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Turning Lives Inside Out

Philadelphia City Paper, September 30-October 6, 2004

Temple professor Lori Pompa is a free woman, but she spends as much time in jail as she does outside. Why does she do it and why are others following?

In the sunny women's studies lounge on the eighth floor of Anderson Hall on Temple University's campus, Professor Lori Pompa is telling her students how to behave in jail. First, there are the rules on what visitors can and cannot wear. Nothing tight or revealing, and nothing light blue, since that's what the prisoners don. "Dress like a middle-aged woman," Pompa jokes. She's playing the clown to break the ice. As she talks, the 50-year-old professor with the funky spiked hair is pulling silver rings and bracelets out of a Ziploc bag and sliding the rings onto six of her fingers and fastening the slinky bracelets around both wrists. She's just come from jail, where you're not allowed to wear jewelry. No cell phones either, or wallets or food. Make sure you have a photo ID. No purses or bags — just a notebook and a pen. And no piercings.

Carry yourself in a professional manner, she tells them. It's inappropriate to ask your fellow classmates what they're in for — we're not there to probe into their personal lives, just to exchange ideas.

This prison-rules speech is old hat for Pompa. She's given it at least 20 times since 1997, when she started the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, a semester-long course held inside a Philadelphia County jail, where Temple undergrads meet with male and female prisoners to explore criminal justice issues together. In all, she's brought about 7,000 students along with her.

One of the undergrads grouses about having to remove her eyebrow piercing. "Can't I just put a Band-Aid over it?" she asks. The answer is no.

Pompa has invited a guest speaker. Diana, a recent Temple grad and Inside-Out alumna, walks into the lounge out of breath. She's rushing to make it to a relative's graduation ceremony, so she takes a seat next to Pompa and jumps right in.

"It wasn't like any other class," she tells the half-circle of students. In the car on the way home from class, she remembers, she and her fellow students were chatterboxes. The intense discussions they had started inside jail would continue until they returned to campus. "You'll feel that you want to help the people you meet inside. And you can, by becoming aware. For me, my career goals shifted. So did my community activity. And I felt a change in me. I started to look at and act differently toward people."

A week later, when the day arrives for the class's first trip behind bars, the student who was complaining about her piercing has replaced it with a plastic plug. She huddles with the rest of the class outside the ascribed meeting place at Broad and Diamond streets. Some of them are sleep-deprived from being too nervous and excited the night before. They exhale cigarette smoke into the cold January air. When all 15 students have arrived, Pompa ushers them into four cars for the 20-minute drive to the prison complex on State Road in Northeast Philadelphia, where they'll pass three other prisons before they get to Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center (PICC).

Inside the low brick building, they wait in line to be signed in. Each student hands over a photo ID, clips a visitor's badge to her shirt and gets her hand stamped. The mix of sophomores, juniors and seniors are all women, including the incarcerated students. During the fall semester, Pompa holds the class in the men's side of the prison. (As of this semester, PICC is all-men; the women have been transferred to the new women's jail, the Riverside Correctional Facility, also on State Road.)

The Temple students are mostly criminal justice majors, with a psychology and an English major thrown in. The jail's regular visitors stare at the college students who are holding notepads and pens and drinking up every detail — the brown-flecked linoleum floor, the green vinyl benches, the glassed-in booth where COs (corrections officers) are watching surveillance footage.

A black man with salt-and-pepper hair asks one of the women, "Are you here to study the prisoners?"

That's exactly what they're not here to do. There are many programs across the country where college students go to jails to teach and tutor incarcerated men and women, and others where college students go inside to do "fieldwork" to bolster their academic papers on sociology and policy. But few are like Inside-Out, where the students "inside" actually take the accredited criminal justice course with the students from the "outside."

