Prisoners in the Virtual Classroom

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Behind motion detectors and razor wire, within walls of concrete and steel, Randy Brown became an alumnus of Utah State University.

Nine years ago, Mr. Brown and an accomplice tried to rob a drug dealer, and ended up killing him. Although Mr. Brown has been in and out of prison over the past 20 years, he is convinced that this term will be his last. In 1996 he walked into Utah State Prison here with a high-school diploma and addictions to heroin and cocaine. Perhaps as soon as 2005, he will walk out with a bachelor's degree in accounting and, if employers are willing to overlook the felony convictions, a shot at a job with decent pay.

Mr. Brown attended his classes via television monitor, microphone, and satellite receiver as part of a distance-education program run by Utah State. His prison classroom was connected remotely to a traditional class at the university, so his classmates included not only fellow prisoners, but also straight-arrow undergraduates, ranchers, and homemakers. The state-supported program redefined Mr. Brown's self-image.

"I always thought there was an air of difference between me and the guys with the boats and the homes on the hill," he says, sitting in a room with caged windows and heavy doors. "I thought I just couldn't handle school, that I wasn't capable of it. But once I got involved, I found I could do it just as well as anyone."

In an era when politicians publicize their tough votes on crime issues, sending inmates like Mr. Brown to college with taxpayer money is rarely popular. Where education in prison is supported, or at least tolerated, some officials are finding that distance education is a cost-effective way of administering courses for inmates -- and, experts say, it may become a more popular medium for prison education in the future.

But educators willing to take on inmate students face more than an ordinary set of challenges. Prisoners typically are not allowed access to the Internet, the most common way of delivering distance courses. Instructors complain that they have to keep a close watch for cheating. And some are uncomfortable interacting with prisoners.

Pros for Cons

Advocates of prison distance education say the benefits are worth the relatively small cost. Studies show that education keeps prisoners out of trouble while they are behind bars, and that it reduces the chances that ex-convicts will get into trouble on the outside. Jeff Galli, a former warden in the Utah prison system, estimates that 80 percent of offenders routinely come back to prison. Among those who get a college education, he says, fewer than 20 percent return.

Mr. Brown says that education, along with churchgoing and drug treatment, will keep him straight. "This is probably the best thing available to people in here, and the most cost-effective form of rehabilitation," he says. "If you want to keep people out of prison, the best thing you can do is educate them."

Utah State's prison program has been in place since the mid-1980s. It was started by Vincent J. Lafferty, director of independent study and distance education, who has run it ever since. For him, the task of educating prisoners is part of the university's land-grant mission. The university has long run an extensive distance-education program, using satellite technology to reach remote areas of the state. Adding prisoners to existing courses cost relatively little.

Pell Grants supported the program until 1994, when Congress cut off college tuition for inmates. The university turned to Lorraine Pace, a Republican who represents the campus's district in the State House of Representatives, to find money to save the program. A former social worker, Ms. Pace became the program's leading advocate in the Legislature.

"The State of Utah thought this was a pretty cheap way to educate people and keep people from going back to prison," Mr. Lafferty says. "It costs about $25,000 a year to house an inmate. We get about $150,000 a year. In order to make money for the State of Utah, we only need to keep a half-dozen people out of jail."

The program offers about 85 courses, including English, business, and history. Inmates at any of five locations pay $100 a semester, which includes books, compared with the $300 to $500 per course that students on the outside pay in tuition and fees. The prison price is reduced because inmates make an average of only 40 cents an hour in prison jobs. They get no break on meeting the university's admissions standards, however.

A course that includes prisoners might look like any other at first. One afternoon on Utah State's main campus, in Logan, an instructor wearing a clip-on microphone stands at the front of a classroom, going over the highlights of a syllabus and lecturing to students and to a camera in the back of the room. The video and audio are streamed out to various satellite locations. The instructor can switch the video feed to a document camera to show a syllabus, or to a videocassette recorder to show a film. Students in the outlying classrooms can make themselves heard through a big black speaker sitting in a corner. Suddenly it crackles to life.

"Question from Gunnison," says a male inmate, identifying himself only by the town where a prison is located. He has a question about the syllabus.

