Bonus Solo Episode: Teaching In Prisons With Taylor Rae Almonte-Roman

This episode is supported by the University Life Social Justice Mini-Grant Program. To learn more about the Social Justice Mini-Grant Program visit: https://universitylife.columbia.edu/social-justice-mini-grant-program.

Summary

Taylor has been teaching in prisons for a year through the Center for Justice and a program called Just Ideas. Her interest in mass incarceration and the American prison system led her to this work. Taylor believes in a bottom-up approach to social justice and emphasizes the importance of direct engagement with the communities she studies. She currently serves as the assistant director of Just Ideas, managing logistics between professors, interns, and the prison facility, and also teaches a full semester course through the Center for Justice. Taylor finds the work impactful and believes it deepens her understanding of the prison system's damaging effects. She plans to continue learning and discussing the criminal justice system, particularly the issue of individuals unable to pay bail. Taylor also announced that she received a mini grant from Columbia University for her upcoming podcast episodes.

Transcription

Taylor Rae Almonte-Roman

Hello and welcome back. It's me, your host Taylor Rae. And this is another episode of “On the Outside”. Hello, friend. Welcome back. We have another solo episode coming at you today. And I'm really excited to be talking about my work teaching inside of prisons. This is something that I started doing a little over a year ago and had this opportunity through being at grad school at Columbia, through a couple different department at Columbia.

We have the Center for Justice. So that's one way that I've taught inside and another is a program called Just Ideas, which is in the philosophy department and that's at another facility. I think it's so wild that I'm only a year into doing this work. And I just can't imagine where it will go. When I initially got to grad school and had to figure out what my concentration was going to be my impetus just in and of itself to go to grad school was already around the work of mass

incarceration and really taking a more critical look at the prison system, especially here in America. So it was pretty easy for me to know that was what I wanted to focus on and I get asked all the time, like why mass incarceration. And I think one of the most impactful frameworks that I learned within, you know, the study of human rights and human rights within human rights.

There are so many theories and you know, ways to go about implementing actually and enforcing and analyzing human rights across the world is this approach that really looks at our society from the bottom up. So that could be within an organization or it could be on a, on a larger scale. And when I, when I take a bottom up approach and really think about those that are the most marginalized, those are the most forgotten.

And especially with my interests of the way that our society and racism and discrimination work together. It really led me to need to learn more about our prison system. And within my first semester, I took a class called Law and Policy Mass incarceration in the United States and it was at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia. And as part of our final assignment, we had to do a podcast lol and I kind of killed it with that one.

To be honest, I actually didn't even speak on the podcast. I was like the producer doing all the behind the scenes. And when we were doing that podcast, we interviewed professor Joy James and she's not a professor at Columbia. But my advisor put me in contact with her. She's absolutely incredible scholar, philosopher, activist and something that she said really stayed with me and she was talking about any sort of social justice work or research that you do within academia.

You can't just be up in your ivory tower looking down on, on other people saying, oh, I want to help you, like, look at these poor people, let me help them instead, you need to get down from there and you need to see them eye to eye and say, OK, what are we going to do? And I thought, how am I going to study and theorize and write my thesis on and research mass incarceration without going into a prison.

It just didn't make sense to me. And while I've loved this program, I think some of the disconnect for me as more of a practitioner versus an academic. Sure, I'm in academia and I am participating in academic exercises. But at the end of the day, I want to learn so I can go and do something and that's actually not what everyone wants to do. A lot of people want to learn so that they can continue to theorize about it and write about it and research it and they're not necessarily going out to

those communities and doing anything to better their circumstances. And honestly, I'm not going to get into, you can probably tell, but I'm not going to really get into if I think that's valid or not because it's not my place to judge that, I guess, like I, I, and we need, we do need the research and the theories and all that stuff. It just isn't necessarily how I see this work.

And so, you know, I really felt called to get in there and be like, am I doing this for real? And if I am, then I need to be a part of being with, with people and talking to people and engaging with people that are within these communities. And that was kind of my reason why fast forwarding a little bit. I had the opportunity to become an intern for a program called Just Ideas, which is in the Philosophy Department at Columbia.

And within the first few months, I became the assistant director of the program. I'm still the assistant director now, which has been a really incredible opportunity. So I oversee all the other interns and I do our yearly workshop and I'm kind of the point person for all the logistics between our professors and our interns and the prison facility.

