Claremont College Students Are Learning Alongside The Imprisoned

CLAREMONT, CA -- A group of Claremont College students are taking classes inside the California Rehabilitation Center alongside incarcerated people.

The effort is part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, a national program in which college students and young incarcerated students come together in an integrated learning environment. The aim of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, according to the college, is to “facilitate dialogue and education across profound social differences.”

Within the classroom, every incarcerated student sits between two outside students and vice versa. The students talk to each other about the assigned readings, how their days are going, and their future goals. Becca Wainess describes the impact of building meaningful connections with inside students.

“Through these conversations, we all learn how to humanize each other,” she said.

“A special community is created for those two hours of class,” adds Nathalie Marx, a sociology and legal studies major who wants to pursue a career in restorative justice.

Pomona College Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Nicole Holliday has been involved with the Inside-Out program for two years. In her Inside-Out class, “Linguistic Discrimination,” students start each day with an ice-breaker before learning about how language can be used as a tool of empowerment or disempowerment for individuals and groups.

This isn’t Scripps students’ first foray into criminal and restorative justice projects. The Claremont Colleges have been involved in prison work for the past 20 years through partnerships with the Prison Education Project, the California Rehabilitation Center, and on-campus activism with the Prison Abolition Club. However, the Inside-Out model was first used by The Claremont Colleges just three years ago, largely due to the insight of Nigel Boyle, current Dean of Pitzer College, who heard about the national program and wanted to implement it at The Claremont Colleges.

Boyle collaborated with Tess Hicks, director of the Community Engagement Center at Pitzer College, whose mission is to “forward social responsibility and community engagement in surrounding communities.” Hicks taught the first class, titled “Healing Arts and Social Change,” and then took over running the program.

Hicks noticed that the classes were mutually beneficial for both inside and outside students. “Through this program, the inside students are seen as humans and scholars who have contributing powers and intellectual worth. For the outside students, there is a freedom that comes in the oddest of places, in the least free place, because a lot of the pretense that is found in Claremont classrooms is dropped inside.”

Incarcerated students have the added benefit of receiving college credit that could transfer to another four-year institution. In addition, for every class an inside student completes, three weeks are removed from their sentence.

After witnessing the success of the Inside-Out model, Hicks decided to expand the program at The Claremont Colleges with the help of faculty and students. Along with her collaborators, Hicks was awarded a $1.1 million grant over five years from the Mellon Foundation. Tyee Griffith, the program administrator for the grant, is working to unify and expand their vision by offering more classes, implementing the program in more prisons, leading a conference to educate people about mass incarceration, and creating an associate’s and bachelor’s degree pathway.

Griffith has a goal of expanding the curricular offerings in justice studies, with the vision of someday creating a Center of Justice Education at The Claremont Colleges.

“With the grant, we are able to dream of the big picture,”Hicks said. “We want to change the system from a political level so that we don’t even have to have an ‘inside’ to go to.”

This year, there have been 10 Inside-Out classes—a substantial increase from the initial two classes in 2014. Next year they aim to offer at least 12.