The Beginning

The Planning Phase and Day One

Well hey there everybody! Kelly here. I have been given the task of writing the first blog post, so hopefully I'll kick it off right! 

Let's start from the beginning. Ellie and I met in Fall 2014 during our first semester of graduate school (see our About Us page for all of the details on us and our studies!). We are both research assistants for Dr. Carrie Pettus-Davis, a professor at the Brown School whose work focuses on adult incarcerated populations and reentry. Last semester we helped Carrie with an in-development decarceration initiative and contacted criminal justice stakeholders for their input. 

We also both interviewed and received and offer for an internship at the City Justice Center (CJC) Division of Corrections (DOC) in downtown St. Louis. When we started our internship, we had a general idea of what we would be doing. Ellie knew she would be working through a grant with the Fathers Support Center (check out our Resources and Collaborators page for links and descriptions) and I knew I would be working with certified juveniles (juveniles who are being tried as adults due to the nature of their crimes). 

We soon found out that the Fathers Support Center wanted to implement job readiness programming at the Medium Security Institution (MSI), one of two jails in St. Louis city, and this project was going to be Ellie's focus. Initially, Ellie came on to this project from a research stance, but it quickly changed to a facilitator role. Ellie asked me to help out because she had never facilitated and felt uncomfortable taking on the project by herself. At first I was just helping her develop the curriculum, but once I was in it, I wanted to take on more, so now we are facilitating together and attending weekly meetings with Carrie to discuss progress and debrief. 

For the past couple of months, we have been compiling materials, meeting with community stakeholders, and developing the curriculum. It's been a new experience for both of us to adapt a program and make it our own, and it's been complicated by communication issues. Because we work at CJC but the program will be at MSI, it's been incredibly frustrating to try and coordinate everything between two facilities. 

These frustrations have been ongoing from the beginning—from touring MSI to forming our mock group to figuring out who is involved with the project and whom to contact—and continued to our first day. We got there half an hour early for our first session and were unable to enter the facility because of a "situation in medical," were unable to make copies of our materials after being told previously that we would have access to a copy machine, and had two people unable to participate in our session due to disability and language barrier. 

Despite this rough start, we ended up having an awesome group. They were very respectful and displayed common sense and intelligence. We were especially impressed with their comments when we made "ground rules." Because neither Ellie nor I had ever experienced ground rules in a group setting before beginning graduate school, we assumed the group would have difficulty as well. But when we broached the topic, they knew exactly what ground rules were and came up with a comprehensive list on their own. We didn't even have to pull any rules from the examples we had written down in our notes because they said them all.

Day One's Agenda

What a great list!!

At the beginning of the session, the group members' body language didn't necessarily indicate that they wanted to learn, and several of them commented that they didn't want to be there, but their actions after class started showed that they were motivated. They followed their ground rules to a T. They didn't talk over each other, and they listened to their classmates. We got lots of great feedback about our facilitation style and our personalities, and we felt like they were comfortable with us because we are peers and still in school. I think the fact that we explained that we are volunteers and students gave them a level of respect for us.

We didn't have time to get through everything we had planned and ended up sending them home with more things than we wanted to, but now we have an idea of how to better manage our time. We also quickly discovered that although we thought we had planned ahead enough, we now know that we will have to have everything ready beforehand when working in this type of facility. It's unpredictable, and you never know when there will be a "situation" or a lockdown, or when, you know, access to a simple copy machine will be barred.

Bilingual Behind Bars

I made a separate heading for this story, even though it happened on day one, because it was just so cool. So as I mentioned before, there was a group member who struggled to participate because of a language barrier. When we asked him to share, he said, "I speak very little English." Ellie, without skipping a beat, began speaking to him and translating all of the instructions in Spanish. The looks on the group members' faces were absolutely priceless, and it's all they wanted to talk about after session ended. Ellie got major street cred for busting out her bilingual skills. 

Of course, we were not prepared to have to translate and we don't know if he'll be able to participate because we only have an hour for class, but it was just such a great moment to see Ellie step up and take an unexpected complication in stride.

Day Two 

Day Two's Agenda

I made copies Thursday morning so that Ellie and I were fully prepared to just walk in and start class on Friday. Except that none of the participants were there, which was a bit of an issue. Apparently the call out process is more complicated than we thought, and we started class late again because we had to wait for the guards to call each participant out of his bunk.

Because of scheduling conflicts at MSI, our Friday classes for the TEP mock group are held in the chapel as opposed to the classroom. It's a huge space, but it's also hotter than Australia in December and echoey and noisy so that we couldn't understand anyone when they were speaking. This also made it more distracting to the participants and made it difficult for them to hear their peers share. Ellie and I had to share a tiny podium and hang charts on a wall that was 15 feet behind us. Overall, the space was not conducive to learning at all, and we are going to do our best to schedule programming only in the classroom for future groups.

Participation was high again today though, despite location complications. The group members were raising their hands and shouting out answers as soon as we asked them to share. Because of this, we're going to focus more on interactive activities rather than lectures. We didn't have a lot of lecture to begin with, but it's clear that the group members prefer working in pairs or small groups, completing worksheets, and sharing with each other and with us. 

Ellie and I are also trying to have fun with the class and participate ourselves. We complete most of the activities and worksheets as well, and share our own answers as part of the process. For example, we asked the group to complete a networking worksheet today about their "inner circles," or people they know that could help them get jobs in the future. Ellie and I completed this worksheet as well, noting Carrie, Kimberly (our intern supervisor), and even a caseworker at MSI as people in our "circle." They also asked us about our experiences in conducting informational interviews as part of networking, and we were able to tell them first-hand how helpful they are. It seems like the group enjoys having real-world examples from people close to their age who are also experiencing uncertainty about jobs and our future. 

Perhaps Ellie and I's greatest strength in all of this is our age. Think about it: when a parent or other adult tells you about how they got their first job, it's easy to tune out and think that their experiences must be different because times have changed. But when you're talking to someone who is in your cohort, you can share experiences from things that happened within the past few weeks or months, not 25 years ago. Of course, that doesn't mean that those things that happened 25 years ago aren't still relevant today, but it's all about perception, especially when working with a vulnerable population like inmates. 

The way that Ellie and I treat the group members may also contribute to their willingness to participate. The manner in which we speak to them is vastly different than that of the guards. We treat them with the same respect we expect them to give us and their fellow group members, we don't talk down to them, and we make it clear that we will answer any questions or concerns they might have without chastising them. Of course, the guards have a very different job than we do, but it really makes me think about how your demeanor can make all the difference in encouraging people to speak out and behave well.

Just some food for thought to end this week. Until next time.

E & K