After filing through a metal detector, patted down by a female guard and opening their notebooks to show that there's no contraband tucked inside, the group walks single-file past several heavy green steel doors. After someone presses a button next to each door, they look up at one of the dark globes protruding from the ceiling before the group is buzzed through. The hallways are white cement, and the floor is gray linoleum. There's the faint smell of cafeteria food. The group passes through one last door and the hallway opens onto a cavernous gymnasium with basketball nets, a scoreboard on one wall, and rows of folding chairs at the far end, where a group of women in prison-issue blues — the rest of the class — is waiting.

When Pompa was in college, she'd never stepped inside a prison. As a girl growing up in a comfortable, very Catholic household in Ardmore, she never really considered how people end up in jail. She majored in education and religious studies at Villanova University, taught religion in a Catholic school for a few years after college and, in her mid-20s, became associate director of La Salle University's Campus Ministry. She was working in an office building near 12th and Market streets when she saw some guys setting up a tent on the sidewalk.

"What are those guys doing?" she asked somebody.

"They're homeless," the stranger replied. "They're setting up a place to live."

"It's kind of astounding to me now," says Pompa, "that at age 25, I was totally unaware that there were people living on the street."

It was in 1985 that Pompa visited a prison for the first time. A friend asked if she wanted to volunteer to tutor at the now-defunct maximum-security Holmesburg Prison. Outside, Pompa remembers, it was a beautiful spring day. Inside, she was immediately hit with the stench of stale sweat and old sneakers, the sound of clanging bars and deafening announcements over the PA system, and the sight of hundreds of black and Hispanic men standing around with nothing to do.

After leaving the prison that day, she and her friend had an errand to run on the Main Line. Sitting in a garden in the beautiful suburbs where she grew up, waiting for her friend to finish up inside, she was struck with the thought that there's a deep connection between this reality and the one that she had just left behind. She couldn't put the connection into words, but she knew she wanted to begin to understand it.

After some years of volunteering in prison, Pompa became involved with the Pennsylvania Prison Society, going into jails as a social worker, then as the director of the Society's early-release program. She went back to school in 1991 to get her master's in social work from Rutgers University, and began teaching in Temple's criminal justice department two years later. By then, she'd been going into jails for nine years as a social worker and tutor; it seemed a natural extension of the syllabus for a class called Introduction to Corrections to take the students to prison. What better way to learn about corrections?

Pompa piled 15 students into a few cars, and they drove three hours to a state prison in Luzerne County, where they took a tour and met with a panel of five life-sentenced men to talk about prison and crime and society. Afterward, one of the lifers suggested to Pompa that the groups meet regularly. The idea stuck with and impressed Pompa, so she contacted the Philadelphia jails about a class in which incarcerated people and college students would exchange ideas as peers.

It doesn't look like there will ever be a shortage of students on the inside. The rising rate of the prison population in Philadelphia County is no different from the state and nationwide numbers — all are escalating fast.

In 1994-1995 there was an average of 4,649 men and women incarcerated in the Philadelphia Prison System, and the city spent $84 million housing them. In 2004, the city is planning to spend nearly $180 million to jail an average prison population of 7,832. In the last decade, the number of women in the city jail system has almost doubled, from 428 to 800, largely due to drug and alcohol problems. There's a body of research that shows that the more education and rehabilitation programs a prisoner goes through while incarcerated, the less likely it is that he or she will commit another crime.

But effective programs cost money. A new program in Pittsburgh for individuals who are mentally ill, addicted and homeless averages $3,000 per person, and it has reduced the reincarceration rate from 67 percent to 9.9 percent. Prison systems have to decide between funding programs like these or funding the construction of new jails to meet the demand. The 768-bed Riverside Correctional Facility, the new women's facility on State Road that opened this summer, cost $51 million.

The Philadelphia Prison System offers numerous programs — the OPTIONS therapeutic substance-abuse program is among them. There are opportunities to study for your GED, to learn English as a Second Language and to take parenting and faith-based programs. Earning college credit is a rarity, though, ever since Congress declared prisoners ineligible for Pell grants in 1994. National statistics show that an estimated 300 colleges participated in prison degree programs before 1994. Today, that number is around two dozen. Inside-Out is not one of them — though the students inside read all of the assignments, write the papers and get graded, they don't get college credit. Still, being able to hold their own in a college class with college undergrads can provide the confidence needed to propel some of the inside students to seek further education once they get out of jail.

