Excerpt: First Class at Marysville Woman's Prison

At London Correctional Institution it was easier to market my career development and job placement services for male ex-offenders along with the classes I taught. At ORW (Ohio Reformatory for Women), it was a different story: good jobs for female ex-offenders are harder to come by, especially if you are trying to cross-train them from prostitution, say, into available jobs of cleaning, clerking, cooking, or waitressing. For one thing, it’s a drastic pay cut. My class of twenty at Marysville had mixed backgrounds….Teaching female inmates was even more dangerous for a male teacher. The inmates could set the teacher up through more hidden manipulations. Where a male inmate would take pride in tricking a teacher on his own, the female inmates had no shame in their game: they would more readily gang up on a teacher with lies, or trick him with their softer persuasions.

We were warned of many things: Prison teachers are put into a trick bag from jump street, or the beginning, as convicts would say: we are given students—over ninety percent of whom have drug and alcohol addictions, but we are not given this information. We are given students with a multitude of emotional and learning handicaps, but we are not encouraged to look into this, in order to modify our individualized educational programs for each student. We are given students who failed to learn in the public schools and whom the public schools failed to teach, but we are not given the details, so we might know where to begin.

(Editor’s Note in retrospect: Given a whole new headstart and a chance to become educated, many of these female inmates could have cross-trained into respectable and well-paying jobs.)