Hacke Award Winners/Wiltse and Reese

The Robert Hacke Teacher-Scholar Award is given annually to a CEA junior teacher who is involved in a scholarly or pedagogical project related to English studies. Those persons who are adjuncts or who hold the rank of instructor or assistant professor in a post-secondary institution, including community colleges, and who are CEA members, are eligible to submit project proposals. Award recipients report on their work at the annual conference and are encouraged to publish their reports in The CEA Forum.

Note: What follows is the text of a collaborative presentation given at the College English Association's annual conference in St. Petersburg, FL, in April 2003. In keeping with the spirit of that occasion, we have retained the section titles and separate “voices” in this text.

Wiltse: Introducing Nazareth College

Nazareth is a small, private liberal arts college, rapidly adding the pre-professional undergraduate and graduate programs that pay the bills these days. We're formerly Catholic and all-women, now independent and co-ed, though still about two-thirds women among the undergrads. We draw the bulk of our first-year students from the Thruway cities and surrounding towns of upstate New York, and a substantial number of transfer students come from the local area via 2+2 programs with community colleges. Like nearly all private colleges, we struggle with “minority” student enrollment, which has hovered around 7½ % over the five years that I've taught at Nazareth, but we are significantly more diverse in terms of class backgrounds. The Admissions Office tells me that about one-third of our first-years are the first generation in their family to attend college (that number seems significantly higher among transfer students), and that over half of incoming students are eligible for New York State's Tuition Assistance Plan. And, in my highly unscientific sample, their family narratives, as told to me in class or personally, or as written about in journals and freshman comp essays, most often suggest backgrounds we'd likely think of as ranging from working to middle class. Alongside the upward mobility drive of most of our students, the Service Ethos of our founding Sisters of Saint Joseph remains much in evidence, not only in the predominance of students preparing to be teachers, nurses, social workers and other human service professionals, but also in the college's commitment to Service Learning, a relatively new educational trend that sits between community service and internships on the spectrum of Off-Campus Learning activities.

Monroe Correctional Facility (MCF) is a minimum-medium security jail located in Henrietta (Rochester, New York). The facility was originally designed to house 200 inmates and was then expanded to house another 60 inmates in the chemical dependency unit. Currently, MCF houses 400-500 inmates, about double what it was originally intended to hold, one-fifth women, four-fifths men, ages 16 and up, and about 70-75% African American and Hispanic. The inmates housed at MCF are serving time for a number of offenses, including petty larceny, DWI, drug violations, parole violations, and prostitution. Generally, the sentences range from a few months to two consecutive years.

According to the Educational Coordinator at the jail, the facility focuses on education, vocational programs, rehabilitation, and chemical treatment programs. Upon arrival at MCF, each inmate is assigned a counselor whose duty it is to tend to the individual's immediate needs as well as facilitate pre-release planning. Inmates aged 16-20 who do not have a high school diploma or the equivalent are required to earn their GED while at MCF. Several programs are offered to the inmates, including work release, school release, parenting programs, anger management programs, and courses in men and women's health issues, relationships, food services, plumbing, money management, life management, and communications. Courses are also available through Monroe Community College, including pre-college writing, survey of math, college orientation, and career development. Several community organizations, including the City School District, also help to create a facility focused on education and rehabilitation.

However, having known inmates and visited as a friend, I understand that the facility is not the bed of roses that the Educational Coordinator had painted. According to the inmates, the “counseling” provided by the facility offers very little significant assistance. Educational resources are limited, and in some cases, non-existent, for the men and women of MCF. My personal library in my own bedroom put the jail “library” to shame, and many of the books there were provided by a book drive held by Nazareth students. Additionally, in most of the weekly meetings, the men spoke of the racism, classism, sexism, and other “isms” directed toward them by those in charge. Many of the men signed up for the course just to have exposure to valuable literature and to enjoy the company of college students. The Jail Project filled a need.

