The prison bars slam shut. A moment later, professor Drew Leder is surrounded by convicted killers. He begins the day’s lesson, and soon the room echoes with debate about Plato, Socrates or Epictetus’ stoic view of life.
Leder teaches graduate-level philosophy to about a dozen Maryland Penitentiary inmates, many of whom received college degrees while in prison. Most graduated with the help of federal Pell grants.
However, with polls showing Americans incensed about crime and tired of federally-funded programs, Congress has cut off such grants for prisoners.
These inmates in Baltimore are well aware of the public’s anger toward them; the grant cuts are just another sign of it. But they’re determined to keep college education in their prison, even if they have to do the teaching themselves.
“What else is there left? If we don’t teach them, who will?” said inmate Celestine Aniunoh. “In this period of cutbacks and budget problems, there’s no other avenue. . . . Each man must teach the other.”
The inmates are asking the school that employs Leder, Loyola College in Maryland, to prepare them to teach college courses. That way, they say, they can keep education alive behind bars, without tax dollars or outside help.
If the convicts do become teachers, they won’t be your typical faculty: Most, like John Woodland and Arlando Jones III, are in prison for murder. Aniunoh, a native of Nigeria, is serving 15 years for conspiracy to distribute narcotics.
They and a group of fellow prisoners came together after Leder started the classes in 1992. The men learned Plato, Socrates, Epictetus. Then “we moved on to the big boys-Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. . . . And how could we forget Gandhi?” said Jones.
They learned of worlds they never knew existed, and philosophy became part of their lives.
“With Plato, people were jumping up, getting overly excited . . . the violent energy being turned creative,” Leder said. “Better for them to be agitated over Plato than some other things.”
Like many convicts-about 30 percent in Illinois-some of Leder’s students were illiterate when first sent to prison.
Jones was locked up 10 years ago, when he was 16. He was a high school dropout, a functionally illiterate hoodlum who learned to shoot before he could read. He described a man he murdered as “another drug dealer. It wasn’t the mayor of Baltimore or anything. It was a dispute about, `You can’t sell dope in East Baltimore.’ `Yes, I can.’ `No, you can’t.’ “
Behind bars, Jones learned to write, he said, so he could send love letters to his girlfriend. A new world opened up, and he went from earning a high school equivalency diploma to a college degree in psychology to Leder’s philosophy courses.
But the path he took won’t be there once prisoners become ineligible for Pell grants, which provide tuition to low-income students nationwide. Congress made prisoners ineligible for the grants last year, and the last inmate grants will expire when this school year ends.
“We have limited dollars. Why on earth are we giving them to prisoners?” asked Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) in a recent interview. Gordon had introduced the crime-bill amendment that eliminated the funds. Since few states fund higher education in prisons on their own, the federal cut means college classes will disappear for many convicts across the country.
Gordon said Congress has heard from furious voters who’ve been hit by crime, and added that both parties backed the cut.
In Louisville, Ellen Ethington was incensed when she read an article about a Pell grant student, the same criminal who robbed and brutally beat her daughter. While he was using the grant, Ethington’s daughter was struggling to work her way through school.
“I resent that. My tax dollars are going to pay for his education, and my take-home pay is going to educate my daughter,” said Ethington.
It’s hard not to sympathize with Ethington. Yet those who argue for the grants say they actually save tax dollars by dramatically reducing the number of released inmates who return to prison.
A study by Chicago’s Roosevelt University, which has had bachelor-degree programs in Illinois prisons since 1989, found that about 10 percent of its released graduates have returned to prison thus far. That compares to an overall Illinois return rate of 46 percent after three years, said Michael Elliott, director of Roosevelt’s prison program, who conducted the study.
He estimated that the Roosevelt programs saved $1.5 million in 1993-1994 by keeping released inmates out of prison.
Rep. Gordon, though, is skeptical. “Any prisoner who has the motivation and intelligence to go on to college . . . is going to excel anyway,” he said.
Indeed, Leder’s students are a mere handful of the Maryland prison’s 890 inmates. After they heard of the cuts, Woodland and Aniunoh wrote a proposal to Loyola, asking the college to send professors to train college-educated inmates as teachers.
The college agreed and plans to begin the training this summer, Leder said. Inmates hope eventually to teach everything from mathematics to philosophy.
Woodland stressed that since few crimes are serious enough to merit life without parole, the average convict “is coming home.”
“What kind of person do you want to come home?” he asked.
Even Ethington said, “I’m all for anybody bettering themselves, but they should work for it.” When told of the Baltimore plan, she said they seem to be doing that.
In Illinois, higher-education programs will go from being in 17 prisons to just three after Pell grants expire this June, said John Castro, prison schools superintendent. “We’re doing our best not to eliminate it totally,” he said.
Even if the prisoners themselves begin to teach, they won’t be able to grant degrees, and students will have nothing “to take to the marketplace” once they’re released, said Stephen Steurer, director of the Correctional Education Associationin Laurel, Md., which represents prison educators.
That’s a big drawback, said Steurer. “What if an inmate flunks another inmate,” he asked, “and there’s retribution?”
