Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program Research Articles

“Nothing About Us Without Us”: Analyzing the Potential Contributions of Lived Experience to Penological Pedagogy

This paper explores the necessity and considerations of integrating Lived Experience Criminology (LEC) into penological pedagogy. It critically analyses the underutilized, yet transformative, potential of lived experience of the CJS to enrich academic curricula and further inform student understanding, particularly in Australia. Drawing on initiatives such as the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, Learning Together, and Walls to Bridges, the paper highlights how such programs operationalize LEC’s dimensions—particularly Persistent Experiential Narratives (PEN) and Common Experiential Narratives (CEN)—to build criminological knowledge. However, the need for cautious and ethical expansion of these programs is emphasized, considering potential objectification of people with lived experience of the CJS. The paper advocates for greater inclusion of lived experience perspectives in criminology curricula, underscoring the value they could bring to the preparation of future practitioners, the design of robust research, and the advancement of penological epistemology. Additionally, it stresses the importance of context, locality, and specialization within LEC, and the ethical considerations inherent to these pedagogical approaches. The paper concludes by calling for a stronger commitment from academia towards inclusion and empowerment of individuals with lived experience of the CJS, echoing the maxim “Nothing About Us Without Us” from the disability rights movement. The paper posits that significant strides in the CJS and academic discipline are achievable only through meaningful and sustained involvement of these individuals.

Reflecting on the Delivery of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Reflecting on the Delivery of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Jurastuderende bag tremmer

AbstractSince 2016, Søbysøgård Prison and the Department of Law at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) have partnered to offer the course »Crime, Punishment, and Crime Preventive Strategies.« The course is inspired by the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which was established in the USA in 1997 and has spread to several countriessince then. The teaching is conducted at Søbysøgård Prison’s closed wing with the participation of 12 law students from SDU (outside students) and 12 incarcerated men at Søbysøgård Prison (inside students).In 2022, a total of 150 students had completed the course. The article describes students’ experiences with the coursebased on an analysis of student motivation applications, evaluations of the course, and teacher reflections. The research finds that the course extends students’ knowledge of criminal justice matters. In addition, the program appears to support critical thinking among students and transform problematic frames of references, whichresults in transformative learning. The article also reflects on the programme’s potential risks and benefits.

Learning with the Others: Perspective-Taking and the Future of Criminal Justice in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Alumni of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program declare their experience in the course as “life-changing.” If this impact holds true for all who have completed an Inside-Out course, the program will have transformed over 60,000 lives. We examine attitudinal change among Inside-Out alumni on factors expected to be influenced as a result of the ‘dialogue across difference’ critical to the foundation of the program. Across four courses representing 86 students, nonincarcerated “Outside” students reported higher post-course scores in support of the humanity of people incarcerated as compared to pre-course scores. Incarcerated “Inside” students reported higher post-course scores in support of the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system as compared to pre-course scores. Our findings build on the limited empirical assessments in support of the numerous anecdotal accounts of the transformative power of a program that has been taught over 1,200 times across 48 U.S. states and 14 countries.

Performing Orwell in Progress

This piece was written, memorized, ripped-up, forgotten, improvised, and rewritten in collaboration with returning citizens, police officers, actors, faculty, students, and other chosen family in the Spring semester of 2021. The work was undertaken within an iteration of Roger Guenveur Smith’s Phi Beta Kappa course Performing History/Biography in Progress, co-facilitated by Susan Stein, that had been blended with a version of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program originally designed for police recruits and incarcerated citizens. Running in a pandemic, during the trial of the former police officer who murdered George Floyd and in the wake of the January 6th insurrection the course became a dialogic exchange in autoethnography where people separated by severe social boundaries could meet in the Zoom platform’s electronic box and overcome social distance.

An Analysis of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program: Outside Students’ Empathy, Social Connectedness, and Criminal Justice Activism

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program unites college students and incarcerated individuals for semester-long courses. The present study assessed the association between Inside-Out participation and perceptions of incarcerated populations, as well as criminal justice activism. Specifically, we compared Inside-Out participants to students who submitted a request to enroll in Inside-Out but ultimately did not participate, and students who neither participated nor requested enrollment, on: empathy, social closeness and similarity to incarcerated individuals, and criminal justice activism importance and confidence. Inside-Out students expressed greater affective, but not cognitive, empathy, and felt closer and more similar to the incarcerated, compared to their non-participating peers. Inside-Out students and those who requested enrollment did not differ in activism. Both groups scored higher than students who neither participated nor requested enrollment. Present findings demonstrate that empathy and social connectedness towards incarcerated populations are uniquely associated with Inside-Out Program participation, not simply an interest in its curriculum.

