E-Mail by Jon Marc Taylor, MA Bio/Address
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A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear. Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale |
The story of Paula Cooper and the sixteen other women graduating from Martin University's extension program at the Indiana Women's Prison ("College diplomas symbolize new beginning for inmates") is an affirmation of the human spirit to soar beyond the confines of our past failings, social circumstances, and even despairing imprisonment.
The graduates should be applauded for their determination under arguably the most arduous educational conditions; nothing achieved in the milieu of incarceration is easy. The Department of Corrections should be acknowledged for it's continuing allowance of other institutions (i.e. colleges & universities) programming access to its highly restricted facilities; a practice not naturally amenable for any bureaucracy.
Today, approximately five-percent of the state's inmates are striving to better their circumstances through voluntary matriculation in higher education opportunities, greatly enhancing the likelihood of successful reintegration into society upon their parole. Sadly, this is one of the highest inmate-student ratios in the nation.
While repeatedly shown to be the most effective programs in reducing the likelihood of an ex-con returning to prison, post-secondary correctional education options are subject to a litany of unsupported and many times fallacious criticisms and are usually the first item cut. Regardless that such academic offerings are the best return on investment for the correctional buck spent. The best way to fight crime (and cheaper in the long-run, too) is to educate, rather than continually incarcerate.
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What disturbed me most in the story was law professor Henry Karlson's vaguely qualified accusation that Paula Cooper is incapable of rehabilitation—an equally ephemerally defined term. Conceding he is not a psychologist, Karlson proceeds to diagnose Cooper as suffering from "a dangerous antisocial personality disorder." Based, I guess, upon the devastating actions of a sixteen-year-old girl a decade and a half ago.
How many of us are the same person we were as a teenager, as we are now ten, twenty, thirty years hence? How different are we as college graduates compared to what we were like as sophomores in high school?
What Henry Karlson obviously dismisses out of hand is exactly what the story is all about: the ameliorative, soul-enriching affects of higher education. Coupled with the starkly maturing existence of decades spent behind bars as Paula already has served and Miss Cooper will endure further, the epistemologically influenced evolution manifests a new person wearing the same prison number upon her breast.
Paula's teacher, Professor Warren Lewis of Martin University, focuses on her transformative epiphany: the examination of her life through edifying scholastics. It is here, in the cognitive-moral development of the student's maturing mindset that the concrete-thinking, self-absorbed, adolescent personality metamorphoses into a more caring, more rational, and more importantly, a socially functional adult. And isn't that what we want in those we eventually release from prison?
Karlson dismissively quips that Paula is only "a completely self-serving person" and "she'll behave very well if it’s to her advantage." Philosophically paraphrasing Ayn Rand, I will return an equally qualified jibe in comparative volley: "As do most of us
."Jon Marc Taylor, AA, BS, MA, Ball State University-Indiana State Reformatory extension program.
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