The Promise of Higher Education at San Quentin
by Jody Lewen

Delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, April 21, 2007 

I’d like to thank Mimi Haas, the selection committee, the Chancellor, and the whole university for this amazing award.  To Mimi Haas: it is an honor to be associated with the memory of Peter Haas, and with both of your accomplishments, particularly in the field of social justice.

I’d like first of all to welcome everyone who’s here: above all, my nieces and nephew Hannah and Eden and Carina.  I also want to welcome rest of my family; all the extraordinary volunteer teachers, past and present, from the San Quentin College Program; administrators and correctional officers from San Quentin (without whose help this program would not run for a single day); and a multitude of friends and supporters of the Program, who have provided professional advice, funding, advocacy, and support of every imaginable kind.  And perhaps most importantly, I’d like to welcome the several former students of the College Program who are here today, together with their friends and family members.

Also: the main reason this event is being filmed today is so that it can be shown on SQTV – the prison television station.  Therefore, I’d also like to greet the current students of the College Program at San Quentin, as well as the rest of the mainline, and, all of the over 600 men on death row.  I’m thinking of all of you right now. 

Reflecting as I have for many weeks about what to talk about here today, I found myself thinking along two different paths simultaneously. Part of me wanted to spend the whole time telling you about the extraordinary accomplishments of the students and teachers who truly make this program run, and about the countless others who have brought this program as far as it has come.  The other part of me wanted to spend this time telling you about how extremely dire and dangerous the whole situation inside the California prison system has become, and to talk about how urgently we need not just reform but transform our entire criminal justice system.  (And just a couple of quick facts to convey the scope of what I’m talking about here: in 1985, California’s prison population was 50,000; today it’s over 170,000.  In 1985, the CDC budget was 923 million dollars; its proposed budget for ‘07-‘08 is over $10 billion.  Just as a point of reference, the proposed budget for higher education in California is about $15 billion.) 

But instead of focusing on either of these two topics, I’ve decided to talk about the issue that I believe holds the greatest potential for allowing us to truly address this dire situation.  Specifically, in a fairly roundabout way, I’m going to argue here that the most pressing task facing us right now is that of crafting a political culture that is radically different from the one by which we currently live.  We urgently need to begin calling into question not simply the traditional political categories and terms upon which we ordinarily rely, but the overall pattern of mutual demonization which traditionally governs the ways in which we as groups interact.  Most broadly (and academically): I want to argue against what one might call the rhetorical and imaginary militarization of politics in our society.

To translate: I’m talking here about the widespread cultural pattern of dividing the social and political landscape into a landscape of friends and enemies, of good guys and bad guys.  I’m talking about a way of understanding the world in which those who oppose or frustrate us in some way are reduced in our minds to rigid, irrational, and often menacing stereotypes and caricatures.

For me, one of the best cures for this type of thinking has been being placed in the role of advocate for a college program inside of a state prison; in other words, being placed in a situation in which either alienating or dismissing people who reject or even undermine your work, is a kind of luxury that you can never afford.  This situation has forced me to at least try to understand a range of attitudes and actions which I, in other contexts, in earlier lives, would surely have given up on and walked away from – quickly, and in anger. 

Instead, here, in this situation, there’s been no choice but to take a deep breath, and try to understand what’s going on.  I’ve had to ask myself: What is happening here?  What is this person thinking?  Why are they acting the way they’re acting?  In a situation in which you have no control and little leverage, you have no alternative but to find a way to work it out. 

As I see it, California today is faced with a situation quite similar to the one I just described, though on a much larger scale: we cannot afford not to work together – we can no longer walk away, and give up on understanding each other.  Rather, I would suggest that if there is any hope at all for the cause of fixing the California criminal justice system, it lies in our building a huge coalition of people who, politically speaking, often come from entirely different universes.  In order to accomplish this, we’re going to have to adopt entirely unconventional, and some might even say revolutionary, ways of relating to each other as human beings.

There is a strong link, I’ve discovered, between the kind of interpersonal/political practice I’m advocating here and the work that I see going on every day in the College Program at San Quentin.  For reasons I don’t fully understand, something about the process of bringing the world of higher education into a prison tends to bring about a profound perceptual and relational change in its participants.  Let me try to explain this. 

