison education and rehabilitation programs. Most of San Quentin’s programs are funded by private foundations and spearheaded by volunteers.

Like any other trade union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association tends to look after its members’ economic interests. As more and more prisons are built, more guards are needed. The union’s increased strength is reflected in its huge membership. California prisons employ 40,758 correction officers; 915 of them are based at San Quentin.

As a midlevel state bureaucrat, Woodford is politically vulnerable. But the warden insists that she faces no major obstacles and has staff support for her efforts.

“I think the staff wants programs. They want to do more than just be jailers,” Woodford said. “What staff doesn’t want is to see us babying inmates.

Inmates should handle the details of their lives and treat themselves with respect and treat others with respect.”

This summer, her staff plans to begin an Honor Dorm program for 200 short- term inmates who volunteer to take part in a rigorous schedule of community service hours within the prison, classes and workshops. They will be rewarded with minor perks such as eating first in the cafeteria.

But the prison system has a record of stamping out innovation. San Quentin’s experimental Boot Camp for nonviolent offenders was closed in 1997, amid debate over its cost-effectiveness.

“I think our programs are working,” Woodford said. “For many inmates, this is a total education of heart, mind and soul . . . to show inmates what it means to be a good citizen out there.”

Attribution: This originally appeared on SFGate on February 8, 2002. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.