Oasis of Learning

Initially, many mainstream students are not aware that they are studying with prisoners. Jennifer R. White, a senior majoring in psychology, says she did not know that inmates were in her international-politics course until a class discussion when someone made a comment about being incarcerated.

"It was as if you were talking to a normal student, which was weird," she says. "I thought they should have talked different from me -- not as intelligent. When you get them in that classroom setting, they don't sound a whole lot different." Although she was comfortable being in a distance-education class with prisoners, she says, she is not sure that the state should pay for their education.

The classroom area at the Draper prison, downstairs from the old death row, is a relatively quiet oasis of learning, away from the din of iron gates, the apathy of hardened criminals, and the scowls of the guards. Students in white jumpsuits sit at tables and watch instructors on television sets. An old microphone with a "talk" button, one of the prison's few direct connections to the outside world, sits on the front table.

Although computers are scattered about the room, none are connected to the Internet. Mr. Lafferty, the university's distance-education director, says Utah State once set up a secure connection to the Internet that allowed prison students the use of e-mail and a few course-related Web pages. But inmates quickly figured out how to use it to look at pornography and to contact family members, he says. Now prisoners can e-mail only under supervision; often they rely on postal mail and fax machines to turn in assignments. Classes with significant online components, like discussion groups, are not offered to the prisoners.

The prisoners must have clean records and some hope of parole to be enrolled in the program. They find various ways to maintain their newfound skills within the limits of prison.

Jeremy Hanks, who was convicted of assault, robbery, and other charges, is working on a degree in business administration. In the process, he says, he has learned a dozen computer languages -- his real interest -- and helps maintain the machines in the classrooms. He expects to be in prison for several more years, so he takes just one class per semester, stretching out his education and savoring the environment.

"The mentality up here is different," he says. "You hear debates about stoicism, whereas in other places you're hearing arguments about card games."

Mr. Brown, the accounting student, says he lives on a quiet cellblock these days. But he has lived in noisy areas where talkative prisoners would come by and interrupt his studies. Now that he has graduated, he works as a clerk for the prison's sign shop, buying supplies, finding customers for jobs, and keeping track of inventory.

"My education helps there, but it's not really accounting," he says. "For now, it's the best I can do."

Growing Practice

In the past few years, corrections departments in other states, including New Mexico, Texas, and Washington, have seen the effect that distance education can have on managing inmates and reducing recidivism.

Eastern New Mexico University at Roswell recently began offering bachelor's degrees to prisoners in the state through WebCT, software that delivers courses over the Web. Security components prevent the inmates from roaming around on the Internet. Prison officials once shut down the program for six weeks after an unrelated security lapse, when an inmate who was not a student got on the Internet in a staff member's office. During the shutdown the inmate students resorted to the U.S. Postal Service to communicate with professors.

A prison-education program in Washington, run by the state's community colleges, has had some false starts. Administrators first experimented with live-broadcast lectures that were not interactive, but the students soon lost interest. Administrators tried passing computer disks between students and instructors, but that was cumbersome.

Now the program is trying interactive video. Kathy Goebel, who oversees the colleges' corrections-education program, says that although classes that were once delivered through postal mail have moved online, the state's prisons have not found ways to give inmates access to online courses.

While the courses in Utah are offered as a reward to well-behaved prisoners, Washington offers its courses to prisoners who are judged most likely to land back in prison, says Ms. Goebel. The state has also avoided putting those inmates in classes, even at a distance, with mainstream students. "I think they are afraid of what might happen," she says.

In Utah, however, the presence of prisoners seems to enrich the classroom experience for traditional students. Jeannie Johnson, a former intelligence officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and a lecturer at Utah State, teaches general-education courses that focus on cultures and human nature. She says the inmates often come to class with the most perceptive comments -- contributions that jar the traditional students into thinking more deeply about the topics at hand.

"For instance, we were discussing Hobbes and talking about whether people are born with a violent nature," she says. "My murderer section spoke right up and explained that they had murdered people, and that they did indeed believe that people were born with a violent nature. The rest of the class was sitting there, shocked."