Spiritus Est qui Vivificat: Mass Incarceration, Social Justice and the Spiritan Mission

This article explores the connection between the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (Spiritans) and the Elsinore Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice (EBTT). The Spiritan’s historic involvement in the liberation, healing and restoration of enslaved men, women, and children in French colonies, as well as the establishment of local churches in Africa, inspires the human spirit to equitable relationships between peoples. Shifting from that global perspective, we consider their local efforts in founding Duquesne University as an institution of higher education for the children of immigrant steelworkers. Moving to the present, we note the genesis of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program at Duquesne, the formation of the EBTT at the State Correctional Institution in Pittsburgh. EBTT members are committed to collaborative community efforts as a way for people damaged by circumstance and systems of oppression to remake themselves, recognizing that remade people are needed to restore a broken society.

Transformative Praxis With Incarcerated Women: Collaboration, Leadership, and Voice

The ever-widening net of racialized and colonial carceral spaces and neoliberal strategies of control of poor and marginalized communities means that social workers are often in positions of complicity with or resistance to (or both) the norms and practices of the carceral state. Feminist praxis can both challenge and inadvertently sustain the prison industrial complex and its harms. Approaches that even tacitly accept some of the basic premises and discourses of correctional frameworks risk being co-opted and transmuted into racialized and colonial control practices. In this article, I use the example of Walls to Bridges Canada, a social justice iteration of the U.S.-based Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, to illustrate the power and significance of feminist praxis that privileges the epistemic vantage point of those who are incarcerated. This article will examine how collaborative work with criminalized and incarcerated women (in classrooms, research studies, and community work) moves beyond “giving voice,” to promoting leadership by those with lived experience and shared collaborative knowledge production.

Teaching Note—Taking Social Work Undergraduates Inside: The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

ABSTRACTThe Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program is an experiential learning program that involves teaching college courses inside correctional facilitates to classes that include incarcerated and nonincarcerated students. This teaching note describes the program and argues that its congruence with social work values makes it a valuable tool for preparing students to take on social justice work. The impact of the program’s pedagogy and structure on students’ and faculty’s capacity for critical thinking and self-reflection is described. Logistical issues to consider in developing programs are discussed.

Participatory Evaluation in a Prison Education Program: Meaning & Community Building within Inside-Out Think Tanks

ABSTRACTThis article presents the processes associated with a participatory evaluation of alumni groups—Think Tanks—affiliated with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. The participatory evaluation members included people incarcerated (Inside members) and an academic scholar (Outside member). Members were affiliated with Inside-Out and part of their respective Think Tanks. The participatory project yields insights related to having team members who are Inside and Outside people. In several ways, the participatory evaluation members experienced challenges to their working model throughout the project. Data come from nine focus groups convened in eight prisons moderated by the Outside member. The findings describe the personal meanings that Think Tank members attributed to being in the group. The analyses revealed that Think Tank participation represents a significant, positive experience to members. The themes identified to highlight the concepts of individual transformation, relationships, civic engagement, and solace. The perceptions of Think Tank experiences convey substantial individual growth as well as community building within and beyond the group into the general prison population and the outside world.

Stanton Heights: Intersections of Art and Science in an Era of Mass Incarceration

I have the tremendous privilege of working among a collection of artists, activists, incarcerated men, police officers, professors, students, and writers. Some of us straddle multiple categories, but we all come together as fictive kin and chosen family. Without realizing it, we have always been tied together; our connective thread stretches back to American slavery, if not further, and can most easily be observed in the ongoing calamity of mass incarceration. These links and overlaps provide a framework for bearing witness to white supremacy as it plays out through the US justice system.Finding a true starting point for these relationships is unlikely, so I began mapping the network within the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, or more specifically the local think tank that emerged from that larger program. However, this cartography quickly evolved into a story of people who are bound for powerful interactions with law enforcement, the legal system, corrections, one another, and themselves. Whether creating a strange and terrible saga or a series of smaller projects, our goal is always to share these experiences in a manner that capitalizes on the academic depth and breadth of our ranks while also conveying that this is not simply the work that we do but rather engagement with one of the most severe social problems this nation has produced. As such, it is an experience that makes it difficult for participants to remain complicit with malignant authority.This work continually changes us, and by telling our stories, I hope to push readers to consider the wider totality of lived experiences included within them. Moreover, our group is working to build solutions that address the human suffering we have observed. This article offers a perspective, comprising many different perspectives, that is the foundation for a program designed to address the disconnection between the public, the police, and men in prison.