Imagine lecturing about the diagnosis and treatment of various mental illnesses to a group of college students, a disproportionate number of whom have either themselves struggled with some form of mental illness, or currently live among others who have; and imagine that for their entire lives, until now – until your class – these students have probably had little or no access to information on this topic.  Imagine talking about the themes of masculinity and the banality of violence in George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant in a place where one of the greatest everyday sources of physical danger is people who are in some way trying to “save face.” Imagine reading Kafka’s The Trial while literally subject to one of the most terrifyingly dysfunctional bureaucratic systems this country has ever known. Imagine teaching a class on the U.S. Constitution and explaining to a group of prisoners that the 13th Amendment bars slavery and involuntary servitude – except in cases of punishment.

Bringing these kinds of texts into San Quentin, I have often felt like I was returning stolen property to its rightful owner.   I have wondered at how texts like these could have been withheld for so long from people who not only understand them so well, but who need them so badly. I haven’t felt so much generous and heroic – as I have often felt confused, apologetic, and even ashamed.  It always feels like too little, too late; we should’ve been here long ago, and there should be many, many more of us here right now.

In certain respects I’ve had a similar reaction when witnessing the physical and emotional intensity with which the students in this program are committed to getting an education – how hard they push themselves through physical exhaustion, and how they manage to cope with the constant noise, the steady interruptions, and what has to be the most unergonomic academic environment imaginable.  Among other things, college in prison means reading and writing for long hours on a bunk bed with little head space, almost always working without a desk or a chair – and for most people it means completing all assignments with a pencil.

This feeling of mine is intensified when I contrast what I see at San Quentin with my sometimes very bleak memories of my own performance as an undergraduate, or even with the very half-hearted (or let’s just say deeply ambivalent) relationship to school demonstrated by many undergraduate students in conventional college classrooms.  For me it’s the infuriating juxtaposition of someone on a diet with someone who is starving.  The larger issue here – the irrationality and injustice of unequal access to education – the fact that there is rarely a direct correlation between who wants or needs education the most, and who gets it – quickly engulfs anyone who spends much time in these classrooms.  

But it’s not just about the issue of access.  It’s also about what results intellectually when the material content and the standard practices of each academic field get held up in the prison classroom like an x-ray is held up against a light.  “Scholars” and “experts” suddenly see all sorts of gaps and fractures in their own disciplines that they’d never really noticed before, as they’re asked to explain things they’ve never in their lives heard someone question.  How do you know that?  Why do we have to do it that way?  (Perhaps some of the teachers in the audience here today will provide some examples of this during the discussion.)  Sometimes academic inexperience can be a person’s greatest source of intellectual strength and originality – most students at San Quentin haven’t been immersed in academia long enough to have memorized its many conventions or to have learned to accept them passively, on faith.  Plus no one in this environment trusts anyone without cause, so why should they trust us? 

But yet another way in which these students challenge the traditional academic world – and thereby make their teachers wiser – is through the very fact that many of them also occupy social or cultural positions which in the academy, and often even the professional world, are generally either entirely absent, or figure only as exoticized abstractions.  People talk and write everyday, for example, in the fields of sociology, psychology, public policy, political science, public health, and journalism, about “the drug dealer,” “the addict,” “the sex offender,” or “the gang member.”  But how many people to whom these terms refer are themselves actively participating in those discussions?  How many of them worked on writing the textbook for the class? 

What’s important here is not just the presence of individuals who can “speak from first hand experience,” but rather it’s the reminder that those individuals have voices – that there are actual human beings trapped behind those terms and categories.  My point is not to suggest that these students represent an alternative “authentic” voice for any of these categories – nobody can do that – no such thing exists.  My point is, rather, that those who are traditionally only spoken about, must also be allowed to speak and be heard.  This is not only an ethical issue; these individuals add vital insight and knowledge to the discussion itself; their presence and participation simply make everyone smarter.

