There But for the Grace of God....

All the young dudes

Bam!

“You need to go faster!”

Bam! He smashed into my bumper again.

“I’m going to kill that son of a bitch!”

I pulled my car to the side of the road, jumped out and screamed, “I’m going to kick your ass!”

Just then I saw the knife flash in my face as he backed me up against my car. Then I saw two more guys, both with knives, all of them bigger than us, and the one in front of me, ugly as ugly could be. He didn’t have much to lose.

I started talking quickly, “Can you please put the knife down, please put the knife away.” He started pushing me backward, I had nowhere to go, I was between my car and him and the knife. We were on an old backroad, nothing around, no one coming anytime soon.  I talked faster and faster, “Can you please put the knife away” over and over and over.

As noted, they were all bigger, the one looked like Grizzly Adams (I know, too old for most of you), he was huge. My friend Kevin started mouthing off, and I yelled, “Kevin, shut the hell up!”, just as Grizzly pushed him in the ditch.

I eventually talked the guy in front of me to put his knife away, he offered to fight me straight up, but I politely declined, I would have most likely gotten my ass kicked, and I was still shaken, envisioning that knife in my face.

They eventually got back into their car and drove away. Somehow, crisis averted.

That’s probably my most vivid “crisis” memory from my teenage years or early 20’s, I think the rest weren’t quite as intense, or my brain was under too much influence to remember some of the parts or even all of the parts. Lord knows, I wasn’t the best citizen back then. Somehow, miraculously, I survived without getting killed or arrested. But sadly, not all of us did.

I recently completed teaching a course at Marion Correctional Institution, I taught a class on “Personal Financial Planning” to eight of the inmates there. I taught this class as a part of a program through Marion Technical College, who provides a great number of courses for the inmates. While I thoroughly enjoyed the teaching and interacting with all the people involved, I don’t plan on returning at least in the near term.

There are several reasons for this, and I’ll raise them in the order that they came to me as I debated returning or not. The first:

The red tape to get access to the facility

First of all, I get it. We are talking about a medium-security prison, and all precautions are necessary to ensure the safety of everyone. The facility is about 40 minutes away from where I live, and over an hour from my main teaching location, Ohio Dominican University. So, it’s not a short commute for me to pop in for whatever is needed.

There was a great deal of red tape to go through to get access to the facility. It all started in the Fall, I had to go through a background check, training, get a badge to get into the prison, various processes and procedures to just be able to get in. I went through various starts and stops, I’d drive up, and for whatever reason, the person I needed to see wasn’t there, I had to turn around and go home. Even once I was supposed to start teaching in January, I didn’t have access on my own, I had to be escorted in and out. The whole process of getting to and into the facility was painful, I had to always plan extra time to account for whatever might go wrong.

The course setup

Marion Technical College sets up the course in their learning system, which typically leaves it to me to purely teach the course. OK, I’m making this sound easier than it is, but I taught a course in the Fall at MTC on campus, and it went quite well, the course was set up incredibly well. As I said, all I had to do was teach.

The issue in this case was that they were transitioning the Learning Management System from Canvas to Brightspace, and the transition wasn’t complete. This was the last time this course was being offered at the prison, and the course just wasn’t set up very well. I don’t blame anyone for this; it was just the circumstances led to a very difficult teaching experience for me. In this case I wasn’t purely teaching the course, I had to fix a great deal of issues each week

Plus, and I did know this up front, you’re not allowed to bring any paper or anything else into the facility. Apparently in the past, drugs could be smuggled in by spraying something on the paper for inmates to be able to inhale from the paper. This makes no sense to me, but that was the situation, and so I had to plan ahead, send files to the administrative personnel ahead of time and hope to have copies for my class each week, which was hit or miss.

It's not them, it’s me

As I made the decision not to return after the Spring semester, I blamed the red tape, I blamed the poor course setup, and as noted, in each case, I understood why it was the way it was, I just didn’t have the time or energy to deal with it while having a full-time teaching job already. It just wasn’t feasible, for once, I had to say no to something, which is a whole other story for me.

But then, reality slapped me in the face. I was at graduation at Ohio Dominican, and I was talking to Shawn Zerby, he’s the father of one of my students, Liz Zerby. He and I were discussing my time teaching at Marion Correctional Institution, and I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he asked me if it bothered me teaching at the prison. It finally dawned on me, yes it did, it did greatly, but maybe not the way he meant or the way many people would think.

As the semester went along, I got to know each of the students, at least to a certain extent. It was a bit of a menagerie of people, but the one thing they had in common was they had been institutionalized for many years. You’d get into situations where you were talking about things in modern-day life, and they really hadn’t experienced them, they had been in for so long. Driving, cell phones, shopping, normal day-to-day experiences we take for granted, they had no real clue about. I never knew what any of them did to be incarcerated, I didn’t want to know, and I really didn’t know for sure when any of them were getting out, or if they ever will be.

But I would get snippets along the way. I believe most or all of them had been in prison for 20 years or more. The one young man talked about turning 40, and having spent half of his life there. There were several stories like that, but the one that got me the most was what I heard on my last night. One gentleman talked about his senior year in high school, it was his last week, he was going to graduate high school with honors that Friday, but he never made it, he was arrested and had been in prison ever since. He had just passed his 26th year in prison. He always carried mala beads with him to stay calm, to “not lose his shit” as he would say.

There but for the grace of God, go I

You know, I know I don’t have the answers, and I guess none of do. I just struggle with this is the life someone gets for making whatever mistake it was when their brain wasn’t fully functioning yet. Making the wrong decision or choice at 18-20, and your freedom, your life is over. It was devastating for me to imagine that, and I felt so much sadness and empathy for those gentlemen, but again, I have absolutely no idea what they did to get into that situation. I just feel so lucky and blessed that I somehow didn’t make the same mistake. I did some really stupid things as a teenager, but I survived, I made it through.

A couple weeks ago, Laurel and I were in Gallery 22, a volunteer-run gift shop. They always have some form of eclectic art, and it’s a great experience to see what they have. It was a “perfect” signature moment for my prison experience. The one display is shown below, it’s an art project that shows various stories of women who are in prison, and what they miss the most about being incarcerated. As I read each of the stories, I started crying. The simple little things we take for granted in life, they missed the most, “having a dog”, “late night drives with the music blaring”, “being able to call home whenever I want”. Some of the same things I would miss, and am so thankful that I have.

Will I go back? I’m pretty confident I will. I believe people who do this really serve a greater purpose, and I applaud them for doing it day after day, semester after semester. I just didn’t have the time, or more importantly, the strength, to do it right now. I need to focus less on the sadness I experience for them, and more on what I can hopefully do to help them if and when they ever get out. I kind of feel like I owe it to them.