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Bonus Solo Episode: Teaching In Prisons With Taylor Rae Almonte-Roman
49 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, I discuss teaching in two correctional facilities over the last year and my focus on mass incarceration.
We Talk About…
- Why mass incarceration?
- Studying human rights with a concentration on mass incarceration
- The teaching environment inside of a prison
- Learning from my students
Resources:
- Follow @activismprogram
- Full episode transcription and citations: https://www.taylorraealmonte.com/on-the-outside-podcast
Keep In Touch:
- Visit taylorraealmonte.com
- Instagram @taylorraealmonte
- TikTok @itstaylorraealmonte
- YouTube /@TaylorRaeAlmonte
This episode is supported by the University Life Social Justice Mini-Grant Program. To learn more about the Social Justice Mini-Grant Program visit: https://universitylife.columbia.edu/social-justice-mini-grant-program.
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Transcript
Introduction & Purpose
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome back. It's me, your host, Taylor Rae, and this is another episode of On the Outside.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hello friend, welcome back.
Journey into Prison Teaching
00:00:23
Speaker
We have another solo episode coming at you today and I'm really excited to be talking about my work teaching inside of prisons. This is something that I started doing a little over a year ago
00:00:36
Speaker
and had this opportunity through being at grad school at Columbia, through a couple different departments at Columbia. We have the Center for Justice, so that's one way that I've taught inside, and another is a program called Just Ideas, which is in the philosophy department, and that's at another facility. I think it's so wild that I'm only a year into doing this work,
00:00:59
Speaker
And I just can't imagine where it will go. When I initially got to grad school and had to figure out what my concentration was going to be, my impetus just in and of itself to go to grad school was already around the work of mass incarceration and really taking a more critical look at the prison system, especially here in America.
Approach to Mass Incarceration Issues
00:01:22
Speaker
So it was pretty easy for me to know that was what I wanted to focus on.
00:01:26
Speaker
And I get asked all the time, like, why mass incarceration? And I think one of the most impactful frameworks that I learned within, you know, the study of human rights and human rights within human rights are so many theories and, you know, ways to go about implementing actually an enforcing and analyzing human rights across the world is this approach that really looks at
00:01:53
Speaker
our society from the bottom up. So that could be within an organization or it could be on a larger scale. And when I take a bottom up approach and really think about those that are the most marginalized, those are the most forgotten, and especially with my interests of the way that our society
00:02:11
Speaker
and racism and discrimination work together, it really led me to need to learn more about our prison system. And within my first semester, I took a class called Law and Policy, Mass Incarceration in the United States, and it was at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia.
00:02:29
Speaker
and as part of our final assignment we had to do a podcast lol and i kind of killed it with that one to be honest um i actually didn't even speak on the podcast i was like the producer doing all the behind the scenes and when we were doing that podcast
00:02:46
Speaker
We interviewed Professor Joy James, and she's not a professor at Columbia, but my advisor put me in contact with her. She's absolutely incredible scholar, philosopher, activist, and something that she said really stayed with me. And she was talking about
00:03:04
Speaker
any sort of social justice work or research that you do within academia you can't just be up in your ivory tower looking down on on other people saying oh i want to help you like look at these poor people let me help them instead you need to get down from there and you need to see them eye to eye and say okay what are we going to do and i thought how am i going to study
00:03:25
Speaker
and theorize and write my thesis on and research mass incarceration without going into a prison. It just didn't make sense to me. And while I've loved this program, I think some of the disconnect for me as more of a practitioner versus an academic. Sure, I'm in academia and I am participating in academic exercises, but at the end of the day, I want to learn so I can go and do something. And that's actually not
Role in Just Ideas Program
00:03:53
Speaker
what everyone
00:03:54
Speaker
wants to do a lot of people want to learn so that they can continue to theorize about it and write about it and research it and they're not necessarily going out to those communities and doing anything to better their circumstances and honestly i'm not going to get into you can probably tell but i'm not going to really get into if i think that's valid or not because it's not my place to
00:04:18
Speaker
Judge that I guess like I and we need we do need the research and the theories and all that stuff it just isn't necessarily how I see this work and so, you know, I really felt called to get in there and be like am I doing this for real and if I am that I need to be a part of Being with with people and talking to people and engaging with people that are within these communities and that was kind of my reason why I
00:04:47
Speaker
Fast forwarding a little bit, I had the opportunity to become an intern for a program called Just Ideas, which is in the philosophy department at Columbia. And within the first few months, I became the assistant director of the program. I'm still the assistant director now.
00:05:03
Speaker
which has been a really incredible opportunity. So I oversee all the other interns and I do our yearly workshop and I'm kind of the point person for all the logistics between our professors and our interns and the prison facility. So we teach those classes in a detention center.