In the last two years, two more Temple professors have formed their own Inside-Out classes. One focuses on drugs in society and meets with men at PICC; the other, which focuses on parenting from prison, goes to the women's facility.

This fall, the program will grow beyond Philadelphia.

In July, 20 professors traveled from as far away as Oregon and Colorado (and as close as West Philly and Chestnut Hill) to bunk in Temple dorms for a week and attend Inside-Out's inaugural National Training Institute. Those professors have started to sow the seeds of Inside-Out at their own universities, including John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, North Carolina State University, Portland State University, Widener University, St. John's University, the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania. In January, the next batch of professors will arrive in Philadelphia for a second installment of the training institute. Pompa put this national replication project together with the help of a Soros Justice Senior Fellowship awarded her in 2003 by the New York-based Open Society Institute's U.S. Justice Fund, a program of the private, grant-making Soros Foundations.

What started as a seed in 1985 and became a "what if?" in 1997 is spreading far and wide, and Pompa seems to be accomplishing the impossible — inspiring people on the inside to get out and pursue further education, and inspiring people on the outside to venture past prison walls.

On the first day of class inside the prison, the Temple students cross the gymnasium and greet their classmates, who have entered the gym from a door on the opposite side. There are smiles and hands extended and all of the forced familiarity of people trying to take the edge off of an awkward situation. The women inside are wearing thin cotton uniforms that are the same faded blue as well-worn hospital scrubs.

Pompa asks everyone to move the rows of folding chairs into two circles — an inner and an outer circle, with the chairs facing each other, for the class's introductory icebreaker exercise. The Temple students take the inside circle, and the PICC students the outside circle. They're so close, the PICC women's blue-cotton knees are almost touching the Temple students' mostly denim ones. Pompa tells the group she's going to give them an unfinished sentence to complete and talk about for a minute, and then they're going to hear a sound. At that point, the PICC students will rotate so they're facing a different Temple student.

"OK," she says. "Your first sentence is, "When I was young, I was …'"

"Rotten," smirks one of the PICC students, Monica, who has a teardrop tattoo high on one cheek and tattoos of an eight ball bomb with a lit fuse and "Lovely" in cursive on her arm. The sound of the women's voices and laughter bounce off of the gym's hard surfaces, and Pompa has to clang her finger cymbals twice to get their attention.

"The most frustrating thing is …" Pompa prompts.

"Being told to take it down," finishes one PICC student. Her partner doesn't know what that means, so she explains the terminology: It's when something happens to prompt the COs to secure the unit. The women have to stop whatever they're doing and go right to their cells. "It can happen any time," she says. Being told to take it down, the woman explains, can make a grown person — these women are in their 20s to 40s — feel like a child.

The PICC women have all come from the E Block or OPTIONS unit, the therapeutic unit for women with substance-abuse problems. "On regular units," Pompa tells the Temple students during their intro class, "people have very little to do all day." In OPTIONS, they have group therapy, individual substance-abuse counseling and are encouraged to study for their GED and to learn computer skills. There are about 100 women on the unit — the social workers decide which ones might get the most out of participating in Inside-Out. Even with these programs, some OPTIONS women return soon after they're released, mostly for drug-related nonviolent crimes like boosting, prostitution and dealing.

During the last 20 minutes, Pompa asks the group to think about and comment on a Dostoevsky quote: "The degree of civilization in a society can be measured by entering its prisons." The Temple students are largely silent, but the PICC women have lots to say.

"I wouldn't hurt anyone," says Tara, who had never been incarcerated before. "Sometimes you're just put in a situation where things happen. But when you come to prison, you become your crime. You're treated like your crime."

