Teaching Economics in Prison
Teaching Economics in Prison
Education in the big house
Since 2021 I have taught two courses through the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI). Founded in 2016, YPEI is a joint effort through Yale and the University of New Haven to offer education to incarcerated individuals. Students in the program take for-credit courses that count for University of New Haven credit. Since its founding, YPEI has expanded quickly. After receiving a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, YPEI evolved from offering solo courses to entire degree programs. Students can now earn an associate's and a bachelor's degree from the University of New Haven while incarcerated. That diploma comes without asterisk or footnote; for legal and accreditation purposes, there is no difference between students taking courses behind bars and those taking classes on the main campus. Courses are offered at two facilities, a men’s maximum security state prison, and a women’s low security federal prison.
I have taught two courses at the men’s maximum security prison, introduction to microeconomics and introduction to macroeconomics. Here are some of my thoughts.
Getting into YPEI is tough. Every year, hundreds of inmates apply for fewer than 30 spots. If YPEI was its own university, it would have one of the lowest acceptance rates in the nation. To that end, my interactions have not been with the typical inmate. Rather, I am teaching the best of the best.
And the best they are. These students are driven. It’s jarring (and a bit depressing) to compare my incarcerated students to my traditional ones. The incarcerated students I’ve taught come to class prepared and ready for lecture every day. They have always done the reading and completed their homework. Attending class, far from a drag or chore, is the highlight of the week for these students. Instead of trying to overcome apathy, I get to enjoy exuberance. It’s fantastic. As I like to say, my incarcerated students spend much less time on their cell phones than my traditional ones.
My incarcerated students are not only driven, they are good. They outperform my traditional students on identical exams every time. That includes my traditional students at both the University of New Haven and the University of Colorado Boulder.
The most common question I get about teaching in prison is about safety. Despite being in a maximum security prison, I’ve never felt threatened. Again, there is an extensive filtering process in place before any inmate steps into my classroom. There is also a one-strike rule. Any incarcerated student who breaks an important prison rule will be removed from the program. I am alone in the classroom - there’s always a guard in the school area, but that includes about a dozen classrooms and a library. To date, there has never been a safety incident in a YPEI program.
Teaching in prison becomes normal quickly. For the first few minutes, it’s a bit odd. But then old habits kick in. I am the teacher, they are the students. The classroom might not have any windows, and there aren’t any women in the class, but other than that it’s the same as teaching anywhere else. It’s easy to forget where we are.
Sometimes I get a little too comfortable and forget entirely. Once, at the beginning of class, I asked, “So how was everyone’s weekend?” After a prolonged silence one student finally replied, “What weekend?” Insert foot into mouth.
Another thing I learned is not to talk about what I eat. Some days I would teach in the morning, have to leave the facility for a few hours, and then come back for office hours in the afternoon. The first time I did this a student asked me what I had for lunch and I said I had a pastrami sandwich. The student’s eyes practically rolled into the back of his head. “PASTRAMI! I haven’t had pastrami in six years!” he exclaimed. You could see the look of hunger and envy on the rest of their faces. After that I would just say I got a sandwich or something similarly nondescript. They still ask every time.
That quickly became the most difficult thing about teaching in prison: the bewildering transition between living a normal life, spending several hours on the inside, and going back to normal life. Some of my incarcerated students haven’t left that building for years. They haven’t sat in traffic, shopped at a store, or grilled with their neighbors. They haven’t done much of anything. This isn’t to say you should be able to do any of those things after committing a serious crime. It’s just that it’s disorienting to go from a life of privilege and freedom and interact with those that have neither, and then go back. When the prison door shuts behind me, I am in a liminal space, a purgatory, for a few hours each week. The longer I spent inside that space, the more otherworldly it felt.
In the YPEI handbook, instructors are cautioned to not “romanticize someone in prison. If their being incarcerated does not necessarily make them a monster, neither does it make them a saint. To assume otherwise is always inaccurate, usually patronizing, and sometimes dangerous.” I agree with that wholeheartedly. It would be easy to view an incarcerated individual as a terrible person who should spend the rest of their lives locked away, or as a martyr who never stood a chance and has been railroaded by an unjust system. I choose to view them as normal people who made some terrible decisions.
To that end, teaching in a prison has reaffirmed my view that everyone deserves an education. Just like emergency care, it shouldn’t matter who you are or what you have done. No person should ever be turned away from an emergency room and no person should ever be denied an education. Yes, I teach people who have done horrible things. I just don’t see that as relevant to receiving an education. Disqualifying a felon from learning makes as much sense to me as revoking a person’s library card because they cheated on their spouse.
Some people struggle with that. I’ve been asked point blank why I would teach in a prison instead of low-income students or the homeless. My response is that I would teach them as well. Find funding and set up a program. Let’s put students in seats. Otherwise shut up and let me teach.