Wiltse: Why I invented the Jail Project

For some years now, I've been teaching an introductory literature class focusing on novels, short fiction, and films about crime, criminals and detectives. The course goals are to expose students, most of whom are non-literature majors taking the class to fill a core requirement, to a literary genre in some cultural and historical depth, and to cultivate their abilities as readers, thinkers and writers. Ideally, such courses make plain to the students the ways that literature has addressed and informed our understanding of "real world" issues, and this is especially crucial in my Crime and Detective Fiction class. Students are often surprised to learn that what is commonly perceived as a "light," popular genre has from its inception dealt with complex questions of how crime and criminality are produced, defined, and dealt with in our society. Engaging with issues like where crime comes from and what we do about it inevitably leads students to questions of power and privilege, and how they are socially distributed. The course as I used to teach it focused on variations in the figure of the detective, as imagined by authors across time and across cultures. We explored what happens to the detective story when the detective is no longer the usual White Guy in the modern city—what if the detective is a woman, an African American, a Native American, a futuristic techno-cop?

Despite what I perceived as the success of that class—it was fun to teach, the demand for it at registration was high and student course evaluations were good, and it seemed to accomplish the goals for an introductory Lit class—I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the possibility that my class might be reinforcing a notion all too widely available in the media, from the plethora of TV cop shows to the nightly news: that the identification and incarceration of “The Criminal” is the end of the story . At a time when mandatory minimum sentencing, Three Strikes laws, and other law enforcement trends have produced a U.S. jail and prison population of about 2 million, the highest reported per capita incarceration rate in the world, it seemed unconscionable to teach a class full of “whodunits,” even when those books were much more sophisticated than your average CSI episode in interrogating the social and economic origins of crime, without also addressing the question of what happens after the trial and conviction of “the bad guy.”

As I began to research the U.S. “prison-industrial complex,” I became increasingly aware that my failure to educate my students about what happens after the conviction paralleled a much bigger and more serious failure, of the prison system to educate inmates. Despite the fact that such programs are the only consistently effective tool in reducing recidivism, of the 600,000 inmates to be released from jails and prisons this year, two-thirds will have received no educational programs and three-fourths will have received no vocational training. So I conceived a Service Learning project that I hoped would substantially address the failures in my own course, and make a tiny contribution to addressing the failures of the prison system. I revised the syllabus of the course to include prison literature, mostly written by inmates, and re-titled the class “Crime and Punishment in the USA.” With funding from a college endowment specially designated for Service Learning, I arranged to provide the books for the course, along with a syllabus, a blank composition book and a pen, to 30 inmates at the county jail, who would sign up for the project with the jail's Educational Coordinator. The inmates would commit to read five selections from the syllabus, attend a series of five meetings with students to discuss them, and record their reactions to the readings and discussions in a journal. By providing the complete books and syllabus, we sought to encourage the inmates to read along with the students all the material for the course, but also to accommodate inmates whose literacy skills might not enable them to do more than the five selections. I then offered the 60 students in the two sections of my course the opportunity, in lieu of a paper for the class, to go to the jail five times to meet in a small group with the same small group of inmates, and to write a special “jail journal” recording their reactions to the experience. At the end of the series of meetings, each student would also commit to a second, smaller project, some group activity that would either benefit the inmates or raise awareness of jail and prison issues on campus and in the community. Whether through good karma or dumb luck, each of the two times I've done the project I've had about 30 students sign up, to match the 30 inmates, and I've sorted them into 5 groups of about 6 students and 6 inmates each. The inmate groups had to be either all male or all female; the student groups are usually co-ed. So they go, they sit around a table talking about a book, and the results are amazing.

