After consulting with the school’s information technology department, Rockhurst revamped its courses for the incarcerated students Curran calls “companions.” Using eye-ball cameras, Zoom and a big-screen television, he taught them about the interaction of human beings with their environment.
Eighteen students, 6 feet apart and masked, watched him on the screen placed in a large room in the prison, a two-hour trip from the university. In the past, faculty usually drove to the prison to teach in person.
“Until we could come together, physically, what are the ways to remind us of the need for that solidarity. What are the ways to link us?” he asked. “And that’s how I used technology to do that. So it’s a kind of a bridge to where we need to return.”
Curran said he hopes the “breakthrough” in keeping the course going can lead to a hybrid approach to learning with classes in person and via Zoom for students at Chillicothe and Rockhurst. So far, the inmates — along with a separate group of correctional officers — have completed 31 college credits toward an associate’s degree.
Kimberly Herring, deputy warden of operations at the prison in northern Missouri, said the program generally helps build self-worth but was especially beneficial for the offenders amid the isolation that accompanied COVID-19.
“The Rockhurst program allowed them to feel a connection to some sense of reality and ‘normal’ and allowed them to continue working toward their goal of improving their lives,” Herring said in a statement.
In a handwritten note to Religion News Service, student Vermonn Roberts spoke of the lessons she was still able to learn through the course, which focused on the relationships between humans, other organisms and the environment.
“Human geography helps to diminish the danger of ignorance by forcing us to look beyond ourselves,” she wrote. “To look through a wider scope and try to appreciate the differences of others through conversation.”
Curran hopes to extend the program, which is newer than courses provided by St. Louis University and Georgetown University, so a network of Jesuit schools can provide education to prisoners.
Across the country, there are roughly 300 higher education programs in prisons, both religious and nonreligious, according to Lois Davis, a senior policy researcher at the nonprofit Rand Corp.
Each one has grappled this past year with whether to allow outside instructors into prison facilities to hold classes as states have taken action to slow the spread of COVID-19, Davis said in an email to RNS. Some facilities ceased or substantially cut back on programming. Some educational programs suspended classes until they can be held again in person, while others found ways to adapt, such as videoconferencing.
One study by Rand found that incarcerated people who participated in those kinds of educational programs had 43% lower odds of recidivating than those who did not.
Such programs have their root in religion: Clergyman William Rogers is credited with starting the U.S. correctional education movement when he taught inmates in a Philadelphia jail in 1789.
And they are something “all of higher education can embrace,” Council for Christian Colleges & Universities President Shirley V. Hoogstra said in a written statement marking April as Second Chance Month. She pointed to the positive effect such educational programs have on prisoners, their families and their communities, as well as Jesus’ words in Matthew 25: “I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
“An education recognizes the God-given dignity of all individuals. It provides a fresh start. And it provides the confidence to face a new future and look candidly at the past,” Hoogstra added.
Rick Sharkey, senior chaplain at the maximum security prison in Angola and director of the New Orleans seminary’s extension center on the prison grounds, said classes were canceled in March 2020 and started again in November, with the next semester beginning in January. Since the reopening, a masked professor has visited weekly, standing in an auditorium and teaching students — also wearing masks — in classes on subjects including church history, English composition and introduction to ministry.
The program, which dates to 1995 and has 368 graduates, currently includes 68 undergraduates and 45 graduate students.
Sharkey said that even when Angola inmates couldn’t be taught due to the pandemic, there were already trained ministers among them. More than 200 inmates — mostly taught through the seminary’s program — are leaders of dozens of churches among the prisoner population of about 5,100.
“The spiritual needs of the men were still being met by the inmate ministers that were all throughout the prison,” he said. “That’s exactly what the purpose of the school is all about: preparing men for ministry and strengthening the churches that are inside here.”
This article originally appeared here.