"Society needs to focus on what's behind the crime," says Natalie, a woman who's been arrested 34 times. "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for a drug addiction that needed to be satisfied."

"It's a myth that the system is full of throwaways," says Roxanne. "I've met wonderful, intelligent people in here. Misfortune is not limited to one type of person."

Leaving jail that day, one of the social workers from E Block walks out with Pompa and tells her about Angela, a woman who was in the 1999 class. The social worker has stayed in touch with Angela, who's been taking art education classes at the Community College of Philadelphia and has just transferred to Temple.

"She might e-mail you," the social worker says.

Pompa's doesn't get her hopes up, but sure enough, a couple days later, she gets an e-mail. "I had never thought about going to school before I met you," Angela wrote.

As of this month, Angela, 33, will have been out of PICC for five years. A few weeks after sending that first e-mail to Pompa, on an afternoon in March, the chatty brunette sits at a picnic table on Temple's Liacouras Walk between classes and tells her story.

It turns out she's fairly typical of the women who end up on E Block. The daughter of a mechanic and a secretary, she was a promising student in a middle-class Bucks County suburb until she started smoking pot and drinking at age 13. Things went south in high school when she got pregnant. When her parents told her to get an abortion or get out, she got out. A single mom and a waitress, Angela tried heroin at age 23. When she first experienced withdrawal, she didn't know what was wrong with her. She figured it was the flu.

By the time she was 28, she'd been through detox or rehab more than 20 times and in jail twice. She'd survived a number of heroin overdoses. She'd lost custody of her son. Her dad had driven up and down the streets of Kensington many a sleepless night, looking for his daughter. She remembers the fourth time she was picked up by the police — she was nearly hysterical in the back of the paddy wagon, thinking about how sick she was about to become. Another woman couldn't figure out why Angela was crying. "You can get clean inside," she told her. Angela realized she was right. This time, she was going to do things differently. She asked to be placed on E Block. The women there have a chance. Not all of them take advantage of it, but some do.

Shortly after starting on the OPTIONS unit, a social worker encouraged her to join the Temple class that came to the jail once a week. Angela read ahead in some of the books the class was reading. One of them, a book called Doing Life, had photo portraits and stories of Pennsylvania lifers.

"I realized that lifers in Pennsylvania really do life," she remembers, "not 25 years. I always thought they eventually got out."

She became determined to do everything she could to turn her life around, and that included Inside-Out. "At first it was really tense," she remembers. "There were debates between the inside and outside. We'd go back to our cells like, "What do they know?'" Eventually, though, the class came together. There was no exact moment. It just started happening. The two sides became one big group. Everyone talked the same amount — and when there were debates, they agreed to disagree. Maybe the women inside couldn't read or write as well, but they had different life experiences, and they could add a lot to the discussions.

That semester, the class's final project was to create the ideal correctional facility for women. Pompa knew the Philadelphia Prison System was getting ready to build a new women's facility to remedy the overcrowding at PICC. She figured, why not come up with a plan and present it to the administration? The class split into groups to focus on the facility's goals, programs, philosophy, policies and services. On the last day they realized they hadn't thought of the building itself: what would it look like? Angela didn't hesitate. She stood up and walked over to the easel holding the giant notepad that Pompa was using as a makeshift blackboard. She picked up the black marker.

"What are you doing?" asked one of the Temple students.

"I'm drawing it," Angela shrugged.

Pompa remembers being amazed at how much Angela's drawing looked like a professional artist's rendering. It looked like a college campus, with a central octagonal building and smaller buildings radiating out from the center. After a few minutes, the whole group started to compliment her work and egg her on. It doesn't resemble what the prison system ultimately built, but it served as an impetus for Angela.

"It got me thinking I could go back to school for art," she says. It jarred a long-off memory of being good at art when she was in grade school and junior high. "And I knew I could handle being in the classroom."

