Week 8: Clint Smith part 1

Week 8: College Reading and Writing: Suffolk County House of Corrections at South Bay

Clint Smith:  Annotating, Summarizing, Analyzing, Imitating

to annotate: to make notes on something to help you understand it better

to summarize: to put something in your own words

to analyze: to consider a question on the text, providing supporting examples from the text

to imitate: to create an original piece of writing based on something you have read

Exercise: Read and annotate

1. Read the excerpt out loud and underline any words you need to look up

2. Write any questions you have in the margins, the white space on the page

3. Put tricky parts into your own words in notes in the margins, the white space on the page

Clint Smith teaches in BU's Prison Education Program; this excerpt from his article "What Prisoners Serving Life Sentences Gain From Education" starts by talking about one of his classes. An "excerpt" is a chunk taken away from the whole; I edited this to make it shorter.

Darryl, serving his 43rd year in prison, wrote an essay. He described the despair of having the small moments—the ones that so often shape the contours of an individual’s relationships with loved ones—stripped away. "I am suffering in this place. Day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, walking up and down hallways; going from room to room in the same building, under surveillance 24 hours a day. The keepers start the kepts’ day off with the intercom announcement at five minutes to 7 a.m. 'Five minutes to count! Five minutes to count!' The kept stir to life from a night of visiting who knows what or where, perhaps a dream of being home with mother and siblings or wife and children, sitting at the table to eat a meal of turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, squash, and cranberry sauce."

To date, much of the research on prison education is centered on the correlation between prison education and recidivism—the tendency of an individual to reoffend. A 2013 meta-analysis by the RAND Corporation, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice, found that incarcerated people who participated in correctional education programs have 43 percent lower odds of recidivating than those who did not. Furthermore, those who participated in such programs were 13 percent more likely to land post-release employment than those who had not. That number would likely be higher if discrimination against the formerly incarcerated weren’t so profound. These data are compelling, but they disregard the fundamental role of prison education. Education is a human right—a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded. It isn’t merely something that attains its value through its presumed social utility—or, worse, something that society can take away from an individual who’s convicted of breaking the social contract.

That’s true even for the men I work with, nearly all of whom are serving life sentences, as are nearly 160,000 other people across the country for crimes ranging from first-degree murder to stealing a jacket. This reality—that those I taught would never leave the prison’s premises—recalibrated my understanding of the purpose of prison education programs. Do those serving life sentences deserve access to educational opportunities never having a future beyond bars? The answer is yes and necessitates that in-prison education serves additional goals beyond reducing recidivism.

Arthur Bembury, who is formerly incarcerated and now serves as the executive director of Partakers, an organization that provides mentorship to incarcerated men and women participating in the Boston University Prison Program, [believes] that those serving life sentences shouldn’t be left out of the conversation around carceral education. “A lot of people ask why do we accept lifers into our program, if they’re not getting out? Why are we putting our resources behind somebody that doesn’t have a rap date?” he said. “One is: It instills a culture of dignity. And two: Lifers are a force within the prison system where they mentor other people.”

Prison-education programs focused on art and literature, for example, keep prisons safer, as people are less likely to engage in violence when they have there is something meaningful and edifying to look forward to. Education, whether inside or outside of a prison, creates its value in ways that aren’t always simple to measure. Nor should they be. One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before. One does not read an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson because it statistically enhances her likelihood of staying out of the criminal-justice system; she does so because there is something to be gained from reading literature and exchanging ideas that tell her something about who she is in the world.

These men are not perfect. They are complicated. They have made mistakes. In other words, they are human. And it is precisely this humanity that demands a space where they can ask and question and create and grapple with all that makes the world what it is—a place where social and intellectual community might be restored in a way that reestablishes an individual’s agency. The agency a carceral institution inherently attempts to strip away.

Exercise: Summarize the excerpt

Write a paragraph summarizing the excerpt with quotations, in-text citation, and a Work Cited page

example summary, incorporating quotation and in-text citation:

Clint Smith's article "What Prisoners Serving Life Sentences Gain From Education" argues that everyone in "carceral institutions" should be granted access to educational opportunties, whether or not they are ever getting out (Smith, 2017).  In addition to "lower odds of recidivating," Smith points to the "culture of dignity" and "intellectual community" prison education can provide (Smith, 2017).

Work Cited Page

Smith, Clint. ""What Prisoners Serving Life Sentences Gain From Education" The Atlantic Monthly June 27, 2017.

Exercise: Analysis

Question for analysis: Do you agree with Smith?  Why or why not? Quote and cite the piece in your answer. 

Exercise: Imitation

Write a personal essay on the value of prison education.  How does your experience with reading and writing in jail influence your thinking?  Feel free to use your own words, quote a classmate, or quote and cite another text.