Transcript

Future Stories for Offenders: Lisa Culp at TEDxLCSC

so we as educators and human service people we've been waiting a long time for this clearinghouse of great ideas haven't we and finally it's here ted talks has brought it to us it's exciting that they also understand that great ideas come from local people right even rural communities and so i'm just excited to be a part of this thank you to the lcsc team for letting me be here and i'm going to talk to you today about what i think is probably our most malign group of people i'm going to begin by talking about the group or population that most people see as being really really bad folk and you might be surprised to know that that is people in poverty even more so it is people in poverty who are behind bars i'm going to talk about three things i'm going to talk about the idea that education is changing the lives of people in prison i'm going to talk about the idea that there are teaching strategies that we can use in prisons and for marginalized populations including under-resourced students and i also want to talk to you about the idea that community can gain and help with opportunities that will expand and increase our um our corporate way of looking at offenders so let's begin in 2005 the state of washington began this process of offering professional technical degrees to men in prison in fact walla walla community college kind of led the way they were at coyote ridge corrections center in connell washington and they were seeing some really great things happening to this group this population with the economic downturn a lot of the money went away and it was so scary for this population of of students that one inmate was compelled to write a letter to doris buffett and doris buffett is warren buffett's sister she is a philanthropist in her own right and she has invested in education programs for many years he wrote to her and he said we are changing the culture of this prison the way that people interact with one another through this process and i'm really worried about it ending i also believe that it could really reduce recidivism would you help and you know what doris buffett read that letter and she'd climbed on an airplane and she ended up at coyote ridge corrections center and decided to pour a hundred forty thousand dollars into a two-year project and see what would happen well since two thousand five they've had ninety two graduate from this program and she has continued to fund it and the 92 that have graduated there have been 12 that are have been released none of them have returned in fact they know that six of them have continued on to get their bachelor's or master's degree that five of them are employed and that one is just simply off the grid and has not returned to any kind of penal or correctional kind of uh relationship so that is zero recidivism rate now that's a small cohort isn't it 12 people so i wanted to look around the country and see what else is happening and guess what they're seeing these types of outcomes everywhere in fact in north carolina they looked at 60 inmates who were students they looked at 60 inmates who were not students they tracked them for three years after they were released what was so amazing to find was that those that were not students had a 40 recidivism rate they were coming back to prison those who did have an associates or bachelor's degree while they were incarcerated they had a 5 recidivism rate what they realized too was that 700 dollars in one year for the state of north carolina that they saved simply by investing in these education programs but more important than what it happens economically think about the citizenship that has all has begun to happen in these communities these men stepping out being taxpayers becoming people who are giving back and who are contributing that i think is what's so important so i want to talk a little bit more about this malign group of people i want to see if i can switch your paradigm a little bit see if i can change your mental model and i want to say that i got to be a teacher for a year at walla walla for walla walla community college at coyote ridge i was climbing into my car driving two and a half hours every day to teach a group of offenders and it was probably the most impactful thing that i've ever gotten to do and i'm excited that i get to talk about it some of the strategies that i want to share with you that i think really work for any group for any marginalized group for any under resource group are things that i use there and i certainly don't pretend to be a know-it-all in this arena i know there are many people that know a lot more about this than me but i'm going to share with you what worked for me the first thing is you need to learn the name of your students i have learned the name of 140 students every quarter the first week of class and the reason i do that is because it's important to them yes oh my gosh that's the huge payback but it also is a way of engaging students it's a way of keeping students accountable and some of you right now are saying i can't memorize names like that i'm not good at that i'm calling you out if you're a college instructor you went through a master's degree you went through a doctoral program you had to memorize hundreds and hundreds of bits of data and information and i'm telling you to employ those kinds of strategies to learn the names of your students it can't be more important and here's why marginalized students have always been invisible nobody knows who they are no one has ever known who they were they slipped through the cracks they were trying to keep their family afloat so when you learn their first name you're saying i see you i know you're there i care that you've showed up for class and in the offender population they're called by their last name and a number so it's honoring