By C1 Staff
LEXINGTON, Ky. — “Drugs and Crime, An Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program Course” is a first for the University of Kentucky College of Social Work (UK) and prison system.
It consists of 16 UK students and 16 minimum-security inmates from Blackburn Correctional Complex in Lexington, according to Kentucky.com.
The course pairs 16 undergraduates with 16 inmates to study as peers in a seminar behind prison walls. It operates in more than 300 prisons and college programs acros the country, says Carrie Oser, a second instructor and an associate professor in UK’s sociology department.
The Inside-Out Program was developed in 1997 at Temple University, founded on the premise that inmates and college students had a significant amount to learn from one another when studying together.
Every student was required to read more than 400 pages, write 10 reflection papers, create group presentations and write a 15- to 20-page final paper. Because of prison rules, many of the Blackburn inmates could not use computers or other technology.
On the first day of class, said Michele Staton-Tindall, “Everybody had a lot of the same questions, everybody had a lot of the same anxieties about the other group: ‘What are they going to be like? How is this going to go?’”
The goal of the course was to examine the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs through a sociological analysis and a social work framework for policy and treatment. Some inmates said they initially were concerned about the rigorous content because they had struggled to get high school equivalency diplomas.
It was a tough, high-level college course, inmate Willis Winston said, “but collectively we just put our heads together. We were able to do it.”
Watching the students evolve, Staton-Tindall said, “has been so rewarding.”