CalMagSpr05 ind.indd - CSUSB Magazine - California State ...

By Joe Gutierrez
Photography by Robert Whitehead
Imagine walking into a classroom where the teacher has a captive
audience — literally. A classroom filled with students who could be
functionally illiterate, have lower than normal IQs or are highly intelligent
and, for whatever reason, never got a chance at education. You’re
in a makeshift classroom — maybe a shower or a cramped room in
the worst part of the building, where toilet piping runs through. The
students are considered by many to be the dregs of society. They are
inmates, prisoners and juvenile offenders. This is the world of Carolyn
Eggleston and Thom Gehring, who have spent the better part of their
professional lives working in correctional education.
Working as a team since 1975, when they met at a correctional education
conference, and married in 1987, Eggleston and Gehring belong to
a small group of educators around the country and the world dedicated
to advancing and improving correctional education and helping people
that most of society would like to forget. But the number of those incarcerated
may be too large a figure to ignore.
At any given time, more than 2.1 million people are behind bars in
correctional institutions around the country. Every year the law jails
between 10 and 12 million people and releases about the same number,
according to a study by Gail Spangenberg, president of the Council for
Advancement of Adult Literacy. Many of these people have been caught
up in something similar to a revolving door, being rearrested and reincarcerated.
It’s a world where education is desperately needed and can help turn
a person’s life around, said Gehring, who has been teaching, advising or
consulting at correctional facilities since 1972. “These are people who
education gave up on, or [who] gave up on education,” he said. “This
is the last frontier in education. We do change lives, though — sadly
— not everybody’s.”
It’s not a quixotic branch of education. The council’s study also
showed that inmates in correctional education programs have substantially
lower rates of rearrest after being released than those who leave
prison without participating. But it’s an area that is regulated state by
state, leaving each state to create or copy its own correctional education
programs.
Eggleston, who is president of the International Correctional
Education Association, and Gehring co-direct Cal State San Bernardino’s
Center for the Study of Correctional Education, which was created in
1991. The center helps veteran and prospective teachers who work in
local, state, federal and private correctional facilities by providing training,
historical perspectives, and teaching methods and showing them how
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CSUSB Spring/Summer 2005
to deal with prisoners in the classroom. And though the two professors
teach in the predictable and safe spaces of a university campus, they still
know what it’s like to teach at a prison or juvenile detention center.
It can be an absurd, even bizarre setting that a typical teacher would
never see in their classroom. They remember starting a class with few
if any teaching materials or making do with makeshift classrooms. In
Eggleston’s case, she once held classes in a shower room. “You teach
where you can.”
Despite the work of educational groups and associations, teaching
conditions are still abysmal at many institutions around the country as
education and rehabilitation continue to be low priorities, Eggleston said.
Too often teachers working in these prisons, jails or juvenile facilities are
credentialed, but have no training in correctional education. “They don’t
know that there are programs and organizations that can help, that there
are peers and mentors going through or who have gone through what
they are doing,” she said.
But learning how to teach in correctional facilities isn’t the lone
major issue educators face right now. “America still has not decided if
the prisons are the punishment for the people we send there or if they