By MARTY LEVINE
Pitt’s School of Law is one of only a handful of law schools in the country with a class that’s part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, bringing 14 law students last fall to the State Correctional Institute in Greene County for a weekly class alongside 14 incarcerated men.
Professor David Harris carpooled with his students about an hour and a half south to teach the prisoners (some serving long sentences) on an equal footing with the future lawyers. “What are prisons for?” was the topic of one lesson — which all focused on the criminal justice system — and the perspectives of the “inside” students surprised the “outside” students.
Several of the law students suggested abolishing prisons.
“I don’t know what kind of reaction they were expecting,” Harris said, but several men currently in prison immediately spoke up.
“‘Hold on a second, you don’t understand what kind of people there are in here,’” they said, as Harris remembered it. Yes, many prisoners deserve shorter sentences, these inside students agreed, but “there are people in here who need prisons,” they said — such as those convicted of child abuse or other physical abuse. As one prisoner put it: “I don’t think I should be here and not for so long, but I don’t want some of these people around my family.”
“I think that really surprised (the law students),” Harris said.
During the same class, the group discussed an article they had read about prisons in certain northern European countries where the prisoners are still isolated from society but wear their own clothes, work jobs, cook their own food and see their families. “Because they want people to reintegrate into society better than they were,” Harris explained. “The gap between those (prisons and ours) was pretty breathtaking. Watching everybody say ‘It doesn’t have to be like this?’ was a moment.
“We bonded pretty quickly as a community inside,” Harris recalled. The class involved small group discussions and written papers, just like any class, but it focused on dialogue among the full group. “The inside/outside students taught each other. I’d say that the influence of this experience on the 14 law students will stay with them in the justice system — whatever position they have going forward.”
Law students who took the class agreed and said their apprehension eased once they got inside, got used to the security and got to know the inside students.
The class was run on strict rules: There were certain items the law students could not bring inside or wear. Physical contact beyond a handshake was frowned upon, only first names were used, and no questions were allowed about when the prisoners were in for, although some ended up volunteering such information and much more. Nor was there to be any contact with the “inside” students apart from the class itself — including on social media.
It also was made clear to the law students that they were there to learn from and with the prisoners, and vice versa — not to study the prisoners or prisons, not as a service project and not to help the prisoners’ cases. “Respect, listening, honesty, candor” were the watchwords; “melt the walls; dissolve the stereotypes” were the objectives. Together they discussed, read and wrote about such topics as “What causes crime, and how must we address it?”; “Victims and survivors of crime”; “Roles of major criminal justice actors: judges, courts, prosecutors, criminal defense”; and “How do you live a meaningful life inside.”
As one “inside” student wrote at the end of class in a paper: “Just the conversations I’ve had with people around the jail revolving around what I’ve learned from the classes has shown me that, when I’m focused and I put my mind to it I can learn and apply what I’ve learned to my life and make the necessary changes. This program has forced me to take a hard look into me, how I look at things and to challenge them, and to look at things objectively as opposed to subjectively. Because some of the views I had on the world and how I conducted myself in the past was just a view from a narrow minded point of view.
“Being able to share the information from this class with some of my peers and them understanding what has been given to me has paid dividends ten-fold, and this is a program that I feel should be accessible to all those interested. … This group has become therapeutic for me to have a sense of normalcy on a weekly basis having realistic conversations about the real issues. So this really isn’t the end, this is just the beginning.”
Third-year law student Anthony Jessel was part of the class; he is set to graduate and has secured a job as a public defender in the Allegheny County Public Defenders’ Office.
The class, Jessel said, “sounded like an experience I wouldn’t be able to get in any other place. It sounded like, for someone who is going into the kind of work I wanted to go into, it would be very fruitful to me as a future lawyer.”
“A lot of those guys crave discussion and crave connection of some variety in a correctional institution, and I was just glad we were able to give it,” he said. “Basic human connection is lacking inside, and it was the highlight of our week and their week every time. More opportunities to practice humanity is warranted” for the inside students, he believes. “The experience to me spoke to the need to remind the citizenship at large that these are still human beings in prison, no matter what they may have done, and a lot of those basic human needs are simply not being met.”
He said the class left him with a “deeper understanding of our current justice system … but so much more.” For one, it gave him “profound connections” with his fellow law students. “Law schools can be very rote and routinized — this class was very unique. The best thing about the class was just being there. These folks who we otherwise would never have met, hearing about their lives … It is not what you get in a lecture hall.
“I would recommend it to any law student, no matter what they want to do. It changed my life — I can say that with certainty. I don’t think about any other classes after they are over. This one I know now will stay with me forever. As a future public defender, it helped me understand my clients better.”
Another class member, second-year law student Nina S. Wiramidjaja, valued the class because it helped her better understand the prisoners’ situation — whether she goes into criminal law or tax law, as she is debating. “I think it is so easy to relegate the people who are incarcerated as subhuman. It’s just (not right) to lock them up and throw away the key — for themselves, for their families, for society.
“Our hope is that classes like this become more common in law schools,” she added. “Police officers or anybody who wants to be part of the criminal justice system should take a class like this.”
“Our society has moved into mass incarceration, the worst and most damaging social experiment any country has ever tried,” Harris said. He created Pitt’s inside-out course — a much more common offering for undergraduates throughout the country — because he felt his students needed to know what prison means to victims, families, communities and the incarcerated “in a non-abstract way.”
Harris learned about such courses when he interviewed the program creators on his podcast, “Criminal Injustice,” a few years ago. Concerned that placing law students — essentially graduate students — in the same class with prisoners who may not have high-school diplomas would not work, he found instead that the inside students, selected by the prison administration, were eager to take on the readings, papers and discussions.
“My hopes were that we would create a real learning community inside,” he said — to have both groups act as peers to one another “and to give each other the kind of respect and dignity that all of us crave on the outside but those on the inside don’t always get. And I hope the inside students will feel, at least for those hours … that they were just as important as anyone else … that they were being treated as people with worth, that they had experiences in life that counted.”
Harris is already recruiting law students for the next semester of the class. He acknowledges the crimes of the prisoners, but counters that, “when you see the amount of potential and talent in learning … it is enough to throw you into despair to think that these lives have been thrown away and that these lives are seen as basically worthless to society.” Punishment may work “to crush a person’s spirit,” he said, but when you watch how some inside students respond to the class, “it is something to behold.”
As one inside student wrote in a final class reflection: “It has made me much more trusting in the duties of future generations. Their duty to restore the pertinent things that were either lost or destroyed in the past has the potential of getting accomplished, thus benefiting all of humanity.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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