The Center for Prison Education has a clear cut mission: to bring a Wesleyan education to incarcerated individuals. However, as the majority of their work occurs off campus and in the classroom, you might not be aware of just how involved University students, faculty, and staff are in the CPE’s functioning. From program coordinators to professors, tutors, and on-campus volunteers, many different groups of people work together to bring University academics to students in prison. To get an in-depth look at the CPE’s daily work in the programs, The Argus spoke with a range of individuals involved in the Center. 

The CPE began as a student-run initiative in 2004, in which University students volunteered to provide workshops and tutoring at Cheshire Correctional Institute, a maximum-security men’s prison about a 20-minute drive from campus. In 2009, the CPE got its formal start with a seed grant from the Bard Prison Initiative. The program has grown over the past decade, offering more classes to an increasing enrollment. In 2013, the program also began offering classes in York Correctional Institution, a mixed-custody women’s prison in Niantic. 

Through the University’s partnership with Middlesex Community College, the CPE currently allows students to pursue an associate degree.

There have been six application cycles since the founding of the program. In order to be admitted to the program, applicants must demonstrate their preparedness for college material. CPE Director Allie Cislo described the program’s eligibility requirements.

“There are three stipulations: students must have a high school diploma, or GED,” Cislo said. “There’s a…Department of Corrections stipulation that they must be free of certain kinds of disciplinary infractions for at least a year…and then they also have to be at least two years to their earliest possible release. If a student qualifies to apply, the application process involves several steps: there is an in-class essay…. We come in and give people a set of prompts. They choose the prompt that they most resonate with, and then they have a few hours to write a response to that prompt in a proctored classroom setting. Then the admissions team reviews those in-class essays and decides which folks they want to invite back for an interview, and to write take-home essays. We distribute another prompt to folks to take back to their housing assignments.”

Once admitted, the new students will join a community of CPE classmates, some of whom have been with the program since its inception. As of this year, there are currently 60 students in Cheshire and 22 in York, the largest enrollment the program has ever seen. These students also have the largest selection of courses in the history of the program, with seven offered at Cheshire and three at York. 

The day in the CPE begins at 8 a.m. in Cheshire with either a class or a study hall period. Professors, program coordinators, teaching assistants, and tutor volunteers generally arrive well before the official 8 a.m. start to accommodate the time it takes to check in, go through the metal detector, and be escorted to the facility’s school area. As they make their way to the classroom, CPE students are called down to the school from their cells, jobs, and elsewhere in the facility. Each class meets once a week, and each course has its own dedicated weekly study hall, equipped with two volunteer tutors and a rotation of program coordinators. Depending on the class, the professor or TAs may also attend to answer questions. These study halls are an indispensable part of the CPE students’ academic experience, as they allow students to do offline research, type essays, and ask any clarifying questions on course material. 

“Here [at Wesleyan], I get emails all day, asking me questions from various classes I’m teaching,” said Cameron Bishop, a University graduate student instructor in the CPE’s Math Department. “I think [CPE students] would be really well served with something like that, but you just don’t have it.” 

Prison rules and schedules present unique challenges to CPE students that students don’t really experience on main campus. In this sense, the study halls make up for some of the impediments that incarcerated students face. Although there is no internet access in York or Cheshire, students can use offline computers equipped with word processing and offline versions of JSTOR and Wikipedia. Outside of study halls, students compose their essays the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. But when it comes to research assignments, sometimes the archived databases don’t suffice. This is where on-campus volunteers play a crucial role: Program coordinators take CPE students’ research requests back to campus, where volunteers process and complete them. The research requests range from preliminary topic research to specific requests for certain titles or articles. Volunteer Shaya Tousi ’22 explained University students’ role in this process.

“As on-campus volunteers, we support the students by filling their research requests for class-related or personal information, whether that be through checking books out of Olin, printing Wikipedia articles, or researching the topic and compiling articles of our choice,” Tousi said. “My favorite request that I’ve filled asked about Chinese herbal remedies for a sore throat.”

