Bringing Down The Walls

After I received my layoff notice from the school district, I was driving to work, and for the first time, I didn’t want to have a child. Corruption. Seems like I just can’t justify certain things in my mind anymore.

The other week, I went to a panel against the death penalty, and Mark Clements spoke about being falsely accused of arson as an adolescent, tortured into a confession, and spending 27 years in prison until finally granted freedom. What really resonated with me, though, was the lack of education in prison…how prisoners don’t have access to the internet, not training them to be prepared to work in the world when they get out, how the grants for college have been discontinued, how in some states, they can’t even receive letters—only postcards.

When I went to the University of Michigan, I thought higher education was “the answer.” What I found was a lot of students who knew how to work a system, but didn’t necessarily care about the betterment of society. I sought out study with Buzz Alexander and started working in the prisons. We videotaped Detroit at-risk inner-city youth at their high school and brought it back to the prisons where the men responded in taped dialogue to the boys. Here, was my first experience with service learning.

A year later when I was a senior at Michigan walking across the diag, I ran into Nate, one of the prisoners. Out of prison, he told me he was on a grant going to the University. On a sunny Spring day in Michigan, I gave him a hug. He had tears in his eyes.

By examining the literacy levels of fourth grade students and determining how many students read “below basic,” state departments of corrections use student literacy levels as “penitentiary forecasters” to allow them to project how many prison beds they will need over the course of the subsequent decade. I haven’t even touched upon prisons for profits, the ratio of minorities in prison, or the price of a prisoner in comparison to the price of education/mental health services. I’m sure you already know this and the work of The Innocence Project.

We have no computer lab at the inner-city public high school where I work for the students to use whenever they want. I think this is criminal. When I started writing blogs with the students using the laptop carts, some students didn’t even know how to type a word document because they didn’t have the money for their own personal computers.

While I was working with my mentor teacher on my National Board Certification, she spoke about bringing down the walls of the classroom—how my field trips to The Getty, to The Museum of Tolerance, and to USC have brought the learning into the real world for the students.

When I told my college boyfriend (who was much older) about how I saw Nate in the diag, he kind of freaked out and lectured me about how I had to be careful about an ex-con…how I shouldn’t be such a naive college student. After seeing Mark Clements speak at the panel, I thought about that moment meeting Nate in the diag—how the walls had come down for him, how I saw him as a peer, and that was why he had tears in his eyes. I saw him not as a prisoner, but as human.