Of course one of the most curious and clichéd attributes of the traditional academic world is how often its discussions take place far removed from their actual subject matter – you would sometimes think we were all astronomers.  But this problem of academia is actually to a large extent the problem of the world generally.  It’s not just that our isolation (or someone else’s exclusion) limits our actual understanding of that which we study; the much more pressing problem is that we rarely seem to really grasp how little we actually know.  (The more degrees you have, the worse this problem seems to get!)  Ignorance is perhaps by definition a void that always fills itself instantly with speculation, rumor, myth, and fantasy.  (Lack of knowledge is just lack of knowledge – that’s not really ignorance.)  And what makes things much worse is that we often become invested – culturally, psychologically, and politically, in our own ignorant notions about who other people are. 

Long before we ever realize it, we are learning to imagine people in prison as grotesque, subhuman caricatures – “Criminals,” “Prisoners,” “Ex-convicts,” “Parolees” – they’re the stuff of horror movies, nightmares, Halloween costumes, prime time television, and off-hand jokes.  One of the most powerful and potentially world-changing aspects of the program at San Quentin, is that it allows outsiders to actually meet, and get to know, human beings who are literally subject to these categories.  (When people ask me what I do for a living I sometimes tell them I run a study abroad program for clueless white people.)

Yet it is certainly not just the mere fact of coming face to face with people in prison that affects us so deeply – if it were, correctional officers, for example, would be having the same experience, which they frequently do not.  Rather, it’s the specific social and psychological context in which we meet (the classroom), as well as the dynamic that this framework creates between us, which allows us to get to know the fully human and often very vulnerable parts of our students – in other words, it allows us to see that which is now systematically eluding others, and that which has sometimes even eluded those individuals themselves. 

What’s interesting and often very hard to understand, particularly for many of us who have worked in this field for a while, is how widespread and intense the political opposition often is to programs like this one, which would seem to do nothing but good for everyone involved.  Prison college programs make prisons safer; they also help people grow intellectually and emotionally; prepare them for successful lives after prison; and dramatically reduce the likelihood of their re-offending and returning to prison after they are released.  This all of course prevents crime and saves the state a great deal of money.  It also saves lives.

I would suggest that the answer to the question of why so many people continue to oppose programs like this one, lies at least in part in the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of people in the U.S. right now who are not in prison, who would react with much the same intensity and gratitude to the opportunity to be in college as the students at San Quentin do.  Many of these people have often also lived economically or psychologically tenuous or even precarious lives; and they too have often been extremely ill-served by this country’s public schools.  Hundreds and thousands of people in this country – not just prisoners – live their entire lives isolated from the realms of information and opportunity into which higher education provides a key point of entry.

For a long time, I simply felt rage and disbelief when I encountered people who would oppose a project that was as overwhelmingly positive as this one.  These “Conservatives” as I imagined them, were simply irrational, stupid, and even sadistic.  But I’d like to tell you a story about an experience I had that dramatically altered this outlook. 

Several years ago, a correspondence college program was set up by a local community college at a prison in the town of Blythe, CA called Ironwood State Prison.  Shortly after this program was set up, the then-chapter president of the correctional officers’ union down there led a very visible campaign to shut down the program. Because the media coverage of the conflict made no distinction between the local chapter and the organization as a whole, I assumed it was the entire correctional officers union that was trying to eliminate that program.

Students and teachers at San Quentin who’d heard about the situation down there started asking me if I thought the union was going to come after us.  Since I’d already heard a lot about this notorious organization, which was supposedly the source of all the ills of the CA prison system, I had already developed a strong morbid curiosity about them.  But it was in large part this situation that actually led me to do what I’d only contemplated doing before: I contacted them directly.

To make a very long story short, I went up to West Sacramento with Nicole Lindahl (then program administrator) and met with the president and vice president of CCPOA, and we became friends.  A few months after that first meeting, they invited us to their annual convention in Las Vegas.  One of the most important experiences I had at that convention was a conversation with a man named Kelly Breshears, who was the infamous local chapter president at Ironwood. 

At a lunch break I found out who Kelly was and Nicole and I sat down on purpose at the same table with him.  (I never did find out if he thought this was a coincidence.)  I mostly wanted to hear from him directly what his reasoning was – and of course I suppose I wanted ultimately to persuade him to back off and leave that program alone.  We all introduced ourselves, and each explained what we did, and the group of us at that table ended up having a perfectly amicable – if initially slightly awkward – conversation about the whole situation.  Kelly explained the list of things about how the program was being administered that he considered unfair.  He also talked at length about the fact that the people running the program didn’t seem very concerned about quality; they seemed more interested in enrolling as many people as possible. 

