By Jason Karpuk, teacher, Kamloops, and Kevin Heinze, teacher, Maple Ridge
It’s quarter to eight on a blustery November morning near Maple Ridge. The familiar smell of coffee and nearly burned toast punctuates the air as Kevin Heinze enters his “classroom”—Living Unit A at Alouette Correctional Centre for Women. He walks toward a massive circular desk where 15 people dressed in grey (not orange) are sitting, chatting, and finishing breakfast.
Heinze pulls up a chair, sits down, and class is in session. One student at a time, he works his way down the roster and attends to the needs of each student: that could be collecting homework, teaching a concept, or consoling a student who may have just had their mother die, their children taken away by social services, or found out they are going to spend the next 25 years of their life behind bars. It’s another day in the life of a provincial jail teacher.
At about the same time, a few hours up the road, Jason Karpuk is clearing security at Kamloops Regional Corrections Centre. He hands his ID in at the front desk and picks up his corrections ID and pass card before signing out a personal alarm transmitter (PAT). After testing the PAT and grabbing the classroom keys from the control room, Karpuk passes through six secure doors before entering the teacher’s office. Time to call for the first unit. These students are at all levels of learning, from Grade 1 up to graduates who are upgrading. You never know which student will come on a given day or what they will be working on, so you know your stuff and start the day.
Today is a busy day: eight inmates are dropped off by the prowl (a corrections officer who escorts inmates from one location to another within the facility). The inmates are talkative and relaxed, so it will be a good class. After 10 years of corrections teaching, Karpuk has learned to pay attention to body language and read how the students are interacting.
What do we mean by “jail”?
“Jail” is a catch-all word for the place people go after they break the law and get caught. It’s also quite an inaccurate term. In British Columbia, there are specific names for the place an inmate spends time. It depends on where they are in their sentencing process and the severity of the conviction. The place a person goes immediately after being apprehended by police is called a jail. Most offenders do not usually spend a lot of time in jail: less than one month according to 2014–15 federal study.
While waiting for trial, people are usually held at a pretrial centre. Once sentenced, the offender goes to a federal institution/penitentiary (if their sentence is longer than two years) or to a provincial correctional institution (if their sentence is less than two years). For the purposes of this article, the term “jail” refers to either pretrial centres or provincial correctional institutions.
...you need to be prepared to teach any subject, at any level, in any given class. ... from teaching how to read a simple sentence, to teaching exponential regression in Math 12.
How is teaching in jail different?
Teaching at a massive table, one student at a time, on a living unit or in a classroom, or communicating through a 5" by 18" window and passing the work under the door, are just a couple of the ways teaching on the “inside” is different. While in some locations in BC teachers work in a more traditional environment, there are numerous ways teaching in a correctional centre is unique.
If you were to become a jail teacher, one of the first things you would likely learn is just how far down the list of priorities educational programming is within the institution. The primary functions of a school are teaching and learning. A jail’s primary functions are to control and protect. Everything else takes a back seat to those functions.
The where, when, how, and if a school program is going to run on any given day is dependent on what is going on in the institution. For example, in an emergency a “code” is called (yellow for an altercation between inmates, blue for a medical incident, red for an escape) and the jail is locked down. "
For the teacher, a code can mean one of three things: not being able to see any students if the teacher is going door to door, not having students come to the classroom if they were on their way, or holding onto a group of students until the emergency has been dealt with and the code has been “cleared.” This can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more.
In addition to codes, there are a lot of other things that prevent or delay inmates from attending class: going to work, legal or medical appointments, medication dispensation, family visits, staff breaks, mealtimes, and other programming that the inmates/students must attend as part of their sentencing.
When these scheduling conflicts inevitably arise, the teacher must adapt. How they adapt is based on the kind of disruption they are facing. In some cases, a teacher may simply delay the start of a class; in other cases the teacher may go from one living unit to the next and hold class at one of the tables (best case scenario), or in other instances the teacher must “teach” through the door of a cell.