Challenges in Prison Education
00:05:20
Speaker
And what's really interesting is that for folks that are in a detention center, they have pending cases, which means they are still waiting to find out where they're going to serve their full sentence.
00:05:33
Speaker
So what that means is that we might have a student one week and then by the following week they were sent to a prison across the country to serve their sentence. So we do mini courses which are four consecutive weeks and if you are still within the facility and able to continue you can do more mini courses and you can get credit for that and all kinds of stuff. So that was my first introduction. I have an amazing mentor who's
00:05:57
Speaker
the founder of Just Ideas named Professor Christia Mercer, and she really helped me to understand how to approach this work, how to really bring dignity and humanity and respect to what you're doing, how to give it a real effort, how to show the students that you're teaching that you are there for the work and for the educational aspects. And while, of course, there are so many things that they can share with us about
00:06:27
Speaker
their stories and why they're in there and what's going on for them and all that they're enduring. That's not what the class is about. The class is about the book we're reading, the exercises that we're doing. And I think having that approach and having that guidance so early on in my career and my work
00:06:44
Speaker
has just been huge. It's been so monumental and so impactful because now I know that I can create that environment just by focusing on the work, not by divulging my personal experiences, not by getting information about what's going on with the students, but really just bringing
00:07:03
Speaker
a seriousness and a dedication to the work which makes the students feel so valued and challenged and excited for class and that has been such an amazing lesson. This semester I also had the opportunity to teach a full semester course through the Center for Justice
00:07:23
Speaker
and that has been absolutely like amazing and also a bit of a different experience because with this population and this specific facility they are it's a prison so it's not a detention center and so folks are staying there for
00:07:40
Speaker
whatever amount of time that they have to serve their sentence and they know each other really well. So they have their own dynamics, they've been in classes together, and they also are all on relatively the same page around where their studies are at. So they're all going for
00:07:57
Speaker
a bachelor's or some people might be going for their master's but they've been in classes, they've been in college level courses before versus at the detention center we have folks that are from kind of all various levels and in our courses specifically you don't have to have any sort of diploma or degree to be a part of it. So it has been a really different experience working with an entire group that has taken a bunch of college courses before. It definitely has a little bit more
00:08:26
Speaker
Like, I don't know, they're all relatively serious in that we're definitely serious about the work, but it is different when people are trying to get a grade to get towards a degree because they want to have that when they're eventually, you know, out of prison. So I think the approach is just a little bit different. I'm only halfway through my first semester teaching a semester-long course, so I still got a lot to learn, and I don't think I necessarily really know.
Raising Awareness on Prison System Flaws
00:08:54
Speaker
But overall, I really have to say that this work, these relationships that have been built within class has been so impactful to me, has really made me
00:09:09
Speaker
more than ever before, see how damaging our prison system is, has lit a fire in my heart and really made me more than ever feel like this is what I'm meant to be doing. I know that
00:09:28
Speaker
So many Americans really don't know much about our prison system. I'm working on an episode now for you guys that has more of the history, more of the data, more of the info specifically on the American prison system because it's so interesting to me that so many Americans don't really even know how our prison system works.
00:09:48
Speaker
the different security levels, but also just the fact that folks that are in jail right now, they have not been sentenced. They have not been found guilty. They are just waiting there because they cannot afford bail. Yes, of course, some folks in jail are just serving short sentences. That's kind of the difference between a jail and a prison. A prison is for more long-term sentences. A jail is for either brief sentences, similar to a detention center,
00:10:18
Speaker
or a jail is for folks that simply cannot pay bail. So there are people sitting in correctional facilities right now who have not been found guilty of a single crime, but they cannot pay bail. Those make up a good portion, not the significant portion by any means, not the majority. And again, I'll bring you the statistics on that, but I've written about this so many times that, you know, you can trust me. I'm gonna give you the facts next week, I promise.
00:10:46
Speaker
But it doesn't make up the majority, but these are human beings and they're sitting in correctional facilities because they cannot pay for bail. Nevermind so many people that are mixed up in our criminal justice system without really receiving true justice. It's something that breaks my heart and it's something that I will continue to talk about and to learn about. And there's no better place to learn. There is never going to be a better place for me to learn.
Value of Learning from Incarcerated Individuals
00:11:16
Speaker
than straight from the experience of those who have been incarcerated before. And I'm so, so lucky to have made so many incredible friends outside of prisons who have been previously incarcerated and to have gotten to work with so many incredible students while inside of the correctional facilities. So that's just a little bit about my work and my experience. And you're definitely gonna get some more episodes about this in the future.
00:11:42
Speaker
I'm also so excited to share that I did receive a mini grant from Columbia University, so a few of my upcoming episodes will be brought to you from
Future Endeavors & Support
00:11:52
Speaker
them. This episode is supported by the University Life Social Justice mini grant program. To learn more about the Social Justice mini grant program, you can find the link to their website in the show notes. See you out there.