After Angela left PICC, she spent 18 months in a halfway house before enrolling at the Community College of Philadelphia. She earned an associate's degree in art and transferred to Temple, where she's now a junior majoring in art education. When she graduates in 2006, she wants to work with at-risk teens, because they're at the age she was when she began making the wrong choices. Most important, she's back in her son's life. She sees him on the weekends and goes to parents' night at his high school. Once or twice a year, she goes back to E Block to give a motivational talk about what it takes to get out and stay out.

"I believe everyone can change inside the walls," Angela says. "But I've seen plenty of women not change. When I go back to PICC to speak, I see a lot of the same faces."

Pompa has no illusions that Inside-Out is going to turn the tide of recidivism. She knows that Angela's case is probably rare since she hears about former PICC students who end up back on the streets. "I'm realistic enough to know that this program can't be all things to all people," she says, sitting in a conference room down the hall from her office. On the other hand, she didn't hear from Angela for five years. "It could be that there're lots of folks out there doing stuff who just haven't gotten in touch."

One of the collaborative university/prison projects that has spun off of Inside-Out is called Horizons, an eight-week workshop for people on the inside who want to build on the sense of accomplishment they acquired from taking part in Inside-Out. It'll get them thinking about a career path while providing the practical tools to start down that path once they're released. There will also be a support team on the outside.

As for the Temple students, Pompa hopes the class will start them thinking about crime, society and prison in new ways. She knows how easy it is to avoid having to think about issues that are outside your everyday existence. "I run into people all the time who took Inside-Out and they can't let go of it," Pompa says.

Some "outside" alumni are still involved in the program. Pompa drives an hour and a half to Graterford, the men's maximum-security prison in Montgomery County, every Wednesday evening to hold a more permanent version of Inside-Out. She and a group of former students, including Diana, the alum who came to talk to this group of Temple students during their first class, meet with a group of life-sentenced men in a forum that's much like the one at PICC. Even if students don't continue on at Graterford, the experience sticks.

Pompa's seen pre-law and law students dead set on becoming prosecutors decide halfway through the program to become public defenders. One would-be prosecutor ended up working as a research assistant in the juvenile justice system. Pompa's also seen the difference the class makes on students who are going into law enforcement — the 2.1 million people who are incarcerated in this country become human faces to them instead of numbers. "The experience really lights a fire inside people," Pompa says.

On the last Thursday in April, Pompa begins the closing ceremony for the PICC class, standing in front of a crescent of students and special guests: the deputy commissioner, the warden of PICC and social workers from the OPTIONS unit.

"I have a conflicted relationship with prisons," she tells them. "I hate being in prisons, but I can't not be in them. There's something that draws me here and that makes me draw others here, because I think that's how we're going to break down the walls between us and make these walls more permeable."

A Temple student gives a speech praising the experience of interacting with "real people" instead of textbook examples. "We saw commonalities among us," she says. "We saw changes in ourselves and in each other, including the need to go out and effect change."

After the pomp and circumstance, the class meets one last time. The PICC women made origami flower wristbands on ribbons for this closing ceremony, and they fidget with them while the class works its way around the circle. One by one, they share what they learned and what they'll take from the experience.

"At first I thought the class was really boring. I had prejudged all these Temple students. I was wrong."

"At home, I'm a prisoner to my computer, to my schoolwork. When I'm in here, I feel relaxed. I'm not bound by expectations to be a certain kind of person."

"I have courage to succeed now. I learned that being incarcerated, they can take everything from you, but they can't take your mind."

"I didn't know what I wanted to do at the beginning of the semester. I was thinking psychology, but this course has helped me figure out my career path. I'm going to go into juvenile rehabilitation."

"I've seen that we can think the way Temple students think. Seeing you guys come in here challenged our inner fears. But I've learned I can finish what I started, and maybe I can further myself when I get out. I'm grateful."

One of the PICC women struggles with what she wants to say. When it's her turn, she pauses longer than most. Finally, she leans forward in her chair.

"If you always do what you always done," she says simply. "You will always get what you always got."

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