(I could not and cannot judge the quality of that program since I have never visited it personally, but I should note that in retrospect this aspect of the conversation has struck me as fairly prophetic, since I have since seen distance learning programs set up inside the California prison system which are of a scandalously low quality.  But this is another topic...) 

In the end, the details of his grievances almost didn’t seem to matter.  Just as I have experienced in similar situations so many times since then, the conversation ultimately turned to the poverty of that area (around Blythe), and the poverty of the areas where so many California prisons are located.  Kelly and the others at the table talked about how the people there were struggling, how expensive health care had become in those rural areas, and how hard it was for a lot of people to afford even community college. 

In the end, most of their objections to the idea of college for prisoners seemed to come down to personal bitterness about their and their own families' various forms of deprivation.  [This is extremely similar to how the contemptuous comments you often hear from some C/O’s and others about prisoners getting “free medical care” so often turn out to be a kind of cynical, defensive overlay to their own anxiety and grief about their own tenuous access to healthcare.]  But of course to hear this kind of thing – to hear what I’m calling the underlying issues at stake in this kind of hostile attitude, you have to have (or take) the time to have a substantive and respectful conversation with a person by whom you may be feeling quite antagonized, provoked, or even threatened.

In that conversation in Las Vegas – and in many others since then – I found that the best I could do – the thing that seemed most appropriate and helpful and truly productive in the moment – was simply to listen to and validate their frustration, and sympathize with these larger grievances, which I found entirely legitimate.  Almost as an aside I did try to gently separate out the issue of programs for prisoners on the one hand and the issues of societal dysfunction that they were grappling with on the other, and they did seem willing to concede the logic of what I was saying. (That these programs do do good.)

But the more I felt that I understood where they were coming from – that is, the more I understood what the actual source of their rage and resentment was – the less compelled I felt to try to persuade them of anything at all.  Suddenly, my stock arguments: the issues of recidivism reduction, improved institutional safety, savings to the taxpayer, crime prevention, improved public safety – all these seemed almost beside the point.  I finally understood that the rational arguments either for or against higher education for people in prison were not at all what this conversation was – or is – really about.  Or at least not for many of its opponents. 

I think this was a critical learning moment for me among other reasons because it made me realize so fully that the most useful thing we can sometimes do to resolve what seems like an absolutely intractable conflict, is simply to listen – to listen, and to quietly bear witness to what the very angry person in front of us is going through.  I use this skill every day at San Quentin because I am surrounded there by people – prisoners, C/O’s and administrators – who are dealing with situations on a daily basis that are more than most people I know could handle, even for an hour.  These people are routinely flooded by feelings of anger and powerlessness, and some of them are sometimes rather quick to take those feelings out on others.  It’s as if they want others not just to know, but to feel what they’re feeling – they are literally acting out.  But their acting out presents – to them, and to others – as political belief.

So instead I sat there in that hotel dining room feeling more and more protective of these men, their feelings of overwhelming bitterness, and the almost desperate need they seemed to have for an outlet for those feelings.  In my mind, the utterly tragic irony is that the only outlet that they had apparently found was to make sure that the suffering of the prisoners at their institution was worse than their own.  And of course how sad and ironic too that so few people like these men would ever think to fight with this kind of vehemence for, say, universal access to quality, affordable medical care or to higher education.

And yet, one of the things that truly struck me that day was how polite those guys were to us – how willing – and even eager – they were to talk to us about their thoughts and experiences, and how uninterested they seemed to be in hating us, in spite of what we did for a living.  By the end of the conversation I think it was also pretty clear to all of us     that we were actually in agreement on a lot of key political issues – and that the main thing that distinguished us from them was the depth of our idealism.  In spite of what we might all have said about each other had we never met in person, the conflict was definitely not personal.  (I remember I kept thinking later, that guy is supposed to be my enemy?)