Changing views and perceptions: the impact of the Australian Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program on students

ABSTRACTThe Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program has been delivered at 2 prisons in Victoria, Australia, Dame Phyllis Frost Centre and Marngoneet Correctional Centre, since 2015. Selected university (outside) students and prisoners (inside) engage in a collaborative learning environment, studying Comparative Criminal Justice Systems. Students critique complex criminal justice material and undertake university standard assessments. The programme was evaluated through pre-test and post-test surveys and focus groups. This paper outlines this evaluation, including the similarities and differences between inside and outside students’ experience, their knowledge of the criminal justice system, the stereotypes and the values, and challenges of the Inside-Out programme. Student views of the criminal justice system and each other were challenged and changed, often in unexpected ways. The knowledge from this evaluation will contribute to the improvement of Inside-Out processes and outcomes, nationally and internationally.

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program: Intersections between Feminism and Communication

This paper explores the intersections between feminism and communication in an Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course that is cross-listed with Social Justice and Women’s and Gender Studies. The paper focuses on the alignment of the Inside-Out curriculum with feminist pedagogical principles and explores, through the structure and content of the course, the ways in which these feminist principles interconnect with communication concepts.

Metamorphosis Inside and Out: Transformative Learning at Portland State University

In this article, the authors (a faculty member and two former students) describe the trajectory that Portland State University has taken over its history to institutionalize transformative learning opportunities within its comprehensive general education program, University Studies. Following a description of the institutional changes that resulted in the community-based, experientially focused courses at the heart of University Studies, the authors explore one particular community partnership involving both a state agency and the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, dedicated to offering transformative experiences in which incarcerated and non-incarcerated students learn together inside correctional facilities. Finally, each author shares a reflective essay about the personal transformation experienced through these Inside-Out courses and the implications of these changes on their lives.

Teaching Note—Reification and Recognition in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

ABSTRACTAt an Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course in a correctional facility, roughly half the students are from the university (outside students) and half are residents of the facility (inside students). I participated as a teaching assistant in an Inside-Out social work course on drugs and crime that was offered in a prison for men and interpreted the observed and reported experience of students using Lukács’ concepts of recognition and reification as discussed by Axel Honneth. This teaching note explores the implications of the Inside-Out course for outside students’ reification and recognition of people who are incarcerated, and by extension, members of groups that typically receive social work services. The pedagogical elements of Inside-Out courses that promote recognition and the limitations of the program are discussed.

Shankman, Steven Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (review)

