For three years, I conducted a project at Minnesota's maximum security
prison in Stillwater. Its purpose was to teach illiterate prisoners to
read. I wrote and donated all the software for this project, and one of my
sons, who is president of his own computer company, donated the
hardware.
How this project finally came to see the light of day is worth recounting.
As so often is the case, other - seemingly unrelated - things had to happen
first. Which they did, beginning in 1990.
One of my daughters, who is a Unitarian minister, had been serving as a
guardian ad litem in difficult foster care cases. For those who do not
know what a guardian ad litem is, it is a court appointed person whose job
it is to represent the best interests of the child rather than the views of
the contending parties.
Frequently, my daughter would express shock and anger at the cavalier way
in which the fate of children would be decided on the basis of arbitrary
administrative practices that had nothing to do with their welfare.
After hearing more than I could stand about these cases, I finally decided
I could no longer remain on the sidelines. For the first time in my life,
I became actively involved in politics at the state and local level, hoping
to help change things on behalf of these unfortunate youngsters.
One thing led to another, and I began speaking to various Senate and House
committees concerning needed legislative reforms on this issue. Then -
although I am a "lily white" Scandinavian - the Minnesota
Suburban NAACP asked me to become its Political Action Chair, and I started
writing articles for INTERRACE Magazine on topics such as the problems
confronting multi-racial foster children. And so on.
Now back to the Stillwater Prison Literacy Project. I wanted to get such a
program underway, using some interactive teaching techniques that I had
been mulling over for a long time. The question was, how might I obtain
the necessary approval so that things could begin to happen?
I decided to set up an appointment with the gentleman who served as
curriculum director for Minnesota's state prison system. Inasmuch as his
name suggested that he was a lefse and lutefisk-eating Scandinavian like
myself, I thought this would be an easy meeting to arrange. But no. His
office would not even return any of my several phone calls.
This is where my ongoing work in the field of foster child politics
unexpectedly paid off.
Another fellow and I were having a foster child meeting with the governor's
deputy chief of staff - a bright and vigorous African American woman who
had obviously shattered her own glass ceiling.
As our meeting was about to end, I mentioned that I was having trouble
getting my Stillwater literacy proposal listened to by the prison
curriculum director. The deputy chief of staff nodded, jotted something
down on a piece of paper, and we adjourned.
A few days later, my phone rang. It was the curriculum director. He was
all sweetness and light: "How can I help you, Mr. Esbensen?"
It took no more than twenty minutes of telephone conversation to arrange
the entire project.
I want to tell you something about this project. Its purpose, as I have
mentioned, is to teach illiterate prisoners to read.
Let me set the scene.
Minnesota's maximum security prison at Stillwater was built in 1914. It
has cell capacity for about thirteen hundred adult male felons. It is
estimated that sixty percent of the inmates are white, twenty-six percent
are black, six percent are American Indian, and seven percent are Hispanic
or other. At the time of admission to prison, approximately eighty percent
have histories of chemical abuse, and over fifty percent have been
convicted of crimes against persons.
The prison is home of The Prison Mirror, the nation's oldest continuously
operating inmate newspaper. First published in 1887 at the original
territorial prison, the newspaper's founders included Jesse James gang
members Bob and Cole Younger.
I was soon introduced to the Level One Reading Supervisor there - a
marvelous woman - tough-minded but motherly. The prisoners genuinely
seemed to admire her. She obviously cared about their academic welfare.
Some ground rules were quickly established.
Two of the inmates, Darrell and Dick, were assigned to be my assistants.
They were both convicted murderers. Dick had been on death row in another
state before being transferred to Stillwater.
Our students were to be the "hard core" cases - not in terms of
violence, but on the basis of their having failed to learn much with any of
the instructional materials in the prison's learning laboratory. This
included other computer programs.
When I showed the Reading One Supervisor my software and explained how it
would work, she merely said, "If it works with the students you're
going to get from me, you can count me as a believer."
And so the project started.
Both Darrell and Dick were conscientious monitors of our students. And as
the lessons began to function as designed, they became enthusiastic
commentators about what was taking place.
Darrell was particularly impressed by the progress of Rolando, a young
Hispanic inmate.
"I worked with Rolando for five months in another literacy
program," said Darrell. "We achieved nothing. I mean nothing.
We made zero progress. Everything was too hard for him. Now he is
beginning to learn. And this has made a great change in his attitude. Now
when his lesson time is up, he doesn't want to quit. He has become a
different person."
Dick had the same kind of success stories to tell about the students he was
seeing.
"These lessons," said Dick, "are really teaching them to
read. And you can tell, as they sit at the computer keyboard, how engaged
they are with what they are doing."
Darrell liked to talk about an especially dramatic example of progress for
one of his students. "This man," said Darrell, "had worked
for ten months in another part of the laboratory with other learning
materials, including other computer programs. He learned absolutely
nothing. He couldn't even master the vowel sounds. Then he began to work
with our lessons. In two weeks, he was able to do what he had not been
able to do in ten months with the other stuff."
I asked my two assistants whether they would agree with me that success in
learning is ultimately the prime motivator for serious students."
"Yes, indeed," said Darrell. "Let me tell you something.
Every Friday is Game Day in the learning laboratory. But my students often
come to me and ask to do more work with our program. They would rather do
this than play games. They know they are learning to read."
Because my assistants were proving to be such reliable and careful workers,
I decided one day to get their reaction to a different kind of proposal.
"You know," I said, "although I have written all of the
software that we are currently using, I am not really a
programmer."
They looked at me in astonishment.
"That's right," I said. "What happened is that one of my
sons, who is a programmer, created a special kind of software that enables
me to communicate with my computer in plain English. In effect, this
software teaches my computer to understand the commands that I give it in
ordinary English. My computer then writes the program that I have
requested. Pretty neat, eh?"
More astonished looks.
"Tell you what," I continued. "If you're interested, I'll
show you how to write those English commands the computer will understand.
Then you can develop some additional lessons that will be helpful to our
students. Are you with me?"
Darrell and Dick both nodded vigorously. So I taught them how to use CLAS,
the acronym for my son's Computerized Lesson Authoring System.
As things turned out, this was only the beginning. They soon felt so good
about the quality of their own CLAS-created lessons that they went to the
warden with an unusual proposal. If he would allow it, they would buy a
computer with their own money and use it to develop interactive
instructional software for other inmates. The warden not only endorsed
this idea but had the prison itself buy the computer. Then he took things
a step further. He assigned a separate prison cell for Darrell and Dick to
use as their special writing room for software development.
As you can imagine, I was elated by what was happening. I decided that
other correctional facilities around the country might be interested in
what was going on at Stillwater. Filled with optimism, I wrote personal
letters to the top two correctional officials in all the other forty-nine
states, plus some other places as well.
I received one reply - a brief letter from Washington D.C., and that from
an underling who had apparently been given the task of expressing interest
without meaning it. Despite a number of phone calls I made trying to talk
to the writer of that letter, I was never able to hold a conversation with
anyone except the receptionist.
I was left with the firm impression that regardless of the rhetoric
emphasizing the importance of literacy as one facet of the fight against
crime, most of this is just empty talk. To the extent that something is
being done, it seems to be mainly more of the old tried and untrue.
As for the Stillwater project, it is still continuing. That, at least, is
something.
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