"One of the favorite parts of class is to hear comments from these folks," she says. "There is a good relationship there."

Guarding Against Cheating

But there are drawbacks, too. The prisoners devote an enormous amount of time to homework, but some simply aren't prepared for college courses. "You get quite brilliant people and people who are really struggling," Ms. Johnson says.

Some inmates make up for academic shortcomings with expertise in deception. She had to redesign her testing procedures after one ex-convict showed up in her classroom and told her that cheating was rampant. Although the tests were proctored, some inmates would sneak out an extra copy and pass it to inmates in another section of the class. The other section would later return the favor. Now she assigns essays and other projects instead of tests.

In her cultures course, Ms. Johnson normally requires students to rent and watch a foreign film or to interview a foreign citizen. That is impossible for the inmates, of course, and she describes the need to come up with other assignments for them as "a bit of a pain."

She says she has never felt threatened teaching inmates, even the few times when a student in prison has been released and joined her classroom in Logan. The ex-cons are polite, even timid, when they meet her. They sometimes cry in class when they hear the voices of friends, still locked up, crackling over the speaker.

But some situations have made her uncomfortable. Ms. Johnson has long blond hair that she usually wears pinned up. One day she wore it down. As she was writing something on the board before class, a man cooed from a prison site, "That golden hair is like a ray of sunshine in a cold, dark place." Ms. Johnson says she passed it off with a joke.

She tries not to think about what might have sent some of her students to prison, preferring to envision them as embezzlers and car thieves -- not rapists, murderers, or pedophiles. "Part of my successful relationship with them has been an attempt to be as ignorant as possible about their situation," she says. With that mind-set, "I can joke around with them like I would anyone else and not feel inhibited or jaded."

Teaching inmates unnerved Susan Talley, an assistant professor of human development at Utah State. As it happened, she didn't know that inmates were among her students until traditional students in her first course told her so.

It was when she started showing videos of children performing cognitive exercises, a standard part of her lesson plan, that the problem began, she says. After one class she got a letter from an inmate, lauding the video and thanking her for showing it. She forgets what the letter said exactly, but remembers that something about it gave her the creeps. She went on the state's sex-offender Web site and found that the inmate was in prison for sex crimes against children.

"If they understand enough about children, they become better predators," she says. "I met with the faculty in my department and told them that I am not comfortable teaching classes to predators." The department agreed and stopped offering human-development courses at prison sites.

Second Chances

Students at Utah State have their own ambivalence and doubts about prison education. Jed Grant, a speech-communications major, says the prisoners in his course on human nature tend to offer good comments. He hopes that the program will help those imprisoned for minor crimes or drug offenses.

But he cannot abide the state's paying for the education of people who have committed violent or sexual crimes. "They commit a serious crime and get a discount on going to school," he says. "I have a problem with that."

Mr. Lafferty, the distance-education director, says that on one occasion a prisoner ended up in the same class as a family member of one of his assault victims. Utah State dropped the inmate from the class in deference to the student, but Mr. Lafferty still tried to explain the merit of the program to her. "She was saying, We should have this person drawn and quartered instead of educating him," he says.

Leona M. Hale, an inmate in the women's section of the prison here, sometimes picks up a malicious vibe -- in a comment or a giggle over the speaker or the television -- from her young classmates on the campus in Logan. She lets it roll off.

Two years ago, Ms. Hale, a 36-year-old mother of two, was in her pajamas making vegetable spaghetti when her husband called and told her he was on the run after undercover cops caught him dealing drugs. He told her to gather the drugs and get rid of them, and she obeyed. The police, who were staking out the Hales' house, stopped her as she was pulling out of the driveway. Her car was loaded with plastic bags, electric scales, two handguns, cash, and a stash of methamphetamine.

Now she sits with two other women in a windowless, concrete room, doing her homework. The television screen in the corner shows manicured fingers writing out algebra equations.

She has gotten her high-school-equivalency degree, and now she is working on the general-education requirements for a college degree. She dreams of majoring in sociology after she gets out, maybe in a couple of years. "Coming here," she says, "has actually been a godsend."