When Dr. Wiltse let me know about the jail project, I was immediately excited about becoming involved. I had several reasons for wanting to be a part of the experience. For one, I was interested in what the inmates had to say about their experiences , both in jail and outside in society. I have an analytical mind; I like to piece together the parts of the story (I'm an English major). Secondly, I was excited about it because Dr. Wiltse was excited about it . It promised to be an experience that would be unlike any that I'd ever had. I would be allowed to walk into the jail (actually in a place other than the visiting room—which I'd had experience with through my cousin, Butch, and ex-boyfriend, Waymon) and be released within an hour (I could cheat the system). Also, at the time, I was going through a phase where I wanted to confront my fears . One of my fears was jail and all that it stood for. I was afraid of those who were incarcerated. (I was ignorant). Also (I can't lie) I wanted to help to “save” the inmates. I was both scared and sympathetic. I wanted to make a positive impact on their lives. I believed that the inmates should be offered opportunities to become educated and exposed to such programs. Perhaps, having had the experience, they would see that there were other avenues that they might not have previously explored or considered. I also wanted to experience a different group of people. I had heard what the Nazareth students had to say. What would people having different experiences have to say? I can't say that I knew everything about the students at Nazareth, but I knew enough to know that my experiences and their experiences were different, and that I was probably situated somewhere between them and the inmates. So, why not get the two groups together and engage in open discussion?

My friend Casandra was working for the police department at the time. She used to tell me about her experiences on the job, and the people she saw coming in, people either she knew or that we knew in common. People we'd grown up with, gone to school with. You can't help but to wonder what went wrong. Why do some of us make it and not others? When I went to visit Waymon, on several occasions I saw people that I knew sitting in the visiting room on the same side as him—meaning that they weren't going to get up and walk back to their cars within an hour. I wanted to know why they were there (my analytical mind). So, why not ask the inmates? How much of what I'd seen on the nightly news, on NYPD Blue, New York Undercover, CSI, CSI Miami, Oz, Cops, Matlock and any number of Blockbuster hits was true? I wanted to know why the delinquent kids who were sent to jail after appearing on Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake came back to the show crying and apologizing to their parents for their previous behavior. What about jail was so traumatic? I'd heard people complaining about how the inmates have cable television, three meals a day, a gym, a warm place to stay, and educational opportunities. I wanted to know whether these people really had anything substantial to complain about. Basically, I wanted to have the jail experience indirectly—the jail project was the closest that I was willing to get in order to have my questions answered. Also, with Casandra working for the police department, she would let me know about different laws of which I'd had no prior knowledge. Many of these laws I was upset by. I couldn't understand how anyone could sentence another person to time in jail and somehow be able to determine when the person is ready to be released. We're not talking about baking cookies. What if a person is sentenced to 20 years and his or her successful rehabilitation occurs in 5 years? He or she then has another 15 years to sit in jail, get upset, revert back to old habits, thoughts, behaviors, and mentality, and end up worse than he or she was before. Then again, a person can be sentenced to 20 years imprisonment and at the end of said time, not have undergone any significant rehabilitation, be released, and still revert to the old way of living. I failed to see the logic. Casandra also told me about how the inmates were treated by those in authority and what rights they possessed. So, I wanted to see the law at work for myself. I wanted to be an educated consumer. We look at labels. We analyze and scrutinize over nutrition facts because we want to know what it is that we are putting into our bodies. Well, that's what I wanted to do with the jail project. Before I accepted the news, television crime and detective shows, and movies, I wanted to know that what I was ingesting wasn't artificial.

I could ask my cousin and ex-boyfriend, but when we saw each other or talked, they were trying to escape jail through their conversation. So, the jail project offered the perfect forum. These were men and women who had volunteered to be a part of the class. Oftentimes, I didn't even have to ask the inmates any questions because, one way or another, they would simply volunteer the information.