Unlike most schools in BC, where teachers get a new group of students only once or twice a year, in jail there is continuous enrollment. Teachers are always registering new students into the program. Conversely, they are also always seeing students leave the program. Students leave because they get released, get transferred to another institution, get sent to segregation, or lose motivation. This chronic upheaval produces many challenges.
One challenge is that you need to be prepared to teach any subject, at any level, in any given class. This is both exciting and exhausting. Simply moving from one student to the next could be going from teaching how to read a simple sentence, to teaching exponential regression in Math 12.
Another challenge is that paperwork is never-ending! You are constantly processing new registrations, course selections, course withdrawals, course completions, and claims required for adult education funding. There is no clerical support in the facility, so everything is either sent via email or physically dropped off with the school clerical staff.
For as many negative aspects as there are teaching in a jail as opposed to a regular school, there are plenty of positive aspects as well. One of these aspects is phones—or rather—no phones. Teachers don’t have to contend with the distractions caused by TikTok or Snapchat, or the plagiarism spawned by ChatGPT.
Furthermore, even though by its function a jail is a place for people who have done bad things, classroom discipline is usually not an issue. Most provincial jail teachers would tell you their students, dressed in grey or red, are more co-operative and respectful than yours, dressed in Levi’s or Lululemon. The students tend to be motivated in two main ways: those who have figured out they need to do something to change their life once released, and/or those who are trying to do something to potentially reduce their sentence. Either way, they generally try to complete their assignments.
Part of the reason for good behaviour may be that participation is voluntary. Nobody is forced to sign up for school. Also, since classes are either all male or all female, there is less vying for attention. (In case you are wondering, yes, there are some transgendered students in both the men’s and women’s institutions.) Finally, since the students are between the ages of 18 and 70, they are usually more mature than the 14- to 18-year-old cohort.
Residents who complete an education and/or do coursework are much less likely to reoffend and are also more able to move on with their lives. – Eugene Boos, provincial corrections teacher
Why are these programs important?
Inmate education programs, including high school graduation, offer financial benefits for BC taxpayers. Studies conducted over the past 50 years generally show a 30% reduction in recidivism for prisoners engaged in education programs. Considering the costs of keeping individuals in provincial centres, which is about $95,000/year, every person who avoids returning to the system results in savings for the provincial budget. Studies show the normal 80–85% recidivism rate drops to around 35% for inmates who graduate while incarcerated, which amounts to a substantial savings.1
The students Karpuk, Heinze, and their counterparts teach across the province are more than one-dimensional inmates. A lot of them, when they get released, will be returning to their jobs as servers, welders, roofers, and office managers.
Furthermore, many of these students are mothers and fathers who want to improve their lives and their children’s lives when they are released. They realize education can enhance their opportunities for a better life, whether it is by getting a better-paying job or by qualifying for a post-secondary program that can lead to a more stable and satisfying job than they previously held.
For inmates who have never held regular jobs, enrolling in the school program and earning a diploma provides a credential to get a first job. Their achievement proves to them (and those around them) that they can accomplish something worthwhile. They can begin to make the life-changing transition from an offender to a contributing member of their community. Changing how inmates perceive themselves enhances their chance of success in making permanent changes, and that, of course, has a positive effect in communities across BC.
With almost half a century of behind-bars teaching experience between them, Karpuk and Heinze admit that their jobs seem every bit as “normal” as every other BCTF member, so they leave the last words to a teacher with a fresher perspective, Eugene Boos from Chilliwack, who works at Ford Mountain Correctional Centre:
What I most enjoy about provincial corrections teaching is that I can have a constructive impact on the lives of the inmates (known as residents). Residents who complete an education and/or do coursework are much less likely to reoffend and are also more able to move on with their lives. So many residents have learning difficulties and struggled in school as children and need one-on-one guidance. A prison, like a school, is an institutional environment, so in that respect it’s not totally different than teaching in schools. Personally, I prefer corrections teaching, because I don’t have to contend with difficult parents, cell phones, and endless interruptions. The job is still very much about being a teacher, since corrections teachers still mark, assist students, explain course content, prepare course content, deal with paperwork, and remind students (and ourselves) about various rules and procedures.