One of the main barriers to effective teaching in a correctional setting is overcoming the degrading and dehumanizing world that the student only leaves for the short time they are in class. To illustrate this, let's look at a typical day for an inmate student at Visions Adult School, located inside Corcoran State Prison. Most of the prisons in California are located in remote areas, far from the communities where the inmates' families live. The first thing that comes into view is the immense array of lights, looming in the distance as an oasis of pale trees in the desert. These are visible in the early morning dawn from over twenty miles away. Light poles towering 120' high flood the entire prison in a surreal light from dusk to dawn. For security reasons, all vegetation for 100 yards around the perimeter fence has been disked to bare dirt. The perimeter fence is actually three fences; the outer two are fifteen feet high, topped with coiled razor wire, spaced twenty feet apart, and in the center is a third fence. This looks flimsy compared to the other fences, but closer examination reveals tiny wires, spaced twelve inches apart, that are electrically isolated from the supports. This fence is labeled "DANGER - Deadly High Voltage - Keep Out" and "PELIGRO - Mortal Alta Voltaje - No Entre" at regular intervals. Sometimes in the morning you can hear what sounds like a pot of popcorn exploding over a loudspeaker. This is the sharp staccato of rifle rounds from the shooting range, where each of the twelve hundred Correctional Officers must qualify yearly.
The prison complex is divided into six yards, with two-story concrete cell blocks arranged in a semicircle around an exercise yard about the size of a football field, enclosed by another fifteen foot high fence topped with razor wire. Each housing unit has one hundred cells; however, due to an ever increasing prison population, two inmates must share the six and one half foot wide by twelve foot deep cells. Try to imagine your first night in one of these cells. The door opens and the first thing you see is the stainless steel combination toilet and washbasin. You probably won't notice the lack of a seat until the first contact of cold steel against warm flesh. To one side are two beds, one over the other, welded to steel imbeds in the concrete walls; to the other side is a set of steel shelves, again welded to imbeds in the wall.
There is a
window that looks to me like the loopholes in a
medieval castle, except the 5" x 36" opening has 1"
thick laminated bulletproof glass in the opening.
Next to the window is a small steel shelf for a
desk, with a 10" round steel seat under it, again
both welded firmly in place. Then you see your cell
mate, and a thousand thoughts rush through your
head. You wonder what his crime was: passing bad
checks, drug dealer, child molester,
murderer...Then you notice that you can't go from
the toilet to the desk without brushing against
him. You begin to wonder, do you dare sleep
tonight?
Due to prison overcrowding the gyms have been converted to
army barracks style housing units with fifty bunk beds
packed on the basketball court-sized gym floors. Only men
with six months or less to serve on their sentences are
housed here. The reasoning behind this is that an inmate can
have work incentive credits restored that were taken away
for a rules infraction if he remains disciplinary free for
six months; however, with less than six months left to serve
any good time lost will not be restorable. Still, with one
hundred men living in such a small space, it sounds, feels,
and smells more like a locker room than a housing
unit.
Breakfast starts at 0530, and ends at 0700. This only gives 90 minutes for a thousand men to eat. A Correctional Officer is positioned outside the dining room, and as the inmates leave conducts random searches; the inmate stands with his feet spread wide and his arms straight out, leaning against the concrete wall, as the officer frisks him to make sure he is not taking any food out of the dining room. Then back to the housing unit for just enough time to brush their teeth before work release at 0730. The inmates must stand in front of the vocational work change gate until 0745, when they are processed in according to the class they are assigned to. They form a line and shuffle to a window inside the work change area and give the officer there their work number so the officer can check their gate pass (a separate picture ID). This is done for strict accountability of all inmate movement. Then the inmates report to their classes (average class quota is 27), give the instructor their ID cards, and are issued metal chits, stamped with their work assignment number, which they must use to check out tools.
Now they are students, although this is a very subtle change in status that can be tenuous given the custodial duties instructors must perform. If one of the students has a priority ducat (a special pass for a doctor's appointment, or something similar) he must show it to the instructor, who must check it against the DMS (daily movement sheet). Reporting to work late by five minutes or more past the fifteen minute reporting window can result in loss of work incentive credit for that day (most inmates receive a day off their sentence for each day they go to school, called "day for day").
