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Tracy sits hunched forward, feet flat on the floor and tattoo-mapped arms resting on his lap. It’s a Wednesday morning in April, and he’s among 18 men and women sitting in a circle of chairs in the drab visitor’s room of Lebanon Correctional Institution. They’re under the watchful eye of a uniformed correctional officer, beneath a sign warning visitors against carrying weapons or entering without underwear.

“I’m from a mixed society, ya know what I’m sayin’?” says Tracy, an intense man with a shaved head and thin moustache. “And I got 33 years to life for aggravated murder. I’m white. I don’t believe that racism is as rampant as it used to be. You pull the trigger and shoot someone, you’re going to jail. This race thing is getting on my nerves.”

Jorge—a slim man with Latino-pop-star looks, isn’t buying it. “I killed one person and I got three life sentences, even though I admitted responsibility from the beginning,” says Jorge. “You killed three people. And you say there ain’t racism in the system?”

Tracy is rattled; his face and neck grow taut as he addresses Jorge. “You. Are. Not. Listening to me. I killed one person,” he says. “I’m sayin’ racism exists on all sides. It’s time to just move on.”

“Raise your hand if you think more black people are incarcerated in Ohio prisons,” says Christine Shimrock, a lay prison chaplain from Mason who is helping to lead the discussion. About five hands rise. “Raise your hand if you think more white people are incarcerated,” she says. Another five go up.

That’s right, Shimrock says. “It’s about even.” Does that square with perceptions, she wonders out loud.

The heated exchange between Tracy and Jorge doesn’t faze anyone. Some classmates take notes; others look around to see who’s going to speak next. A woman twirls a lock of blonde hair around her finger, while next to her a young man with a pencil tucked behind his ear chews a toothpick with vigor.

It’s week eight of the 14-week Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program with Xavier University and the Lebanon facility. Each week through the spring semester, students from the Jesuit university travel the meandering back roads to the prison 30 miles north of Cincinnati, tolerate pat downs and security checks, and sit beside an equal number of inmates to discuss volatile subjects like justice and race. All the participants—referred to as “inside” (incarcerated) or “outside” (Xavier) students—read the same textbooks, write papers, and take part in discussions. They sit in a circle—blue-shirted Lebanon inmates next to T-shirted college kids—and they bat around ideas in a confluence of opinion, experience, and emotion that ping-pongs from anger to incredulity to lighthearted banter, sometimes in the same minute.

Professor Jeff Monroe is leading a discussion about race and the justice system, a topic that, if Jorge and Tracy are any indication, elicits strong reactions. Which is one goal of the class: to initiate conversation about crime between those who are incarcerated and those who might one day deal with crime and its causes. It’s a criminal justice course, part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program: Exploring Issues of Crime and Justice Behind the Walls, started at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1997. Schools in 33 states are part of Inside-Out, and about 3,500 students, inside and out, have participated. This class is taught by Monroe, an assistant professor in criminal justice at XU, and Christine Shimrock, who got interested in the program as a grad student of Monroe’s three years ago. Shimrock spent a week in Philadelphia training under the program’s founder and director, Lori Pompa, and now works closely with Monroe to develop the syllabus and conduct classes, guiding conversations and encouraging students to share their experiences and opinions.

And the students do, with a mixture of candor and respect that’s surprising. The exchange between Tracy and Jorge is a philosophical one, even if it sounds rough around the edges. And when Dean—another one of the inside students—wonders aloud whether the class should spend so much time talking about such an intractable issue as racism, the rest of the group calmly considers his point of view. Even when he notes that, in order to eradicate racism, “We’d have to poke everyone’s eyes out.”

Lebanon Correctional is an incongruous concrete fortress surrounded by cornfields and country roads. About 2,600 men are incarcerated there, all serious offenders with long sentences, many for life. The men share cells and have daily jobs that range from farming the property to washing cars and making license plates.