The CPE offers a variety of courses in different divisions. This semester alone, courses offered at Cheshire include multiple English courses, a math course, a College of Letters course, a history course, and a government course, whereas the courses offered at York this semester are in math, psychology, and English. The course selection for any given semester is largely based on which courses professors wish to teach, as well as whether the course may be feasible given the restrictions of the environment. For example, the CPE cannot offer science classes with lab components; for this reason, humanities courses often outnumber STEM courses available to students in Cheshire and York. 

In the spring of 2017, Chair of the College of Letters and German Studies Professor Ulrich Plass taught a literature class at Cheshire titled “Kafka: Literature, Law, and Power.” He taught this class simultaneously as a First Year Seminar on main campus—CPE classes are often taught in conjunction with a similar course on campus. Plass explained that teaching this class at Cheshire was a natural choice, as Kafka engages themes of justice, rights, punishment, and pain. 

“All these questions are important not only as literary themes, but they also have an existential import for these students,” Plass said. 

Plass said he will return to Cheshire next semester to teach a course on Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition.” 

“One of the reasons I’m bringing in the Nietzsche readings is because students had requested, when I taught Kafka…to take a Nietzsche class,” Plass said. “I’d given them an excerpt of ‘Genesis of Morality.’ Partially, the class design is owed to earlier student requests.”

The CPE has also offered many philosophy courses to its students. Professor of Philosophy Lori Gruen has taught six classes through CPE so far since Fall 2010, aiming to provide a variety of classes for everyone, from the simply curious to the students intent on pursuing philosophy degrees.

“There are a number of students who I have taught over a period of ten years, so I have been able to be a part of their intellectual journey in a way that rarely happens on campus,” Professor Gruen wrote in an email to The Argus. 

CPE students can remain in the program for as long as they wish. Ten years into the program, the current student body has a wide range of experience in college academics. In many classes, students who have been in the program since its inception may be sitting next to students who are in their first college class. 

Bishop talked about the implications of this classroom dynamic for STEM courses. Over the past few years, Bishop has taught seven courses at CPE. Coming into the job he said he was familiar with the kind of math courses that had been previously offered to the Cheshire students, and suspected that returning students would have some experience with calculus, while new students might only have an algebra base. Given this range of math background, Bishop started by teaching Precalculus, which he described as a happy medium between veteran CPE students and newer enrollees. 

“I was hoping I could then take everybody into Calculus,” he said. 

The following summer and fall terms, Bishop said he took his spring Precalc group through Calculus I and Calculus II in succession. The next year, he took another cohort through to Calculus-level math, this time starting from Intermediate Algebra. These math classes seem like a natural addition to CPE, but Bishop’s methods show the particular challenges facing STEM courses in the program. 

These blocks of three classes in progression have been an effective way to teach math in the first decade of CPE, but it doesn’t come without challenges. For one, course space per semester is limited due to space and scheduling constraints, and it is not always possible to offer a consistent rotation of these foundational math classes; the space constraints of the prison also cap a student’s course load to three courses per semester. Many CPE students also balance their education with work, as well as matters regarding their case or family life. For these reasons, completing an associate degree in two years is not always possible for CPE students: The CPE graduated its first class in Spring 2018. 

No matter how the students decide to complete their degree, CPE classes seem to consistently be environments of singular intellectual fervor. Every professor and program coordinator testified to the unique experience of a CPE classroom, and the brilliance and drive of the students. Plass described teaching his Kafka class as a positive, but very intense, experience. 

“[It’s] not [intense] just because you’re in prison and prisons are hostile places,” Plass said. “It’s also intense in a very good way, because the students are very committed to their learning…. You’re constantly being peppered with questions—there isn’t a silent moment in class. The problem is that there’s such a desire to have a conversation, that you could just go on forever. But time is really limited.” 

Gruen set that intensity in contrast with the environment at the University.  

“Students at Cheshire come to every single class prepared to discuss the assigned material, and that doesn’t always happen on campus,” she said. 

Now nearing the end of its tenth year, the CPE has continued to grow. While students graduate from the program and some return home, the CPE is beginning to focus on developing support systems for re-entry. Currently, the program is making important strides on the way to offering a Wesleyan bachelor’s degree within the program. Starting fall of next year, students can begin applying for the Bachelor of Liberal Studies.

 

Claire Isenegger contributed reporting.

Sofia Khu can be reached at skhu@wesleyan.edu.