Prison Project provides tutors for inmates

From the panel discussion on race with Sybrina Fulton—the mother of Trayvon Martin— this fall, to the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration keynote speaker Michelle Alexander in January, the Lehigh community has been engaging in discussions about injustice. The Prison Project is one avenue for students and faculty to experience firsthand some of the issues that these talks addressed.

The Prison Project allows 23 students and two faculty members from Lehigh to visit the Northampton County Prison in Easton each week this semester. While there, students and faculty tutor individual inmates, many of whom are studying for their General Educational Development tests.

Lloyd Steffen, a professor of religion studies and the university chaplain, helped start the Prison Project in 2008 as part his course “Practical Justice,” which he was teaching at the time. In the course, students integrated knowledge of three different social concerns — medical care, public education and America’s prison system — through on-site service learning opportunities, one of which was tutoring inmates at the Northampton County Prison.

“When the course was over, we had this great relationship with the prison, so we just decided to keep this thing going,” Steffen said.

The Prison Project is a progressive step toward a rehabilitative prison system instead of a purely punitive one.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections’ official website, as of March 2015, there were 53,560 people incarcerated in the state. These inmates are housed in state correctional institutions, community correction centers, community contract facilities, federal prisons and county prisons—such as Northampton County Prison.

Unlike state correctional institutions, county prisons are not regulated by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Instead, the Office of County Inspections and Services inspects each county prison separately.

Out of the 26 state correctional institutions in Pennsylvania, 18 were over capacity as of March 2015.

Mary Foltz, an assistant professor of English, participated in the Prison Project during the Fall 2012 semester.

“Although the state does have funding and wonderful staff members, they don’t have the resources to tutor each inmate who is interested individually'” she said. “That is really what Lloyd created— a project that addresses a need.”

Molly Fitzwilliam, ’16, said one rewarding part of the Prison Project was being able to see the inmates make real progress toward their GEDs. Tutors are, as much as possible, kept with the same inmate from week to week so as to develop a relationship with them.

However, because most inmates at Northampton County Prison have short-term sentences, and because working with a tutor is voluntary, some Lehigh volunteers frequently work with different inmates.

Deena Davis, a professor of bioethics, said participating in the project was challenging because she is used to preparing for her classes in advance. With the Prison Project, she never knew what material they would cover that day.

Even if she could not perfectly explain the GED material, which was recently made much more challenging, Davis still felt like the interactions were rewarding.

“If I can get them to think ‘Wow, I’m smart, I can do this, I can learn this,’ then that’s an extraordinary thing to have done,” she said.

Steffen said he hopes the Prison Project will have an even larger impact than the immediate benefit to the inmates who get their GED with help from Lehigh tutors.

“The test of this project is going to be seeing, maybe 15 or 20 years from now, if that student sitting around a corporate board table is raising questions about the decisions that are being made, who they are affecting and how that changes the community,” Steffen said.

Fitzwilliam said that while volunteering is important, it’s essential to try to improve the situation as much as possible in the present. She said once she gets out of college, she hopes to enact change rather than just helping.

Steffen pointed to larger issues surrounding the America’s criminal justice system, especially since the “war on drugs.” The war on drugs refers to laws and regulations put into place during the 1980s to heavily reduce illegal drug trading. These regulations increased drug arrests and the imprisonment of African Americans for drug offenses in Pennsylvania by 1,613 percent.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections’ official website, during the 2013-2014 fiscal year, the total spent on expenditures for prisons in the state was roughly $1.9 billion—a 4.01 percent increase from the previous fiscal year.

“(The inmates) have made some bad choices on the one hand, but on the other hand, we have some laws on the books that are putting people in prison instead of helping them with life issues,” Steffen said. “It points to some very deep issues in our society.”

Foltz also noticed that in popular media, incarcerated people are often marginalized and depicted in dehumanizing ways. She said the Prison Project has helped to humanize those who are incarcerated.

“You are called to reflect upon how the prison operates in your community,” she said. “Actual human beings who are charming and funny and witty and made mistakes, but are human beings, are behind that political rhetoric. It’s really important if we’re going to participate in those kinds of political debates that we’ve had those experiences.”

Wade Homer, ’15, said his involvement in the Prison Project has helped him apply what he is studying in class and experiencing on campus to the outside world.

“What it taught me about the things that are happening on campus is that they’re not anything abstract,” Homer said. “There are overarching societal issues that exist in our backyard.”

An information session will be held on Thursday at 4:10 p.m. in the Dialogue Center for those interested in participating in the Prison Project next semester.