Discipline and Punish…and Teach?

1.08.11 By Rachel Singh

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
Michele Foucault, Discipline and Punish

I started tutoring in a prison exactly four years ago, in the January of my freshman year at Harvard. I was a very confused and very angry young person at the time, and I was looking for a way of making sense of all the injustices I was only beginning to see in the world.  My high school Latin teacher - a woman who has taught and inspired me in so many ways - volunteered in prisons and first introduced me to the idea that prisons were more than places where bad people go when they’ve done something wrong.  Since then, I have come to see prison as a place where our society’s gravest and most intractable social problems are concentrated and perpetuated.  Although I decided to become a teacher when I graduated, instead of a public defender or prison activist, I wanted to maintain my connection to the place that had taught me so much in college. I knew I would better understand my work in Boston’s public schools if I was constantly reminded of those whom BPS failed, the men I worked with at Suffolk County House of Corrections. 

Most of the men I have worked with over the years have been slightly older than the prison’s average.  They already had high school degrees and because of their age, they were ready to start thinking about making changes in their lives when they got out.  (Most of the men at Suffolk are between 18 and 24 and serve sentences no more than three years, usually for drug-related crimes.)  I had the privilege of working with each man for about a year, and in that time, I think I learned as much from each of them as they learned from me.  Those men have given me the courage, inspiration and relentless drive to work for justice in our society; I will carry their stories with me everywhere I go.

About a month ago, I started working with a man who is 21, a year younger than me.  I think this was a turning point for me in a few ways. I myself am getting older.  I’m not a college student who goes to prison to learn about the world.  Now I go in as a teacher, with concrete pedagogical skills to offer my tutees.  I also come to Suffolk after spending a day with my students, children who could easily be my tutees’ sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, cousins, or daughters and sons.  Also for the first time since starting BTR, I was tutoring in prison what I was teaching in school.  My twenty one year old tutee did not know his basic addition facts (9+4, 8+7, etc.), let alone his multiplication tables.  Sadly, this is not surprising or abnormal to anyone who knows anything about prisons, but it did cause some cognitive dissonance for me and remind me of the urgency of teaching all my students properly, while I have them.  I don’t know who this man’s first grade teacher was, but I know that a lot of people failed this young man to bring him to the place he is now. 

Usually, during my first time working with someone in the prison, I make a point of talking about their goals, both while in prison and when they get out.  I am not naive enough to think that their time in tutoring, or even passing the GED, can change the trajectory of their lives.  I’m not convinced that many things really can, but if anything can, it’s their own attitude and aspirations.  I made a passing comment about how crazy it must be in prison and how challenging it must be.  He shruggled and replied that being in prison was fine, and it was outside that was crazy.  I was taken aback, because I consider prisons the most toxic environments our society has dreamed up.  They are a nightmare of every social problem imaginable, taken to an extreme.  This young man was trying to tell me that it was the craziness of his world outside the prison that would keep him coming back to prison.  For me, life outside prison is free and safe and comfortable.  It was naive to assume the same of the men I work with.  He was not saying that he’d rather be in prison than outside; he simply recognized that what I see as the inhumanity of prisons like Suffolk is inextricably linked to the oppression in poor communities of color, like Mission Hill, Roxbury, and Mattapan. 

I asked my tutee if there was anything he could do differently to prevent him from coming back.  Although I see these men’s incarceration as the result of structural oppression, I maintain some faith in human agency and believe that we can all make choices to change our trajectories.  He shrugged again and said no.  I have never heard anyone at Suffolk so hopeless about his prospects, so resigned to coming back, but I suspect now that he was just being more honest with me than others.  On average, 60% of people coming out of prisons recidivate, and that rate is probably higher for people in the demographic of Suffolk’s prisons: young, black, undereducated, poor, without job prospects.

In writing these words now, I am struck by how similar my questions to him were to those which I ask my own students after they have experienced some disciplinary action and are about to join the class community again. What choices can you make now to change your trajectory?  My students are very young and new to school, so they are only just learning what they are expected to say in response.  My tutee did not care to lie; he had no reason.  And while being sentenced to prison on a drug charge is a much more complex and devastating process than being sent to the power chair or the buddy room for being disrespectful or fighting with a student, the two are not incomparable.  The reality is that the students who are constantly being punished in schools are the ones who end up being punished in our society.  I think that is an important fact to remember when we think about the trajectory we as teachers set our children on.  The system that damns students with high-stakes testing, tracking, and inequitable funding is the same one that criminalizes them a few years later with its laws, policing, and courts.  The social function of schools is not always very different from that of prisons.  This need not necessarily be the case, but it is important to recognize when it might be.  And we must also see that when we give up on our students, when we fail them, we are not only complicit with their incarceration, we are the perpetrators.