Robert Welch, deputy warden of operations, was an early advocate of Inside-Out when Shimrock pitched it to the warden in 2005. Lebanon has programs for offenders that range from religious study to GED classes. But the waiting lists for these activities are years long; many offenders don’t get spots until their sentences are nearly over. A program that doesn’t cost the system money and offers a chance for offenders to glean information from productive members of society is a win-win in Welch’s book. “The more positive you can put in front of the guys, the more opportunity they can do good on the outside,” Welch says. “It lets them see what society thinks. It lets them see that they can have a place in society.”

Nearly 80 men wanted the 12 Inside-Out slots available to inmates this semester, so students were chosen through interviews with Monroe, Shimrock, and a prison official. Monroe and Shimrock want a mix of ideologies and opinions, students who are thoughtful and outspoken, liberal and conservative. The one thing they all must be, however, is respectful of others. Talking about the class one morning in April, Monroe pointed out that policies to curb or punish crime have a better chance at success if the person creating the plan understands the mindset of the offender. And some of his Xavier students will one day be policymakers, he predicted.

“We need to restore the relationship [offenders] have with society,” Monroe said, which will help them see there isn’t a conspiracy at work in their failure and that society will support them if they follow rules on the outside. “Likewise, we need to show students that these are people. That’s not because I want to be all touchy-feely. I want my students to be connected to the offender. If they are connected, they have a better chance of changing their behavior.” Monroe believes that it could be life-changing for a career criminal to see that he has something in common with a law-abiding student, and that the most important thing that sets them apart are the decisions they control. Likewise, exposure to the inside lets students see that—at the risk of sounding cliché—inmates are human, too.

WHEN YOUR "CAMPUS" holds 2,000-plus felons, getting to class is nothing like ambling into a university seminar room. Before and after class, inmates are strip-searched for contraband. That includes weapons and drugs, of course, but also things like written notes seeking a personal relationship with the Xavier students. That sort of contact is strictly prohibited by the program. Each student agrees in writing to be identified by first name only; inside students vouch that they will not attempt to learn more about or contact outside students, and vice versa. Breaching this agreement led to a few inside expulsions this semester. One student was permanently kicked out for being disrespectful; another was removed for passing a note to an outside student, telling her that he noticed her “aura.” She reported the transgression to Monroe, who passed it along to prison officials.

The chance of a problem is real. Before the semester began, outside students were trained for certain emergencies, such as a prison riot; they were each given passwords that they would use to communicate with correctional officers should an uprising occur. But as the students got to know each other in class, the idea of such a problem seemed remote. A few weeks after the race and justice session, I discussed these precautions with Matt—who, like all the students, can only be identified by his first name. We met in the Xavier campus center, where he was doing some final editing on marketing materials the group is preparing to promote the class to other universities.

Matt is pursuing an interdisciplinary major called “Philosophy, Politics and the Public.” A Colorado native, he’ll be a senior next year, and he’s racked up a list of experiences that seem to address the question “What will you do with your degree?” Last summer he interned on Capitol Hill; he spent his spring break volunteering at a halfway house in Chicago; and he’s on the board of a new club for Inside-Out alumni at Xavier. “Now, when I think of prison, I don’t think of The Shawshank Redemption or Law & Order,” he said. “I think of Dean and Tracy and Ben, the guys in the class.”

Matt calls himself an idealist, but says that the Inside-Out program has grounded his way of thinking. When he first talked with Monroe about the class, he was in the midst of writing a paper for another course about German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s theories on prison and retribution. “In the interview, I said something about how [crime is] society’s fault,” Matt recalled. “But I’ve come to understand that is very demeaning to these men to blame their actions on society. You can say that society’s policies led up to it, but I can’t say Dean is not capable of a rational decision. He takes responsibility for his actions.”

Monroe remembers that interview with Matt, too. “Matt starts talking about contractarian ideology. He thought it was goofy; I think it is central. I thought, I want you, Matt, to be in this class because you’ll have to figure out, ‘Did he do it because he wanted to, or did he do it because it’s society’s fault?’ You can’t have it both ways.”

