The College of New Jersey has developed its own program for students to teach, tutor and study side by side with inmates from a youth correctional facility
By Michele Alperin
A
semicircle of students focused their eyes on the slight woman holding forth Erich Marie Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about a German soldier during World War I — just like any classroom where students are wholly engaged by a talented professor. The only clue that something unusual was happening here were the identical baggy beige shirts and elastic-waist pants worn by all the students. Despite the animated sharing that belies the students’ current reality, this college-style class is at the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in Bordentown.
The professor, Celia Chazelle, chairwoman of the history department at The College of New Jersey, has been teaching classes to Wagner inmates since 2008, originally as a volunteer through the Petey Greene program, a prison tutoring program at Princeton University. Since then, The College of New Jersey has developed its own robust program for students to teach, tutor, and study side by side with Wagner inmates, powered by Ms. Chazelle’s dreams that education might awaken prisoners to a different future. “I hope one or two discover that they have a brain and can think about going to college,” she says.
In fall 2009, Ms. Chazelle taught the first College of New Jersey credit class at the Wagner facility, on the history and culture of prisons, to 15 college students and seven inmates. The college has committed to teaching one joint student-prisoner class every semester; this fall Professor Robert McGreevey will teach one on United States history.
During the summer Ms. Chazelle taught a more informal class on war literature for prisoners only, but student aides helped her out. One was Jillian Polak, a senior majoring in journalism who had taken Ms. Chazelle’s fall class, where she was quite impressed that all the inmates chose to be graded rather than taking the class pass/fail. “They worked hard to keep up with us and made some of us work harder than usual,” Ms. Polak says.
Ms. Polak talks admiringly of one prisoner classmate from poverty-stricken Camden. “He speaks so eloquently and comes up with analogies that are just astounding,” she says. “He wasn’t in a neighborhood with great schools, didn’t have a proper family life, but speaks better than most people I attend classes with when I’m on campus.”
For students like Ms. Polak, Ms. Chazelle has seen big changes as a result of taking a class with inmates. “Students at TCNJ tend to be from a homogeneous, middle-class population from New Jersey high schools, and being exposed to the diametrically opposite background of the prisoners was a revelation,” she says.
Ms. Chazelle’s classes have also had a significant impact on her prisoner students, beyond the intellectual content they absorb. “I get the sense that they see it as very liberating to be in class with other inmates,” Ms. Chazelle says. “It’s interesting intellectually, and they can talk freely and say exactly what is on their minds. It also gives them something to think about when they return to their cells.”
Inmate Joseph Marti agrees. “She sparks my interest and stimulates me; I can think about it all week and write about it. I’ll be watching TV, and something will remind me of the class.”
Mr. Marti also suggests that the class is beneficial for Ms. Chazelle. “People have grown up in different areas of life; she doesn’t know that side of society, and we bring it to her. Everybody learns stuff.”
David Ocasio, an inmate who also took Ms. Chazelle’s fall class, appreciates her classes for several reasons. “It gets me off the tier and gets my mind off the time,” he says. “It helps us get things off our chest; it gets us out of the mentality that you’re incarcerated. It makes you feel like you’re in school, and you get to interact with other inmates and talk to people from the outside.”
Inmate Robin Perez appreciates Ms. Chazelle’s respectful stance toward the prisoners. “She treats us like college students,” he says. “She expects us to read and write essays.”
For inmate Saladin Stafford the experience offers inspiration, “The class helps me out,” he says. “It makes me look at things different and not lose focus and hope.”
Ms. Chazelle opened the summer class with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. “It led them to reminisce on their own lives in ways I hadn’t anticipated,” she says. “The war scenes were like what they had experienced on the streets.”
Discussing a scene in Remarque’s book where the narrator’s friend is dying, students talked about whether it is appropriate to tell a dying person the truth or instead to offer encouragement and hope. One of the students then raised an analogous situation — about what parents should say to their sons who are accused of a crime; they find themselves in a similar situation to the narrator, as they try to figure out whether they should be speaking the truth or offering hope. “When I was on bail,” says one of the prisoners, “everyone was lying to me — ‘You’re going to get probation.’ When I got the sentence, it hit hard. But it worked in my favor that everyone gave me false hopes, because while I was at home, I was happy.”
The College of New Jersey’s program for students working and studying with prisoners is coordinated through the college’s Bonner Center and its director Pat Donohue. The college also has a memo of understanding with the Petey Greene program, which is providing funding for transportation. Ms. Chazelle and Pat Donohue have also applied for external grant funds, with the hope of providing college-credit courses for the inmates, potentially in partnership with Middlesex County College.
Inmate Mr. Ocasio, a big fan of Ms. Chazelle, would approve of these efforts. He has only a single criticism of his classes with her: “The classes aren’t long enough is the only bad part.”