That whole experience ultimately made me wonder how many political battles, upon closer examination, would turn out to follow what I would characterize as a similar psychological structure.  It also struck – and continues to strike me – how rare it is that we have that sort of opportunity – to sit down and talk with the folks who behave as – or look from a distance – like our enemies.  It made me wonder what would happen if meetings like this took place on a regular basis, and what sort of potential such meetings might hold.

I always meant to contact Kelly Breshears again, and I still have his name and phone number on a piece of Caesar’s Palace note paper hanging over my desk.  I suppose the real reason I revised this paper after I thought I had it done was because I heard last week that he had died of cancer at the age of 49.  I guess since I can’t tell him how much I learned from him, I’m telling all of you. 

But so what’s my larger point?  It may seem wildly idealistic and unrealistic to imagine getting all these “opponents and enemies” together to talk through their real grievances, to actually listen to each other, to locate the common ground between them, and to work collectively towards their common goals.  And yet I would argue that what we do right now in the political sphere – which is basically to wage war – is also definitely not working for us. 

What we do now is not only essentially the opposite of forging meaningful dialogue – but it is precisely what we do, with equally catastrophic results, in the realm of criminal justice.    In each case, we imagine those who threaten us (whether “the criminal,” or our political enemy) as if he or she were one large, abstract, irrational nightmare – a mass of evil that needs to be isolated, contained, dominated, and destroyed. 

I have seen and heard this pattern of thinking about politics for as long as I’ve been alive.  And yet in the past several years I have had the experience over and over again of getting to know people who belonged to groups which I had long since learned to fear and avoid, but whom I found rational and compassionate.  I have now had this experience with prisoners, correctional officers, prison administrators, Evangelical Christians, and even, most recently, with Republicans. 

None of this is to say that every member of each of these groups is someone with whom I might be able to work well – but remember: the same could be said of all the various social, cultural, and political groups with which I identify.  And beyond this, I would suggest that what keeps us apart is not so much the vast differences between us, as it is the social pressure that we inflict upon ourselves and each other not to get too close to the other, not to co-mingle, lest we become contaminated or even indistinguishable.

I often have a feeling while doing this kind of work – of reaching out to people, building bridges, and finding common ground – which is sort of like the one you have when you find a missing puzzle piece under the couch; or when you fix a pipe and then turn the water back on and it doesn’t drip; or when you take the drop cloths off of pieces of furniture after you’ve finished painting a room and push the furniture back to where it was.  It’s not the sense that you’re creating something new or original as much as the sense that you are repairing something that’s broken – or restoring it back to its original condition.

I cannot express how strongly I have this feeling when it comes to facilitating dialogue between traditionally alienated groups.  I don’t fully understand what happened, but these lines of communication were not meant to be broken.  But this is not just about a feeling of something being “right,” or even about a feeling of satisfaction.  Rather, the message I hope to convey is, again, that we will not solve either our criminal justice crisis or the overwhelmingly complex and urgent societal problems that lie at the heart of that crisis, unless we start to defy the barriers which are constantly being built up between us largely in the name of own identities. 

The fact is that we can no longer afford to stay among ourselves, to stay within our social and political comfort zones, and to avoid what we might perceive to be the personal discomfort or even risks associated with crossing these sorts of lines.  We have got to broaden the scope of our search for political allies whom we trust and respect, and find ways both to be true to ourselves, and work together to locate that common political ground. 

Just to close, one more very short story: a couple of years ago, I got a call from a man who was the pastor of a church in a little town in California that I’d never heard of – I don’t even remember the name. He called because a couple in his congregation had a son at San Quentin who was in our program, and they were very worried about him.  He had written to them asking that they send money for reasons that didn’t sound plausible to them.  This pastor was calling me on their behalf to ask me for advice.  (How do you help a person in prison with drug debts?)

We talked about the situation for a long time, came up with some ideas, and at the end I thanked him for having contacted me.  He said something in response that has stuck in my mind for a long time.  He said, “It’s in Hebrews, Chapter 12: ‘Remember those in chains as if they were bound to you.’” 

I never would’ve thought I’d live to see the day that I – a non-believing Jewish girl from New York – would quote the Bible in a lecture, but I can find no better way either to express or to model what I am calling on all of us to do today. Step across those lines, and above all:  remember every person in prison as if they were bound to you. Thank you very much.