When the coronavirus started to spread, Deborah Meehan, director of the University of Maine at Augusta Rockland Center, faced a dilemma – how to continue educating incarcerated students as prisons shut down and colleges moved online.
The center offers postsecondary education programs at five correctional facilities in the state, sending faculty to teach in-person classes. But when Maine’s prisons closed to outsiders, educators and corrections officers joined together to figure out what distance learning in prison could look like.
“We met with faculty, met with education coordinators inside the facilities, wardens and deputy wardens – everyone we could – to try to brainstorm [about] how are we going to do this?” Meehan said.
The prisons arranged Zoom classes where small cohorts could meet with their professors – they even held a debate class – though it took some “pretty exceptional” adjustments. Maximum security prisons, for example, typically don’t have internet access for inmates.
“We were running long Ethernet cables down hallways, through laundry rooms, into classrooms to make this work,” she said. “And we continued that through the semester.”
Like the rest of the higher education landscape, college programs in prisons across the country have had to rethink how they teach their students in the midst of the coronavirus. While some facilities still allow educators in as essential staff, many are temporarily pivoting to remote learning for students’ safety, despite “variable” access to technology, said Margaret diZerega, acting director of the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice.
Getting study materials to students, let alone teaching classes, has required some creativity. Some schools are dropping off physical copies of readings and assignments until they figure out how to offer classes, while others have gotten permission for faculty to use the email systems incarcerated people use to contact their families. For classes, programs have come up with a range of solutions, from gathering incarcerated students in small groups for live Zoom classes or videos to giving them laptops and tablets with learning management systems installed.
