Prison Education and the Reasonable Person Model
By Rebecca Ginsburg
Presented at the Environmental Design Review Association Annual Meeting
Chicago, IL
May 26, 2011
Thank you.
I’m going to share some thoughts about the usefulness of the Reasonable Person Model, or RPM,to our effortsto develop a theory of change for the University of Illinois’ prison education program. I’ll start by laying out my understanding of RPM. I’ve come to this model relatively recently, and with a background not in environmental psychology but architectural history, so my take on the model may be idiosyncratic. Then I’ll present some background on our prison education program, and from thereshare with you some surprising and wonderful outcomes that relate to one group of program participants. I’ll conclude by laying out some ideas for how we at the prison program cancontinue to think about how the Reasonable Person Model can help us understand what we’ve observed among the participants and guide future program design and administration.
A big question for us is the replicability of our program, In particular our ESL program, called Language Partners, which I’ll focus on in this paper. While it’s clear that the success of Language Partnershasrestedgreatly on the strength of the characters of those involved, wehopeto find that environmental factors have also contributed to that success, such that by reproducing those environmental conditions, Language Partners can be implemented successfully in other prisons.
The Reasonable Personal Model. I’ve replaced “reasonableness” with “one’s best self,” because I think the model promises more than reasonableness, and “bringing out the best in people” is a phrase that Stephen and Rachel Kaplan have used in relation to the model. The model holds that whenpeople’s basic informational needs are not met, they are likely to feel muddled, confused, and frustrated. Many people cannot attain even a minimal level of healthy functioning under such conditions. Fortunately, where informational needs are met, such that people can and doactively build mental models, engage in meaningful action with others, and achieve effectiveness through restorative practices and settings, we face the possibility not only for people to achieve basic levels of physical, personal, and social health, but to be their best. This is a heady claim. Mostof us do not inhabit our best selves on a regular basis. RPM prompts us to consider to what extent the informationaldimensions of the settings we engage withare responsible for that, and how we might alter those settings so that they bring out the best in the people who use them.
RPM does not provide a definition of what it means for person to be at her best. I take it to mean that her innate capacities for love, compassion, generosity, and courage are unencumbered, such that she can feel and act on these impulses in ways supportive of her own well-being and that of the larger world. A person at her best does not have to negotiate, for instance, the debilitating confusion of being lost, or the frustration of being unable to help where she sees help is needed, or the mental fatigue that renders her unable to think straight and make plans. Freed from such burdens, she is an engaged, empathetic, clear-headed member of her community. She receives in turn the satisfaction of such engagement and the community is better off for it. Given the cumulative impacts of multiple actors so engaged, it’s clear that this is a model that doesn’t stop at individual well-being but has in its sights the larger social good.
How can the insights of RPM be applied to design and administration of a prison education program? Any education program worth its salt will seek to create a climate in which students, administrators, and teachers alike feel respected and heard, are encouraged to explore and be intellectually adventurous, and are oriented towards the needs of one another. A prison education program needs especially to cultivate such an environment, in order to overcome the negative associations with school that many incarcerated people carry and the depersonalizing and stultifying forces of the prison environment itself. Prison education programs are often promoted on the basis of decades of research that finds strong correlation between educational attainment and lower recidivism. Our program is motivated less by concern for lowered crime thanfor social justice. We don’t reach out to incarcerated students in the hopes of making our neighborhoods safer, but because we believe thathigher education is libratory and humanizing to those who participate in it. Given our orientation, the attraction of RPM with its recognition ofhuman dignity, spirit of hopefulness, and emphasis on maximizing the larger social good is obvious.
The Education Justice Project, or EJP, has, since 2008, offered a range of academic programs at Danville Correctional Center, a men’s high medium security state prison about three hours southeast of here. Our programs include for-credit semester long upper-division courses, tutoring, a guest lecture series, not for credit reading groups, a sustainable garden project that Bill Sullivan discussed at yesterday’s session on RPM, extra-curricular writing, science, and math workshops, and an ESL program called Language Partners. About 100 incarcerated menparticipate in EJP programs, out of a population of about 1800, and 18 of those are involved in Language Partners.
Language Partners is the brainchild of an EJP student, Ramon Cabrales. In his written proposal, he noted that Spanish-speaking men incarcerated at the prison, many of them undocumented Mexicans,had had no access to ESL instruction for about 5 years, because of state budget cuts. This made them ineligible for most work assignments, which not only provide spending money but also a sense of productivity, and unable to participate in educational programs at the prison. Most—and he estimated there were between 200 and 300 of them—occupy a Spanish-speaking ghetto within the prison. Their lives at Danville are constrained and their prospects upon release are unpromising. Mr. Cabrales proposed that bilingual EJP students provide ESL instruction to these men. Language Partners was born.
I’m happy to talk about the efforts it took to get the program off the ground. For now, it’s important to note that it took over a year to get the program up and running and that the eight peer instructors, who were selected mostly on the recommendation of Mr. Cabrales, were very active in that process, as were U of I instructors from the Urbana-Champaign campus, shown hard at work here. A pilot Language Partners class began in January of this year.
Our expectation was that the ten English learners would gradually improve their reading, writing, and oral communication skills, such that they would able to place into the GED courses offered by the state at the prison. Their English has indeed improved and we are encouraged. In addition, there has been another, less anticipated outcome that I’m going to focus on. That concerns the peer instructors, or “teaching partners,” as we call them. Based on what they tell us and what we have observed, their participation in the program has produced significant changes in their behaviors and attitudes. I propose that we see these men becoming their best selves.
