Teaching at Metropolitan Detention Center
Hi Friends!
Welcome to Issue 54 of this newsletter. This week I’ll be opening up about my experience teaching at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Yesterday, I went into the prison for the first time through Columbia University’s Just Ideas internship. Today, I’m reflecting on the experience, preparing for upcoming classes, and trying to find the language to discuss this next phase of my work. Let’s get into it.
Lets Get Into It
Just Ideas is a program within the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University. Founded by Christia Mercer, Gustav Berne Professor of Philosophy, the program brings together professors and interns to engage with people in New York prisons. By discussing some of the most challenging literature there is, we reflect on profound philosophical questions like the role of love and suffering in life and the nature of justice and wisdom. We encourage each other to become more reflective agents in the world. In fall 2014, Geraldine Downey, Director of Columbia's Center for Justice, asked Christia to be the first senior professor to teach in Columbia's new Justice-in-Education Initiative — this is how Just Ideas was born. In 2015, Professor Mercer wrote this op-ed for the Washington Post. I’ll pull some information from that piece throughout this newsletter, but want to offer an insight that she shares:
“The pleasures I’ve found teaching in prison are among the richest I’ve ever had. But the pleasure I find in this pedagogical delight is matched by the pain of recognition that my students’ intellectual exploration will cease without volunteers like me. We must not allow so many members of our community to languish in prison without the chance for intellectual development. We must find it in ourselves to educate all Americans.”
My experience at MDC or Metropolitan Detention Center in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Brooklyn is absolutely one of the richest experience I have had. I was lucky enough to teach alongside Professor Mercer this Wednesday and will be teaching alongside her for the rest of this course, which is truly an experience that I know will impact me for the rest of my life. Before diving deeper into my personal experience at MDC, here’s a little more backround on the prison system and it’s intersection with eduction from that 2015 op-ed:
“There are roughly 2.2 million people in a correctional facility in the United States, which incarcerates more individuals than any other country in the world. According to a 2012 study, 58.5 percent of incarcerated people are black or Latino. According to the Sentencing Project, one in three black men will be incarcerated.
Although more than 50 percent of people in these facilities have high school diplomas or a GED, most prisons offer little if any post-secondary education.
Things have not always been this bad. In the 1980’s, when the prison population sat below 400,000, our incarcerated citizens were educated through state and federal funding. But the 1990’s brought an abrupt end to government support. When President Clinton signed into law the Crime Bill in 1994, he eliminated incarcerated people’s eligibility for federal Pell grants and sentenced a generation of incarcerated Americans to educational deprivation. Nationwide, over 350 college programs in prisons were shut down that year. Many states jumped on the tough-on-crime bandwagon and slashed state funded prison educational programs. In New York State, for example, no state funds can be used to support secondary-education in prison. Before 1994, there were 70 publicly funded post-secondary prison programs in the state. Now there are none. In many states across the country, college instruction has fallen primarily to volunteers.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of students just like mine scattered across the country eager to be educated and keen to join the ranks of active participants in our democracy.
As a society, we owe them (and ourselves) that chance. A National Institute of Justice study has found that 76.6 percent of formerly incarcerated people return to prison within five years of release.
According to research by the Rand Institute, recidivism goes down by 43 percent when people are offered education.
Those who leave prison with a college degree are much more likely to gain employment, be role models for their own children (50 percent of incarcerated adults have children), and become active members of their communities. Some of my students are quite clear about the desire to motivate their children: “the conversation changes when you’re educating yourself.””
May 31, 2023
Upon entering MDC, I exchanged my license for a key to a small silver locker. I put my belongings inside and made my way to be screened and scanned. I wore my husband’s jeans, since tight clothing isn’t allowed, and a plain purple T-shirt. Many clothing items are restricted, and I wanted to ensure I had no issues. I took off my sneakers and put them in a bin with my copy of Sophocles’s Antigone and my key. I walked into a hallway with many elevators. We piled in with a few other workers and officers, everyone seeming to be in good spirits. If I’m honest, it wasn’t what I expected, not that I knew what to expect. I tried really hard to have no expectations. I pushed out all of the articles I’ve read and honestly barely thought about what it would be like to enter MDC the entire week leading up to it.
We walked out of the elevator into the Chapel, where chairs sat in a semicircle. We set down our stack of folders and waited. Fifteen men entered in brown jumpsuits, copies of Antigone in hand. I was nervous, and I couldn’t really articulate why. Many people asked me if I felt scared or hesitant to go to prison, and the truth is that I never did, and I still didn’t at that moment. I have known and trusted and loved people who have been incarcerated—but even if I hadn’t, these men deserve an opportunity to learn from someone who sees them without judgment or fear. I felt capable of doing that.
Professor Mercer introduced herself; she wanted them to know that we weren’t the “B Team”; we were qualified, smart, top-tier instructors from a competitive Ivy League University. She wanted them to know they were worth learning from someone like her. Someone like me (even though Professor Mercer is like 100000 times more qualified). We started out with a game. “Say your name and something you love. I want you to dig deep and be honest. When you shake someone’s hand, you suddenly become them, you take on their name and what they love, and then you introduce yourself like that to the next person.” I gave the class the instructions and told them to stand up and start walking around the room. (Coming from a theatre background, I have done this hundreds of times in my life. “Walk around the space,” my acting teachers used to say at the start of almost every class.) Everyone started laughing, trying to remember who they were embodying and what that person loved. Some people said things like “cars” or “food”. Others said things like “my daughter” or “justice” or “freedom.” Eventually, the game ended, and we all sat down, feeling a little lighter.
Soon, we dove into the book. The big questions about justice and law and rules and love. We talked about moral universalism and moral relativism. We read the text out loud. I did a dramatic reading of a few of the big monologues at the start of the play, and I felt like my entire body was being filled up with light. We divided the class into small groups, some defending Ismene and some defending Antigone, and I walked around and gave advice and support to each group. The class debated, and folks who seemed sleepy and disinterested for the first half of class started becoming impassioned and immersed in the conversation. We gave them an assignment for the next class: turning this debate into a short essay and writing a Haiku that connected to the text. I fist-bumped a few of the men and wrote down recommendations they gave me on books to read. I told them we would talk about them next week.
Three hours later, an officer came in the room to escort us out and bring the men back—I don’t even know where?—but back. They packed into the elevator, and I waved. I smiled. I said, “Don’t forget to write your Haikus guys!” and they laughed and either nodded or said some version of, “We will, we will.” The officer remarked, “That’s definitely the first time anyone’s ever yelled that in a prison”. I said, “And I hope it’s not the last!”
I write this all down because I don’t want to forget a thing. The way these men, whom I had only met three hours before, lingered in the room, stacking chairs, jotting down notes from the board, remarking that class flew by…I don’t want to forget those moments. I feel a responsibility to remember.
I’m trying to find the right words to describe this experience’s impact on me. I wonder if it’s okay for me to even be thinking about “me” right now. I want to bring as much respect and humanity, and dignity to these men as I possibly can.
When I interviewed Professor Joy James a few months ago, she described her work as an activist and an academic, stating the ways in which we must not look down from the ivory tower of academia on those we fight for and with, but on as equal terms as we can. Eye to eye, we ask them, “so what do we do?”. My hope in joining this program was to ask myself if I could do this work as an activist, an academic, an abolitionist. I know now, with certainty, that I can. I know now that I will.
