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Two years after my brief introduction to life inside the fence, community colleges by legislative mandate became education providers inside all Washington state prisons, and 'my department head asked me to move from the main Tacoma Community College campus to the women's prison near Gig Harbor to set up a Home and Family Life program.
"One year," I said. "I'll go out there for one year."
For the next seventeen years, I agreed to one more year. Even now, it seems an odd career for one who proclaimed aloud from second grade through college and beyond, "I will never teach." My declaration began when my second grade teacher died suddenly, and my mother, who'd retired from teaching to rear a family, stepped in to complete the year. Until then, because of myopia, I had a favored place beside the teacher's desk. Mom got me glasses; moved me, desk and all, to the spot dictated by alphabet; and taught me more by her principles than primers. Through the ensuing years, I watched her prepare lessons and grade papers and listened to her fret about struggling students. Under her tutelage I achieved an acceptable level of tolerance for human differences, and a certainty I would never develop the patience necessary to teach. Most teachers, it seemed, spent inordinate time with students on the low end of the learning curve.
I now admit my first two post college positions, one as a county extension agent, one as a nutrition consultant for the Dairy Council, involved teaching; they provided ideal experience and credentials to become a community college instructor. In truth, I first became a teacher at age fourteen, when I took over leadership of a group of nine and ten year old boys barred by sex from a girls' 4 H cooking and sewing club. That must have required patience, but I recall it as fun, not work at all. Those boys hand hemmed tea towels and mixed muffin batter just enough to blend ingredients without incorporating too much air. I picture them with stained T shirts and grubby hands.
My mother, whose path I long tried to avoid, would say that wasn't true: they always washed their hands. She often accused me of exaggeration and over dramatization of simple life events. I wish she'd lived long enough to know how well both served me,, especially in prison classrooms. As teacher/author Gail Godwin said, "Good teaching is one fourth preparation and three fourths pure theater." I made every classroom my private stage and played whatever role my students needed each hour, each day, for each subject.
Prison classrooms aren't remarkable: they have student and teacher desks or tables, blackboards (or white acetate boards), bookshelves, file cabinets, pencil sharpeners, and windows that need washing. Rather, it's the students who are notable for the circuitous routes they travel to arrive at a place called correctional education. For all the time I spent with them, their world inside remains foreign to me. I never stayed the night in prison, and that makes all the difference.
Still, something I brought to my work fit their needs: something more than a college degree and prior experience. Skills and passions honed in my family of origin and carried forth with my children followed me to my correctional educator role. I taught my beliefs: all behaviors have consequences; proper discipline teaches; and children deserve love and care and accurate information about their family history.
Washington state's women's prison, when I first went there in 1979, seemed pleasant when compared to the old penitentiary I'd visited two years before. Single story redbrick buildings and a spacious cement courtyard were softened by lawns, flowering trees, shrubs, and flowers. Women wore clothing they brought from home; most moved about freely, gathering in groups to talk, stretching out on a patch of grass to enjoy the sun. To an untrained eye, the whole looked like a private college campus, and it made much of our new employee training seem ill suited.
We were fingerprinted; photographed; told a prison riot was a matter of when, not if; and cautioned at every turn. We watched a video that included footage on searching a toilet for contraband, and heard about an officer whose fingers, or parts of them, were blown off by a retractable pen/bomb. We were told a male former art teacher had worn a rubber apron to prevent groping by aggressive inmates.
We met our students, who'd been sent to the prison (then called Purdy Treatment Center for Women) to get the help they needed; well over half of them had been convicted of property crimes. Our classes certainly qualified as help, though it's not clear who learned the most, students or teachers. We all found women enrolled in our classes who could have been our mothers, sisters, daughters, neighbors, or friends. Some of their stories boggled our minds. A young mother in my first parenting classes had been sixteen and pregnant at the time of her arrest. A judge issued an order to chain her to the hospital birthing table so she wouldn't escape during delivery,
I went inside to teach female prisoners and found humanity in a microcosm. Two professional colleagues who moved from other positions to McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) when it became a state facility said I'd find the same thing with men, and an even greater need for my work. They arranged for me to teach an experimental parenting class at the island for one quarter as a guest from the women's prison. They were right: the men needed parenting and family and personal responsibility courses too.
My official transfer to MICC meant going through the mug shot/fingerprinting/badge making routine of prison employment again. The Department of Corrections (DOC) officer who took my photo and typed vital information on the back of my MICC badge looked at my official title a lengthy one and at my request settled on "parenting teacher." He typed away on his IBM Selectric and misspelled parenting as "parienting." He shrugged when I pointed out the typo, looked at me, shook his head.
"Parenting teacher. For a bunch of screwed up cons. Locking em up's best thing ever happened to their kids."
He needn't have spoken: he projected his disdain, and he wasn't alone. Though prison administrators know positive family connections increase an inmate's chances of successful reintegration into society, not all line staff buy it. He shoved the badge in a plastic sleeve, laminated it, punched a hole in the top, inserted a clip, and handed it to me. For the last seven years of my career, I wore a badge that proclaimed me the parienting teacher.
Whatever my label, all who met me knew I taught, counseled, and advised in the context of personal and social responsibility. I wanted McNeil Island inmates to reconsider their choices, their lives, their families and communities, and their own personhood. I wanted to be more than just another authority figure dishing out information or rules to inmates.
They had already been appraised, found guilty, sentenced, and incarcerated. I didn't serve as Judge, jury, or Jailer. My goal was to precipitate change. That kept me going through political and philosophical turmoil in the prison system; moments of despair and doubt when I dealt with someone whose crime I found particularly deplorable; and occasional encounters with taxpayers who berated me for wasting public monies to teach scumbags, street rats, human garbage. More than once I wiped another's spittle from my face. Taxpayers irate at the costs of crime, in my experience, delivered their views with overabundant saliva, and in one case a deliberate wad of unpleasant bodily fluid.
I agree with them about the expense, more than thirty billion dollars a year nationwide to operate existing prisons, build new ones, and settle lawsuits when paroled felons reoffend. As those costs climb, the dollars spent on inmate education, job skill training, and chemical dependency and mental health treatment sharply decline. Is that what taxpayers want, I wonder, or what we get when we vote for politicians who promise to be tough on crime?
Over the years I have also met numerous people who asked intelligent questions about my experience and expressed concern for the men and women inside. Recently someone thanked me. She's a new acquaintance, and I must confess I looked at her to be certain it wasn't a snide comment, though I'd already seen in her a person of truth and depth. "Thank you for doing that job," she said. "It's so needed."
There it is, the other reason I stayed for eighteen years. Someone needed to do it, and I did it quite well. Only one question remains in my mind: Did it matter?
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