REVIEWS 547 Shankman, Steven. Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2017. xiii + 169 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 (paperback). In 2004, Alain Toumayan wrote that Dostoevskii’s fiction ‘frames and heralds some of Levinas’s most creative, striking, and provocative formulas’ (Yale French Studies 104, p. 66). Yet given the obvious parallels between their lives and thought, comparisons with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas came relatively late to Dostoevskii studies. Levinas, who died in 1995, published his major treatises between 1960 and the mid-1980s. From 1941 to 1945, as a French POW, he was imprisoned in German labour camps; his experience echoes Dostoevskii’s five-year incarceration in a prison camp near Omsk in the 1850s. Despite renouncing theodicy in the aftermath of the Shoah, Levinas remained a practising Jew; Dostoevskii was a practising Orthodox Christian with a weakness for antisemitic propaganda. (In the book under review, Steven Shankman studies the troubling issue of Dostoevskii’s antisemitism with tact and insight.) Crucially, both thinkers maintained their faith in living ethically in a damaged world. Levinas often admitted his debt to Dostoevskii, attributing his interest in philosophy to his early love for Russian literature. He virtually fetishized (according to his French biographer) the famous line uttered by Father Zosima’s brother Markel in Brothers Karamazov: ‘Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than all the others.’ The notion that every individual is responsible (and therefore guilty) not just for their own acts, but also those of everyone else (all the Others), would become a central tenet of Levinas’s thought. While Steven Shankman is not the first scholar to read Dostoevskii through the lens of Levinas (he acknowledges the influence of Toumayan and Val Vinokur), his Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison is the first monograph to perform this exercise in the context of literature classes taught to Oregon State Penitentiary inmates and University of Oregon college students between 2007 and 2013. Instructing prisoners and college students together is a flagship project of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, in which Shankman participated. Happily, the slogan ‘Inside-Out’ matches Levinas’s expression of an important spiritual experience, the undermining of individual identity through being ‘turned inside-out’ (à l’envers) by exposure to someone else’s reality. In the first two chapters of this book, Shankman reconstructs Levinas’s complex and subtle ideas about moral responsibility, transcendence and illeity (approaching God through Others) from selected essays, interviews and key texts, as well as Shankman’s own readings of Jewish doctrine and rabbinical philosophy. As in his Inside-Out classes, Shankman then reads Dostoevskii’s letters and fiction and (in chapter five) Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate, for epiphanies and moral paradoxes that appear to anticipate Levinas’s teachings. He finds characters ‘turned inside-out’ in all Dostoevskii’s major SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 548 novels: Raskolnikov, by his love for Sonia; Prince Myshkin, by all human vulnerability; even Petr Stepanovich Verkhovenskii, by Stavrogin. Shankman argues that both Dostoevskii’s and Grossman’s characters act out the task proposed by Levinas of ‘thinking God on the basic of ethics’, that is, attempting to relate to the divine outside of conventional ontology. God, certainly for Levinas, and arguably for Dostoevskii, does not have being; rather, God is a way of doing. In the words of the camp inmate Ikonnikov, a character in Grossman’s Life and Fate, ‘There is neither God nor the Good, but there is goodness’. Levinas cited this line in conversation as essential to his own ‘thesis’; it is thoroughly and lucidly analysed in Turned Inside Out, with other ethical questions raised by Grossman’s novel (like Ikonnikov’s refusal to continue digging foundations for a building he knows will become a gas chamber for Jews, even at the cost of his own life; like Levinas, Ikonnikov accepts personal responsibility for the Other). Hence, by showing kindness to others, and attempting to act ethically, we can approach divine goodness even in a post-Karamazov, post-Shoah world where everything is, apparently, permitted. IfShankman’sstyleissomewhatteacherlyandponderous,thisiscompensated by the clarity and patience with...

Street Participatory Action Research in Prison: A Methodology to Challenge Privilege and Power in Correctional Facilities

This article presents a prison research model grounded in street participatory action research (Street PAR) methodology but programmatically facilitated in an Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program class. Street PAR’s nine tenets were adapted to a prison setting, and we demonstrate its promise with a brief case study of research projects at one prison location. This article also explores the challenges scholars and incarcerated persons as researchers may face in correctional facilities. Street PAR and Inside-Out can improve prison environments and successful transition to local communities as a function of equipping incarcerated persons with reading, writing, and analytic skill sets.

Prison as a Site for Experiential Learning in Social Work: Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Across the globe, the United States has the largest number of individuals incarcerated, and these individuals are disproportionately of minority status and economically disadvantaged. The extent of the issue makes it important to social work, but many social work programs lack opportunities for students to more fully appreciate the social justice implications of our criminal justice policies. The Inside-Out (IO) Prison Exchange Program provides students with a unique opportunity to learn alongside incarcerated people inside a prison. Through weekly class meetings, and group projects over the semester, inside and outside students learn about each other as well as the course content. In this article, we discuss what IO entails and our experiences developing an IO program in social work. The goal of this article is to illuminate the process of starting an IO program and demonstrate its transformative impact on students, inside and outside.

Building Bridges: Experiential and Integrative Learning in a Canadian Women’s Prison

ABSTRACTThis article reports on a study of student experiences of a Walls to Bridges (W2B) class taught by Faculty of Social Work instructors in a Canadian women’s prison. The Walls to Bridges (W2B) program is based on the U. S. Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and brings students from the university together with students from the prison to study for a semester long course in correctional settings. The article reports on how the program pedagogy of experiential learning and Talking Circle processes impacted student’s awareness of privilege, marginalization and stereotypes, commitment to social change and action.

Reflections from the outside in: Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program acting graduation

A new beginning. The first time this course was offered. First time acting for all … for one last time. Excitement, anticipation, and anxiety as the outside meets inside one last time. First one, a...