PBH Prison Instruction Program: Education As Attempt To Curtail Further Crimes By Convicted Men

Front entrance to Norfolk, Mass Prison is a long, concrete corridor leading into a small chamber that can be filled in two seconds with enough gas to knock a man unconscious. The exit from the chamber opens directly into the prison's inner yard, where rows of iron grey dormitories and brick administrative buildings line a large rectangular plot surrounded by a fifteen foot stone wall.

The 750 men inside Norfolk have committed a wide range of crimes, and have drawn penalties ranging from a few years to life imprisonment. Nevertheless, most of them share one common characteristic: they are not caught on the first offense, and if they were ever released, they will offend again. A large portion of prisoners regard arrest as simply "bad luck," rather than the inevitable, or even probable, consequence of crime, and the case of prison life, together with the difficulty to finding honest employment upon release, all tend to remove any reservations a convict might have about offending again.

Some 80 per cent of the men released from Norfolk will sooner or later be sack on the wrong side of the small, concrete room used to keep men from forcing their way out with a hostage.

Massachusetts' rate of recidivism--technically defined as "the relapse into prior criminal habits, especially after punishment"--exceeds the national average by roughly 20 per cent, but seven a smaller figure would represent a sizable waste of public funds. Recivism rates like the present ones in Massachusetts are so high that the excuse of keeping prisoners in confinement is higher than the cost of letting them steal.

One answer to the rehabilitation problem is education, and it is in this connection that Harvard, and the Phillips Brooks House Prison Instruction Committee, have attempted to help.

An analogy frequently made by Peter C. Goldmark '62, chairman of the Committee, gives an excellent capsule picture of the trouble with prisons in general and Massachusetts prisons in particular. The walls of a prison not only keep the prisoner confined; they keep him so isolated from the outside world that his most difficult task upon release is to learn to stand alone, without falling back toward them.

Massachusetts prisons are especially at fault. The state's high recidivism rate can be attributed to two fundamental causes: first, little effort is made to show the prisoners how to live lawfully in the outside world; second, prison regulations in this state are abnormally lenient, and the protective case of its penal institution make them dangerously inviting.

Education of any sort forces the prisoner to use his mind and to assert himself, and thus is one way of getting the men to stand outside the walls.

PBH has engaged in prison instruction for six years, and currently reaches one tenth of the state's 200 prisoners. Three dozen students are working as teachers this winter, and classes range from three to fifteen pupils. Instruction is in four of the state's seven prisons, at Norfolk, Walpole, Concord, and Framingham.

Student teachers meet with their classes once a week for about an hour and a half. Various groups examine subjects ranging from mathematics and foreign languages to public speaking and philosophy. Very little of the instruction is on a level higher than first-year-college courses, and a typical class is half lecture, half discussion.

Prison teaching often produces unusual situations (such as drop-outs because of stabbings or nervous breakdowns), and Goldmark and the rest of the committee are fairly careful about selecting instructors.

Given the possibility of a choice, PBH is more interested in the person who is curious about prisons than the prospective teacher seeking experience. The latter group, experience has shown, tends to become disillusioned under the trying and often disillusioning conditions of prison teaching. For example, although a class may average ten pupils, some days only one or two will show up, and in no case is student interest sufficient to enable the teacher to make regular homework assignments. The difficulties of maintaining a course's continuity without assigned reading are obvious.

The goals, rationale, and mechanics of the program are relatively clear-cut; its success is intangible. The keys, of course, are the character of the prisoners themselves, the way in which they regard the Harvard classes, and, ultimately, whether or not they commit new comes after their release.

The top per cent regularly attending classes are by and large the most intelligent members of the prison community. Inmates come to the classes for a combination of two reasons...such curiosity, or a desire to kill time and the former motive appears to be more prevalent in the regular attenders. The amount who come just to kill time, however, is indicated by the discouraging fact that a great many prisoners will go to the classroom regardless of whether or not a class is actually being conducted, simply to break the routine.

Once in the classroom, the prisoners must overcome three substantial impediments before making discernible progress. First, many of them are barely able to articulate complex ideas. Since contemporary society emphasizes facility with words, it is not surprising that the inability to communicate should be characteristics of its "failures." The second barrier the prisoners must overcome is a web of middle and lower class prejudices attaching unjustified associations to many of the words and concepts which they use in the classroom. For example, all mistresses in paintings or novels, no matter what their actual qualities, are instinctively taken to be street-walkers.

Thirdly, although largely in courses like philosophy, where discussion is naturally fairly extensive, the prisoners tend to turn abstract discussions, or discussion of principle, back toward the problems of prison life of their own pre-conceptions. Discussion under these conditions often slips into "ruts" and becomes repetitive from class to class.

Nevertheless, the classes have achieved considerable success in their attempts to "challenge the prisoner's mind," as the following selections from short essay written by a "lifer" in Concord reformatory would indicate:

"Those who attend the Harvard Classes find in them a kind of a assuagement for never having attended a school of higher learning. It becomes so pleasant and so challenging for an experienced but unschooled adult to be given the opportunity to think like an adult, to think, really, with Socrates, Shakespeare, Freud, and Einstein."