Before I could in good conscience ask my students to go sit in a jail classroom with a group of inmates to discuss literature, I had to do it myself. So, in the fall of 2001, I went to the jail one afternoon a week to meet with a group of 10 male inmates who had agreed to read some free books provided by a crazy professor over at Nazareth College. Every time I went through the heavy metal door that the guard buzzed open, the clang of it shutting behind me made me jump. And the first few times I sat down in that classroom, having hastily dragged the tables into a square so we could sit around it facing one another, I could smell the clammy sweat of fear on myself, and I asked myself why the heck I was doing this. But by the third meeting, I was hooked. The energy level was like nothing I'd experienced in any classroom anywhere, and I've taught in a lot of different settings. It was edgy, raucous, profane, personal, funny, rancorous, and contemplative, all in the space of an hour. Although I did all I could to make this a meeting among equals to talk about a book, the inmates inevitably looked to me as a professor with “answers,” rather than just another member of the group—happily, the students doing the project have been more successful at dispelling such hierarchies. By mid-semester, my wife, responding to my descriptions of my experiences in two quite different settings, took to referring to “the students at the jail, and the inmates at the college.” And while the differences between the two populations remain obvious to me—especially in class, race, and level of formal education—the similarities are also quite striking. Both groups are mostly in their late teens and twenties, though with significant numbers of older individuals as well. Both groups are, for better and for worse, institutionalized, fully accustomed to the routines and expectations of their institutions, often chafing under the restrictions on freedoms of choice as to how they spend their time, their mobility, and their diets, but also often finding surprising, creative ways, within and outside their respective systems of control, to meet their individual needs and express their individual selfhoods. Both groups understand their current activities and lifestyle as temporary, as a stage on the way to doing something else—thus both students and inmates are in an important sense doing time , a similarity that is easy to overlook, given the obvious differences in power and privilege that produce their different locations.

After the revelations of that first series of meetings with inmates to talk about books, going to the jail has taken on a very different feel for me. I began with the righteousness of the do-gooder, providing books and my time to the “underprivileged.” While I still feel good about doing this, my self-righteousness has been at least moderated by a growing awareness that I take as much as I give when I go to the jail. I realize that's a bit of a cliché when it comes to “community service,” but I want to contextualize it around the specific issue of the value of literature. As I got to know that first group of inmates, the process of reading for each meeting changed, as I pictured the inmates in their “pods” puzzling over the Flitcraft story in The Maltese Falcon , perhaps at the very moment that I was doing so in my living room, and so my “imagined community” of fellow readers grew to include a group of people I never imagined could be there. And lively, hungry fellow readers they were, desperate for distraction from the violence, boredom, and noise that are the distinctive features of jails and prisons, and for connection to the world outside. The contrast between the inmates' jealous love for books and for the meetings at which we discussed them, and my students reactions to their books and classes—which are too often regarded as obstacles in their path to graduation, and the end of their sentence at Nazareth College—has become for me and for many of the students in the jail project one of the signature features of what it's like to go to Monroe Correctional Facility.

A heavy steel door bangs behind me. The thunderous clang is enough to send an old man into cardiac arrest. The space that I find myself trapped in is no larger than a small elevator. I try the knob of the door facing the one I have just entered. Unmoveable. Thick glass and concrete walls house me for about a minute. Maybe more. Becoming claustrophobic, I wait for the guard to permit me to enter the hallway. A little wave to get his attention. O.K., another one, two, three. With the massive door securely fastened at my back, I am finally admitted into the next section of the jail. Moving along the plain corridor, my mind is still on the man that “greeted” me through the thick glass separating him from the lobby of the minimum-security jail. “What? You think you can just walk back there?!” His words shatter the impenetrable glass and slap me in the face. He glares at me, like I made him come to work today! Can a sistah get some direction so that you can stop staring at her? “Take your jacket off. No gum. Leave your ID here.” Would you like my head on a platter, too? Sliding my driver's license to him through the slit beneath the glass, I turn away. “Wait for your pass!” He slowly looks for a page on his clipboard, writes my name and some numbers down, picks up a visitor's pass from a box sitting next to him, copies the number from it onto the yellow sheet, and slides it to me. No explanation or direction. Look. I'm just trying to have a good first meeting with the inmates who have signed up for the reading group, and I'm already running late. Can we try the intimidation thing when I get done? Better be glad my ex-boyfriend is one of the inmates in the class and I'm in a pretty good mood today.

