Nobody here is Innocent: Cultural Values, Pedagogical Ethics, and the Prison Classroom

• Date: 15 December 2005
• Pages: 271-304
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37011-6
• Published date: 15 December 2005
• Author: Deborah S. Wilson

NOBODY HERE IS INNOCENT:

CULTURAL VALUES,

PEDAGOGICAL ETHICS, AND

THE PRISON CLASSROOM

Deborah S. Wilson

ABSTRACT

Beginning in narrative re-evaluated daily from classrooms inside prison

walls, this article further explores cultural, ethical, and social values of

teaching college courses inside the wall. Interrogating public discourse

over what Eric Schlosser terms the ‘‘prison–industrial complex’’ arrogates

subsequent considerations. Prison-building became a growth industry,

even as prevailing political response to prisoners themselves became in-

creasingly censorious and unforgiving. Traditional American culture

preaches redemption but relishes abasement, promises forgiveness but

refuses forgetting. Carefully examining further questions about human-

istic discourse as a possible locus for radicalization, we finally confront

how the prisoners’ situation reflects rather than deflects traditional ex-

pectations.

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Volume 37, 271–304

Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37011-6

271

Let me begin with a brief narrative, as that is where my project originates, in

narratives ferried, almost daily, on either side of the wall, to audiences alike

in their skepticism, wariness, and anxiety of each other.

MY STRETCH IN THE JOINT

I pass through the razor wire from the guardhouse, accompanied by my

escort. Another guard takes my finger prints, full sets, both hands, though

not palm prints, like the last time, when I applied for my California Com-

munity College Teaching Credential. ‘‘Going out or coming in?’’ a black

inmate, probably in his late 50s, asks me. ‘‘Both,’’ I crack, meeting his eye.

At first he looks nonplussed, but then he grins. We regard each other good-

naturedly, as if we were long-time partners in confidence games. Though

I could not have known it then, in that exchange, I had found my key for

working successfully with student-inmates.

Next, I get my picture taken for my ID, but when I start to fill in my social

security number, as the formexplicitly requires, the clerk stops me: ‘‘Don’tdo

that,’’ he says, handing me a new form, ‘‘we had to discontinue printing the

social security numbers because the inmates were ‘doing things’ with them.’’

Yet, knowing that the Illinois Department of Corrections’ administration in

Springfield refuses to alter the forms. It was then that I realized I was on

Planet I.D.O.C., where the rules of earth-bound logic no longer apply.

1

For example, instructors are not permitted to take student work out the

gate with them, because they are inmate property. Yet we have to, because

no one can grade 30–40 essays on site in an hour or two. Our only choice is

to violate an inflexible rule flagrantly, and any corrections officer who tries

to enforce it does so only as a petty power play, making people’s lives

impossible just because she/he can. After all, this is Planet I.D.O.C.

I try to accept procedures and requirements with equanimity, though

I must admit, when I realize my mandatory on-site urine sample requires a

witness to its production, the absolute abrogation of privacy inflicts a shock

of violation. Random, periodic trips to the shakedown room over the sub-

sequent 5 years will make violation seem almost routine, as will the daily

checks of my briefcase.

2

In some small sense, I learn what it is like to be an

inmate, stripped completely of the privacy and autonomy one comes to

expect in a ‘‘free society.’’

I never really got used to these indignities, even though from a security

point of view I understood them. Staff occasionally did collude with in-

mates, smuggling in all forms of contraband: drugs, liquor, gum, or even

DEBORAH S. WILSON272

condoms. Sometimes instructors naively agreed to mail letters for them.

Certainly, I never got used to heavy gates and steel doors slamming behind

me, as I passed through a variety of checkpoints. I was continuously aware

that, unlike my students, I was free to come and go as I wished, that I did

not have to have permission just to go to the lavatory, that I could eat when

I wanted, set my own work schedule, and slack pretty much as I thought

I could get away with, yet not get tossed in seg for it.

3

Early on in my prison

teaching experience, I asked the G.E.D. teacher at one site if I could expect

to get used to slamming gates, because I seemed to be aware of them on a

daily basis. ‘‘No,’’ she said, ‘‘I’ve worked here seventeen years, and I still

haven’t gotten used to it.’’ Even though it has been several years since I have

taught in prisons on a regular basis, something will happen to remind me of

the privilege of living outside the wall almost daily. Glimpsing a snow fence

as I drive along a two-lane highway in the country, or noting the fortress-

like architecture of some forbidding nineteenth century public building.

MEMORIES OF UNDEREMPLOYMENT

From 1996 to 2001, I taught a variety of English classes at several different

sites for the I.D.O.C.: composition and rhetoric, literature courses of all

descriptions, Introduction to Drama and Theatre, creative writing, even a

speech communications class. When I first started that phase of my teaching

career, I had been an adjunct at various community colleges for several

years, most consistently at the community college where I am now a ten-

ured, full-time professor. Before that first I.D.O.C. contract, survival had

become awfully hairy. Like most adjunct faculty, currently estimated at

70%, nationally, I had had to supplement my meager salary with ill-paid,

low entry part-time jobs. Again, like many of our adjunct colleagues, I even

made the decision to re-train, in my case, as a massage therapist, having

embraced the irony that one could no longer use teaching as a fallback.

4

When I accepted that initial contract, I was a bundle of insecurities, partly

from the strain of my adjunct’s freeway-flyer existence, and partly because

I needed so desperately to succeed in this new venue. Called Academic

Preparation, this particular course was remedial, bridging the G.E.D. course

and college, and intended to get the students’ basic composition skills to a

point where they could have a fighting chance once they registered for the

academic program. Mostly, however, I feared not being able to teach my

students effectively, not be able to ‘‘reach’’ them. The first morning of my

first class proved nearly disastrous. Distracted by the many and unfamiliar

Nobody here is Innocent 273