So we teach those classes in a detention center. And what's really interesting is that for folks that are in a detention center, they have pending cases, which means they are still waiting to find out where they're going to serve their full sentence. So what that means is that we might have a student one week and then by the following week, they were sent to a prison across the country serve their sentence.

So we do mini courses which are four consecutive weeks. And if you are still within the facility and able to continue, you can do more mini courses and you can get credit for that and all kinds of stuff. So that was my first introduction. I have an amazing mentor who's the founder of just ideas named Professor Chris Mercer. And she really helped me to understand how to approach this work, how to really bring dignity and humanity and respect to what you're doing, how to give it a real

effort, how to show the, the students that you're teaching that you are there for the work and for the for the educational aspects. And while, of course, there are so many things that they can share with us about their stories and why they're in there and what's going on for them and all that they are enduring. That's not what the class is about, the class is about the book, we're reading the exercises that we're doing.

And I think having that approach and having that guidance so early on in my career and my work has just been huge. It's been so monumental and so impactful because now I know that I can create that environment just by focusing on the work, not by diving, my personal experiences, not by getting, you know, information about what's going on with the students, but really just bringing a seriousness and a dedication to the work, which makes the students feel so valued and challenged

and excited for class. And that has been such an amazing lesson. This semester, I also had the opportunity to teach a full semester course through the Center for Justice. And that has been absolutely like amazing and also a bit of a different experience because with this population and this specific facility, they are, it's a prison. So it's not a detention center.

And so folks are staying there for whatever amount of time that they have to serve their sentence and they know each other really well. So they have their own dynamics. They've been in classes together and they also are all on relatively the same page around where their studies are at. So they're all going for a bachelor's or some people might be going for masters, but they've been in classes, they've been in college level courses before versus at the detention center.

We have folks that are from kind of all various levels and in our courses specifically, you don't have to have any sort of diploma or degree to be a part of it. So it has been a really different experience working with an entire group that has taken a bunch of college courses before. It definitely has a little bit more seriousness. Like, I don't know, they're all relatively serious and that we're definitely serious about the work, but it is different when people are trying to get a

grade to get towards a degree because they want to have that when they're eventually, you know, out of prison. so I think the approach is just a little bit different. I'm only halfway through my first semester, teaching a semester long course. So I still got a lot to learn and I don't think I necessarily really know, but overall, I really have to say that this work, these relationships that have been built within class has been so impactful to me has really made me more than ever

before, see how damaging our prison system is, has lit a fire in my heart and really made me more than ever feel like this is what I'm meant to be doing. I know that so many Americans really don't know much about our prison system. I'm working on an episode now for you guys that has more of the history, more of the data, more of the info specifically on the American prison system because it's so interesting to me that so many Americans don't really even know how our prison system works,

the different security levels. But also just the fact that folks that are in jail right now, they have not been sentenced, they have not been found guilty. They are just waiting there because they cannot afford bail. Yes, of course, some folks in jail are just serving short sentences. That's kind of the difference between a jail and a prison in a prison is for more long term sentences.

A jail is for either brief sentences similar to a detention center or a jail is for folks that simply cannot pay bail. So there are people sitting in correctional facilities right now who have not been found guilty of a single crime, but they cannot pay bail. Those make up a good portion, not the significant portion by any means, not the majority.

And again, I'll bring you the statistics on that. But I've written about this so many times that, you know, you can trust, you can trust me. I'm gonna give you the facts next week, I promise. But it doesn't make up the majority. But these are human beings and they're sitting in correctional facilities because they cannot pay for bail. Never mind so many people that are mixed up in our criminal justice system without really receiving true justice.

It's something that breaks my heart and it's something that I will continue to talk about and to learn about and there's no better place to learn. There is never going to be a better place for me to learn. Then straight from the experience of those who have been incarcerated before. And I'm so so lucky to have made so many incredible friends out, you know, outside of prisons who have been previously incarcerated and to have gotten to work with so many incredible students while

inside of the correctional facilities. So that's just a little bit about my work and my experience and you're definitely gonna get some more episodes about this in the future. I'm also so excited to share that I did receive a mini grant from Columbia University. So a few of my upcoming episodes will be brought to you from them.

This episode is supported by the University Life, Social Justice mini grant program. To learn more about the Social justice mini grant program, you can find the link to their website in the show notes. See you out there.