When visiting Waymon before the jail project began, I always felt intimidated before being allowed into the visiting room. Always fearful that as I passed through the metal detectors, I would be stripped of yet another possession. “Open your mouth. Lift your tongue. Spit out your gum. You wearing any jewelry? Pull the neck of your sweater down. Turn around. Spread your legs. You have any pockets? Cup your hands, place your hands inside your pockets, hands facing out, and pull upward. Turn back around. Lift your arms at both sides. Nothing? Have a nice visit.” It was like a game of “Simon Says,” only this time, “Simon” is not a little boy with a runny nose and a loaded squirt gun. Simon is a full-grown, uniformed man with a loaded gun at his side. Bullet-loaded gun. Simon said it, so I did it. I didn't want my stay to be any longer than what I'd anticipated.

When I visited the jail for the Jail Project, I was always on edge because of the man at the window (remember him?). But once I sat down among “the criminals,” I felt more at ease, safer. The inmates were not making any demands, barking out commands. I went each week, excited, wondering what the inmates saw in the texts that I had not seen. I was interested in hearing their stories (which many of them shared, freely).

What I learned at the jail is that the media-bred stereotypes we carry around in our heads, both of inmates and of the corrections officers and institutions that contain them, are grossly inadequate to the variety and intensity of the life I encountered there. Here are a few excerpts from inmates' journals to illustrate that simple but important idea:

“Today was a great day. I had our weekly meet with the Book Club. It's so nice to have the opportunity to talk with some people from the outside, that are different from the usual friends and family.

We had a good discussion on how the “system” is today. Compared to the time of when [Chester Himes' novel] The Real Cool Killers took place. It was interesting to find out that people don't really think things like what happened in the book still happen. We (the other inmates) told them stories about how cruel the Deps [deputies] can be sometimes and even more we shared our personal stories and things that we have witnessed while being here in jail. Don't get me wrong, there are some good Deps too, there are ones who would break their backs for you, and there are those who would rather break your back.

I'm very grateful to have this program, but more importantly I'm glad to have good conversation with good, honest people who are not afraid to come to my house to talk!”

“I felt this was a wonderful program for this environment! I feel this has allowed for constructive communication and imaginative thinking. I also feel the feedback was beneficial to everyone involved, it allowed for an unrestricted forum on literature that would otherwise not be experienced by most of the inmates. I only hope that this type of program continues and flourishes, giving inmates the inspiration to read more and discuss their different perspectives.”

“First, I would like to thank the outside students for treating me as one of them. They came in here and did not judge me but rather accepted me as a fellow student. … Everyone was able to express their opinion without fear of ridicule thereby creating a most suitable environment for discussion.”

What I learned at the jail is that my students are far more creative, caring, and capable than I had ever imagined. Here are a few excerpts from students' journals to illustrate that simple but important idea:

“When we reached the jail, we traded our IDs in for visitor's badges. It was kind of like trading in my identity as preppy college girl and stepping into a different world. I wonder if the inmates felt that same loss of identity? I'm sure they did, probably to a much greater extent. I was still wearing my own clothes; they had uniforms. I was leaving in an hour; they were leaving when their sentences were over… [discussion of first meeting omitted] After I exchanged my visitor pass for my identity from the guard, I thought about how much I had learned in an hour. I've decided that you can't really be educated about the world until you have really lived in the world. We can read about things in books, watch movies, and still never be involved in the world. How can we know anything without experience? I hope the inmates will get as much out of this project as I think I'm going to. The past hour gave me a little insight into reality, and it reminded me that people are people anywhere you go, even in jail.”

“A few of the inmates will be released soon. I'm happy for them, but at the same time I'm worried for them. Not so much because I believe they'll go back to doing whatever, but because I know that the world isn't too nice to those who've been incarcerated. I'm really getting upset just thinking about it! I really wish the best for these men. Besides their uniforms, there wasn't anything that made it easy to distinguish students from inmates.”