to them to call them by their first name learn your students names the second strategy that i think is really important is to always make sure that you have students working in groups on projects and then to follow up with presentations and i know that sounds strange but we all know about transmission style learning and we all know about how much better it is when it's student driven but even more so offenders are already a segregated group they're not going to hang out with each other they have certain places they sit at the tables when you have them in that classroom you can bring about unity to that group of students and you do it by placing them in situations where they can work together on projects and be successful one of the things that i do when people get up to communicate and present is i insist that they cannot read anything okay they cannot bring up anything to read they have to teach back their concepts without reading and they have to provide an engagement activity that gets the whole room involved oh my gosh we've had songs we've had skits one time we had cheerleading going on it was really fun but we also learned something and do you know if you give people a voice who've never had a voice it evokes leadership that's what speaking in front of others does so that's a compelling part also i embed hidden rules of economic class in everything that i do dr bell hooks a great philosopher said that she had spoken and taught in harlem and at harvard and she said there is no difference between the cognitive abilities of those in harlem and those in harvard there's no difference in the creative abilities of those populations the difference is that those from harvard had had a future story since they were two years old and their parents had talked to them about it and their grandparents had talked to them about it and those in harlem had never had an opportunity for abstract thinking to actually see themselves where they might be and who they might be and you know isn't it interesting in prison offenders have time to read and ruminate and so they have actually have the ability to start seeing themselves where they want to be and that's something that as instructors we can do bring about all sorts of assignments that talk about where do you see yourself where are you going to live what kind of car are you going to drive what's your job going to be like start building that abstract thinking so that they can move towards those mental models that are successful and not unsuccessful finally i think it's really important to say that um i think all of uh the students that you work with need to understand that where they came from is not wrong it's good and but where they're headed they want to be able to code switch okay if you're in a a largely middle class setting you want to be able to code switch and speak the middle class language and that doesn't mean that if you're from generational poverty that the words you use in the language you use are wrong they're exactly right for that situation so again we embed the idea of hidden rules of economic class so people can code switch this has been impactful and and helpful for me as a teacher and i believe also for the offenders and the students so finally i want to talk to you about the idea of community i want to talk to you about the idea that are you the kind of person that when you go out and you're looking for somebody to fulfill a job position and you get that application and you see that there's a check yes under have you ever committed a felony you're the kind of person that's going to put that immediately in the no pile i want to change the way you think about offenders i want to say that they have assets and advantages that our general population does not have some of those advantages are they're unbelievable ability to read nonverbal cues they're better than women they're able to know absolutely absolutely they're able to know in the flash of an eye what's needed and what's wanted because they've been a part of a power struggle for a very long time they also are committed and dedicated you know we talk about persistence in school there's no one more persistent than peop than men who have to make it to class from a cell they're highly resourceful and creative uh they take garbage and make beautiful things out of it they're people who are willing they're appreciative they're not entitled and guess what there are no distracting cell phones or technology in the way i might not be able to say that on ted talks i don't know so this is a group worthy of looking at i want to remind you how did they spend their time their darkest hour how did they spend it they spent it in a classroom they spent it learning something worthy and so that's important for us to all remember um i i want to end today with a poem that i recently received from an offender the poem is actually for all of the faculty at coyote ridge correction center it was delivered to an entire group during an appreciation event and as you hear it would you think about what you initially thought about offenders and then listen to what this young man had to say to the faculty he says and it's called you saved us you're the firefighter that runs into the burning building only if there are enough words to describe how we're feeling under an illuminated sky you treated us as individual stars seeing us swimming among sharks you became a lifeguard after performing cpr on us you instructed us to breathe very eager you were to see us maximize our potential by recognizing our abilities every day will be brighter from the light you instilled in us dark places can't scare us because you've already prepared us understand that this is our meager attempt to explain the unexplainable since it's life you've given us everything is attainable did i change the way you thought about offenders i hope so thank you