What makes me say this? Because they’re displaying those characteristics that, I earlier proposed, are thoseof a person operating at his or her best. The teaching partners are and see themselves as engaged, committed, generous community activists striving to improve the lives and life prospects of those less fortunate than they are—the Spanish-speaking inmates—and they have, as this group photo suggests, attitudes of calm and assured satisfaction about this. They way they talk about the program suggests that they consider Language Partners one of the most meaningful things they have ever done. Let me share some examples.
In addition to the six hours each week they spend in classthey alsospend timecorrecting student papers and designing classroom activities. In many cases the Teaching Partners forgo gym and other activities in order to throw themselves into this work. Mr. Cabrales described being in his cell at night preoccupied with upcoming classes and his desire to teach his students well. He told me, “I’m literally lying in bed thinking about how I can make the lesson better. And then it comes to me. ‘Yeah, they’re going to like that!’ It’s a very good feeling.”[1]
They actively promote literacy and education within the cell blocks. One of the teaching partners makes a point of studying in a public place in hiscell block. When men approach and ask what he’s doing, he speaks to them about the value of education and loans them books. When we starting taking applications for the program, the Teaching Partners energetically encouraged Latino men to apply, urging them to overcome their nervousness about learning a language and going back to school. Then two teaching partners went cell by cell through the hallof the cell block where they respectively lived, asking neighboring inmates to contribute notebooks to the program. The University doesn’t provide writing materials and they knew that some of the learners wouldn’t have resources to buy their own from the prison commissary. “I expected [donations] from other Mexicans, but I [also] got [them] from white guys, black guys.” They felt empowered about the response of their collection efforts. After the final selection of 10 men was made, several of the Teaching Partners began working with those who were not admitted, on their own time.
Since classes have begun, they’ve developed the practice of encouraging the English learners by distributing small rewards like pens in recognition of work especially well done. They purchase these prizes with their personal funds from the prison commissary, which charges inflated prices. Giving prizes was their idea. When I offered to purchase suitable prizes on the outside and bring them to prison for them to distribute as they wish, they politely declined. They explained that the prizes had more value to the students because the students knew that they, the teaching partners, were providing them. The learners interpreted the financial sacrifice as evidence of their teachers’ confidence in them, and the peer instructors were desirous of their receiving that message.
I suspect that most if not all of the Teaching Partners would say that participating in this program is one of the most fulfilling things they have ever done, as Erik Nava does. He’s getting out in two years, and explains, “it’s cool that I’m going home. OK, great… but at the same time…. Two years is not enough time to learn everything…. I’m going to miss prison because of this [program]. I’m going to miss prison when I go home. People depending on me.”
Erik was, like most of the teaching partners, an exceptionally thoughtful and mature man when he became involved in the program. What I think is that Language Partners has made it possible for him and others like him to realize their potential. The program is responsive to the needs of information-hungry actors who seek to navigate their world with confidence and to engage their world such that they feel they are having an important impact within it. Involvement in Language Partners allows them to experience expertise, competence, exploration (as novice teachers encouraged to learn and experiment), and meaningfulness. Perhaps this is all the more pronounced by virtue of the contrast between Language Partners and the larger prison setting, which does not encourage information seeking and discourages group action.
It’s helpful to compare the experiences of our peer instructors with their common pre-incarceration experiences. Most were involved in Chicago gangs and achieved considerable competence, respect, and sense of connection to othersthrough those involvements. But, as Erik put it, “[I] had a sense of community through gangs before, but not like this.” When pushed, he explained that much of the fellowship he felt from the gang was a drug-induced camaraderie, and that in a crisis he never had sure that his fellow gang bangers hads his back. Many EJP students, not just Language Partners, report that in their prior lives they lived in a world of narrow cognitive maps. They don’t use that term, of course, but they describe themselves as having limited perspectives, circumscribed views, and a very fragmentedorientation to the world. Peer esteem and social power in the absence of rich and illuminating mental maps—whether of the city beyond the neighborhood or of social, historical, psychological contexts—seem not to have produced a genuine, true sense of well-being and fulfillment. At least, nothing like being a prison teacher does.
Until I started to read about the Reasonable Person Model, I didn’t have a satisfactory framework for understanding what we’ve seen with Language Partners. In conclusion, I want to share a few ideas for learning more about the mechanisms by which Language Partners is producing such exceptional results. We recently received a grant to conduct program evaluation. I’m interested in exploring how RPM helps us understand what we have witnessed at the prison and how it might direct future efforts by looking closely at competence, clear-headedness, exploration and other RPM values through those internationally-recognized instruments that measure such traits, which Bill Sullivan referred to yesterday.
Second, in 2012 we expect to open up applications for new peer instructors and this time will expand to more non-Latino men. I hope will allow us to explore whether success rests on these particular men or if we can reproduce it.
Finally, there is a possibility of starting a program at a women’s prison. In that case, it will probably not even be an ESL program, but another form of peer instruction. By also structuring the program to allow peer instructor innovation and experimentation, dialogue between incarcerated and free instructors, the ability for peer instructors to contribute to the shaping of the program and other features that mark Language Partners, we can test out these ideas more fully. These would be nothing like controlled scientific experiments, of course but, in the spirit of RPM, opportunities to test assumptions, fiddle with conditions, and develop our working models of what a libratory prison education program can look like.
Ginsburg EDRA 2012 Page 1 of 7
[1]All interviews by Rebecca Ginsburg at DCC on Monday May 23, 6- 8pm.