Students check out their tools and work on their class projects or on institutional projects. In the class I teach, Vocational Sheet Metal, they start out with geometric construction problems. After this they work on the layout and fabrication of sheet metal ductwork, fittings, and transitions. The more advanced students get to work on institutional projects. We have made the ductwork for 90 tons of air conditioning for Avenal State Prison, and have fabricated and installed several complete evaporative cooling systems (including manufacturing the evaporative cooling equipment) for Corcoran State Prison to name some of the projects. One project that you can see for yourself is the sign they made for TCOVE, that is mounted on the administration building located south of Vsalia on Mooney Blvd. They work until 1030, when it is time to check in their tools and clean up for lunch. The instructor then checks to insure that all the tools are turned in.
Tool control is a particular concern in a prison, as they can be used for an escape, and there is an elaborate tool control in effect. All of the tools are inscribed with a code (my code is 310CE) and painted (my color code is blue-pink). In addition to this, the tool rooms (one for critical tools that only the instructor can issue, and one with an inmate tool room attendant) have the outline of each tool in them shadowed on the walls, numbered, with an inventory sheet for each wall that has both the tool number and the description of each tool on that wall. There is a sheet for the instructor to sign three times each day verifying that they counted the tools, and none are missing. In the event that one has not been returned, custody must be notified, and no one may leave until the tool is found. After the tools are cleared the students are released to eat lunch in the vocational lunch room.
Now they are inmates again. Lunch is from 1100 to 1130. The officers pass out sack lunches which usually contain four pieces of bread, two vacuum packed pieces of unidentifiable lunch meat, a pack each of mustard and mayonnaise, a piece of fruit, and a bag of potato chips. Lunches must be consumed in the lunch room, although occasionally some smuggle fruit and bread back to the shops to make pruno (an alcoholic beverage) in plastic bags that are hidden in ingenious places as the contents ferment. The hiding places, such as hall-full trash cans are usually only fond when the bag seal leaks, allowing the pungent combination of fruit and yeast to escape, allowing the odor of "fine wine" to permeate the shop. Another favorite place to hide pruno bags to ferment over the weekend is in the toilet (the toilets in the prison do not have tanks like houses do so the bag is forced down the bowl into the trap, and the other inmates are told not to use the toilet until the bag is retrieved...YUCK!).
After lunch they go back to their shops and are now students again. They check out tolls and work until 1415, when it is time to turn in their tools and clean up the shop. Four hours a week of formal related classroom training are required, although most instructors have one hour of related training each day. In my class we go through a six month course on the Uniform Mechanical Code as one of the topics. With the tool control and inmate accountability, the six and one half hours of contact time we have with the students is eroded to closer to five hours, and assuming no time is spent with discipline problems this works out to only 11 minutes per student per day; consequently it can take months to develop the student/teacher relationship necessary to impart employable skills to those who have previously fallen through the cracks in our educational system.
Now the day is almost over, and with it comes the most degrading and dehumanizing part: the strip search for inmate manufactured weapons conducted before the inmates can leave the vocational area. At precisely 1445 all of the classes release their students (now inmates) to the work change gate. Over one hundred men line up in a corridor only twelve feet wide, waiting their turn. The stench is overpowering, making a locker room tame in comparison as sweat from the unwashed bodies mingles with oil and grease from the various shops (Machine Shop, Sheet Metal, Welding, and Auto Mechanics). Each man strips to only his under shorts until he approaches the two officers conducting the searches. Then he removes these and goes through a precise procedure: placing his fingers on the sides of his mouth he opens his mouth to expose his gums, then moves his tongue around in his mouth; next he runs his fingers through his hair, and folds his ear down; then he raises his hands and arms over his head with his fingers spread wide open and slowly rotates three hundred and sixty degrees; after this he must life his penis and testicles; then he turns, with his back to the officer, and show him the bottom of first one foot, then the other; finally, he grasps both buttocks, spreads them, squats, then coughs trice. This last humiliation to insure he is not trying to kiester anything (smuggle a weapon in his rectum). The officers and inmates go through the entire process with a mechanical precision, none liking it, but all knowing the necessity.
The inmates dress quickly and silently after the strip search, with resigned, mildly embarrassed looks on their faces. Dinner is from 1530 to 1700, so after leaving the work change area they must hustle in order to get into their housing unit to try to be one of the few that get a shower before dinner (there are only six showers in each housing unit). Seeing all that an inmate goes through when is assigned to a vocational program, it is not surprising that few volunteer to go to school. Inmates are placed in vocational programs by the institutional Classification Committee with little regard to their interest in order to allow the inmates to learn a trade and to receive their "day to day". This makes motivation one of the major challenges of a correctional educator.
