12/5/2023 0 Comments Im tyrone backfire![]() ![]() Spending years incarcerated leads to a lot of reflection,” Pompa says. The discussion, she recalls, “very quickly became very deep and complex. Pompa moderated the exchange between her undergrads and the inmates. It was a conversation during one such visit-to the State Correctional Institution-Dallas, near Scranton, Pa.-that set the current model in motion. ![]() The program that thrust Way into this world behind walls has its origins in the early 1990s, when Pompa led her criminal justice students on visits to area jails. (To comply with corrections department policy, all participants are identified by first name only.) Here, inmate Omar sits to the left of Yaa, a senior at St. ![]() Way says she’s been inspired by many of her students who are serving life sentences “because they have found meaning in a totally meaningless structure.” During Inside-Out classes, incarcerated students and those who visit from the “outside” purposefully sit side by side to encourage productive interaction. Tricia Way, associate director of Inside-Out, confers with students in her gender and masculinity course at a medium-security facility in Chester, Pa., near Philadelphia. Way leads a gender and masculinity course at the medium-security state correctional institution at Chester, a half-hour outside Philadelphia. “The people serving a life sentence are the most inspiring people I have ever met because they have found meaning in a totally meaningless structure,” says Tricia Way, associate director of Inside-Out. No one involved-whether inside or out, faculty or student-emerges from the program unchanged. A way to find meaningĪ second facet of the program dispatches Inside-Out staff and college faculty into correctional facilities to moderate open-ended dialogues about the same subjects covered in the undergraduate classes. Through wide-ranging discussions of literature, philosophy, psychology and criminal justice, participants gain personal insight and, ideally, a sense of their own potential. The courses are credit-bearing-for students on either side of the prison walls. The courses, which cover a variety of disciplines and a wide range of subjects, all use what Pompa calls “the prism of prison” to explore the material. Since then, the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program has grown to include more than 300 courses being offered in schools and correctional institutions in 34 states as well as internationally. The 15-week course that started it all, “Exploring Issues of Crime and Justice Behind the Walls,” was first offered at Temple in 1997. Joseph’s University and other Philadelphia postsecondary institutions to become classmates with men and women on the “inside”-that is, those being held in area correctional facilities. Inside-Out allows undergraduates at Temple, St. And no grade or portfolio can adequately demonstrate what these students will gain in the weeks ahead. This first-day lesson in humility marks the students’ entry into the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an innovative educational effort that operates at what might seem an odd nexus: the juncture of academia and the correctional system.Īs the program’s name implies, students in Pompa’s semester-long course won’t learn all of their lessons in the classroom-certainly not the most profound ones. “Now,” Pompa says, breaking the silence, “imagine what it would feel like to be judged forever by that experience.” Her students, here on the first day of an introductory criminal justice class at Temple University, sit for a moment in quiet reflection. PHILADELPHIA-“Think about the worst thing you’ve ever done,” Professor Lori Pompa intones as class begins. ![]() Innovative program turns prisoners into classroom peers ![]()
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