Negotiating the Politics of Space: Teaching Women's Studies in a Women's Prison

"Open your mouth. Hold up your tongue. Pick up your hair. Okay, arms outstretched, legs apart. Now take off your shoes and socks so I can check your feet."

We respond accordingly. These entry search directives frame the material conditions of our experiences teaching a college-level women's studies class in a correctional facility for women. They remind us again and again of what it means to be seen, like our students, as untrustworthy. The visceral experience of the entry procedures, including the accompanying "pat downs" that occur at every entrance, make us very cognizant of the daily privileges of our lives, of the small liberties that might otherwise remain unseen and unnoted.

We three began team-teaching an introductory women's studies course, Understanding Women, to 27 inmates at a local correctional facility for women in 2003 to 2004 under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee. This year, under our own steam and with University of Michigan–Dearborn support, Linker and Bergeron, a philosopher and a political economist, have continued offering Understanding Women to an additional 33 inmates; Lempert, a sociologist, began offering Understanding Society, an introduction to sociology class, to 27 others. We constructed these courses to mirror those that we teach at the university, utilizing many of the same texts, assignments, and in-class exercises.

In this essay, we reflect on prison security procedures and other experiences involved in teaching incarcerated women, as well as on the successes and difficulties of translating theory applications from a conventional university to a prison site. Our discussion of the intersections of material conditions, privilege, and agency in these processes are presented in the format of a "layered account" (Ronai 1992; 1995), a narrative form designed to loosely represent, and to produce for the reader, an ongoing dialectic of experience. In an attempt to process the variety of impressionistic experiences we had teaching in prison, we recorded a series of our own conversations about our prison classes. The dialectic account offered here emerges from the transcribed discussions of our experiences, and we frame our commentaries and analyses in the interplay between unnamed "speakers." In processing the experience of teaching Women's Studies in a women's prison, we have come to see how we share similar views; our individual experiences are merely facets of the spectrum of the particular material conditions associated with our prison teaching.

We begin by tracing out some of the broader institutional contours of Michigan's growing prison industrial complex. We then discuss the conflicts over the meanings of authority and "safe space" that form our (and our students') experiences with the correctional officers when entering the prison classroom. In the final section, we shift the focus to our students' material location in the prison, reflecting on the paradox of the prison as a "safe space" for their learning and thinking.

The Opacity of the Prison: Forgotten Women Behind Prison Walls

Speaker 1: Prisons are these completely opaque institutions that have no interaction with the community, and everything that's done is done to keep that opacity going.

Speaker 2: That just seems so true, having been there, that any effort to bridge with the community is suspect. Yet here is a taxpayer institution that is significantly connected to the community and should be in a variety of ways, and yet everything is being done to keep it dark and closed and to keep the public away.

Michigan has the fifth largest Department of Corrections in the nation, and like most other states, funding for both corrections and higher education comes from general fund dollars. As two of the biggest programs drawing from the same pool of money, prisons and universities are in direct competition for these tax dollars (Ziedenberg and Schiraldi 2002). While nationally state corrections spending grew at six times the rate of higher education, from 1985 through 2000, Michigan's spending on higher education increased by 27 percent, while corrections spending grew by 227 percent. In short, corrections spending in Michigan grew at...