“As we walked through the hall of the prison to exit the building at our last meeting, we passed by a handful of inmates on their way to dinner. I was surprised that I felt nervous and scared. If the inmates walking by had been any of the inmates that had been in our group, I would have said hello and smiled. This proved to me that it will take more than just a few interactions to get me to change my mind and let my guard down a little around others. We are raised to fear that which is different, that which is unknown. By volunteering for this project I learned that if you sit down and listen to somebody, really listen, the barrier of race, gender and background disappears, and you see the person for the human being that they are.”

A final example will serve to illustrate the kinds of stereotypes and artificial boundaries we carry around in our heads, and how this project helps to challenge and complicate them. A few weeks ago a new Lieutenant at MCF walked by a jail classroom and looked in the window. He saw a group of Nazareth College students, who happened to be all female, four white and one Asian, sitting around the tables, interspersed with a group of male inmates, all of whom happened to be African American. To the students' surprise and dismay, he burst into the room, insisting that the students and inmates sit on opposite sides of the square of tables, and that the classroom door be kept open for this and future meetings. Where the Corrections Officer saw a group of potential predators and victims, the students and inmates saw peers, friends, and fellow readers of good books. Happily, the students and inmates quickly overcame the artificial boundary the C.O. tried to institute; they propped the door open with something smaller each subsequent week, set up the tables so they were harder to see from the window in the door, and went about the business of building community.

The first semester that Dr. Wiltse offered the course, I went in thinking that I was going to teach the inmates. If one's exposure to the criminal and criminal justice system is only made possible through television, believing the hype is natural. I had no such excuse for my ignorance. Even so, I still held on to beliefs that all convicts were ruthless individuals who had struck before and were bound to strike again. Having gone through the project twice, I know that the stereotypes, like most stereotypes, are unsubstantiated. My own prejudices (that's what they were) had to do with the way that criminals are depicted on television. What we fail to realize as viewers is that these men and women still exist as human beings.

I didn't realize that they would probably touch my life much more than I'd touched theirs. The reason that I say that is this: the inmates expected that we as college students would have our stuff together. They expected that since we were attending Nazareth, we were intelligent people. However, we as students went in thinking that we had to teach the inmates. We thought that we would blow the inmates away with our intelligence because we had read a few books and could speak on a topic that they were living through. The inmates were correct in their assumptions (for the most part) because we were intelligent people. We were incorrect in our assumptions, because most of the men that were in the group, had they been students at Nazareth, would have put us to shame.

I learned that those who are convicted of crimes do not in any way lose their humanity when they commit the crimes they commit. They simply become people who have committed a crime. I also learned that we lump all offenders in the same way—they're all evil. Seldom do we take the time to realize that some people are in jail for crimes that we've committed ourselves and simply didn't get caught doing. How many people have driven while under the influence of alcohol? How many people have gotten into a physical altercation after drinking a bit too much or after someone has pushed your buttons? Maybe no one will admit to it, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone were able to raise their hand after each of those examples. So what's the difference? They got caught. We didn't…or we could afford good lawyers.

I learned that these people are individuals with talents and dreams. They have families. Some attended college. Some had steady, meaningful jobs. I learned that most of these people were a lot smarter than us (students). They had far more to contribute than any of us. But, I didn't just learn about the inmates. I also learned a bit about myself and my fellow classmates. I realized that we were uninformed “consumers” who soaked up every ounce of what the mass media had to offer. We asked no questions. We failed to realize that the cop shows that we watched every night of the week and on nearly every channel could possibly be “cartoons” with flesh and blood actors. The depictions are sometimes grossly cartoonish. But it sells because sensationalism sells. And sensationalism sells because we buy it. We buy it because we believe it. But I'm here to advise you…don't believe the hype.

The excerpts from inmate and student journals are quoted by permission. I've silently corrected obvious surface errors, but otherwise they are unedited.

Ed Wiltse is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. He teaches writing and literature, focusing particularly on 20th-century British and Irish literature, and the literature of crime, detection and punishment.

Leslie Reese is a first-year graduate student at the Ohio State University in the African-American and African Studies Department. She is particularly interested in the representation of African American women in print media and African Americans and the U.S. criminal justice system.