THE QUESTION IS relevant in today’s discussion of the role that race plays in the justice system. Joe, an outside student with short dark hair who plans to take his law school admission test in the fall, thinks society’s policies lead to poverty, which contributes to crime. “White politicians seem to strip urban centers of economic opportunities that would help,” he says. “What I’m saying is that racist policies have contributed to lower economic status in urban ghettos.”

Rodney, an inside student, nods his head in agreement. He grew up poor, and says he couldn’t afford quality representation in court. “Lack of education and money played a role for me,” he says. “With that, I believe I would have had a different outcome.” He cites statistics about incarceration rates and poverty. “Take welfare. It backfired, in a way, for the poor community. It became a benefit to tear the household apart, where the man had to leave to maximize the financial benefit to the family.”

OK, Monroe says, but let’s think before assigning racism to a failing system. “Do you think that policies were designed to be racist, or were policymakers trying to solve a problem? If they were, give them credit for that. So with welfare, we don’t say that they indeed tried to break the black family apart.” He pauses and looks around. “Or do we?”

Rodney breaks into a broad smile. “Well, I’m hoping that’s not the case.”

Think again, Monroe prompts. “We have bad policies. We know that,” he says. “But should they be assigned as malicious? People are trying to solve a problem. If there are consequences to their solution, is that malicious?”

James, a soft-spoken, thin man, comments that he’s read books that have blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for introducing cocaine to the black community, leading to the War on Drugs under President Ronald Reagan. “But I don’t think it was malicious,” he says. “During those years of Reagan and [Manuel] Noriega [former dictator of Panama], they were bringin’ in more dope by the Panama Canal than ever. When Noriega was arrested, there wasn’t any dope. I had to drive out to California to try to get some kilos.”

Laughter erupts in the room. “I’m serious,” James says.

“So the intention was to make the country safe,” outside student Meghan interjects. “If the drug problem wasn’t there to begin with, they wouldn’t have created policies to deal with it. Behavior accepted is behavior perpetuated.”
Forty-five minutes in, the class breaks into smaller groups to discuss questions, such as whether it is policies themselves or the people who created them that lead to a racist system. Each group is lively and animated, and laughter erupts more than once.

Shimrock then tells everyone to form a large circle. They’ll spend the last 10 minutes deciding on a group project, the culmination of each Inside-Out class. Ideas for the project had been presented at the last session, and Shimrock writes them on the white board: Create a video to promote Inside-Out through the media; form a training program to help offenders land jobs once they’re released from prison; and correspond (anonymously) with a class outside the prison about crime, society, and justice.

Everyone votes. The winner is a variation on Matt’s marketing idea. The students will write and design marketing materials and create a DVD and send it to other Jesuit institutions whose mission includes social justice. Shimrock won the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s Gold Star Award, and students are confident that others will see its value. James—the inmate who had to drive to the West Coast for drugs in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Panama—certainly does. He’s already served 11 years of a 15-to-life sentence; he expects to get out in eight more, and he’s looking to have a new life when he does. He introduced the idea for the training program, but he likes Matt’s plan, too. There’s a sign hanging in the chapel where he works that reads Today’s inmate is tomorrow’s neighbor. Inside-Out fits nicely into James’s belief that society needs to pay more attention to the incarcerated so they have a chance of success when they leave prison. As Monroe announces the end of class for the day, James hastily scribbles in his notebook, trying to eke out the last seconds before the correctional officer shoos inmates into line for strip searches before they return to their cells.

If this were a regular class on a real college campus, there’d probably be a clutch of students that would head off, arguing and laughing, to continue the debate. But that luxury isn’t available to half of the Inside-Out scholars, and when the time’s up, James sighs and rises. An outside student notices, and nods at him as if she understands. “Today was frustrating,” she says. “There’s just so much to say, and not enough time to say it all.”

Originally published in the August 2008 issue.