On the first day of this fall’s English 101 class at Otisville Correctional Facility, as visiting college administrator Ann Jacobs began asking 12 prisoners about their dreams and expectations, their level of engagement wholly, suddenly shifted.
“There’s something hard about a prison door locking behind you — the consciousness you have about not breaking the rules — that creates an intensity,” Jacobs said. “Then, you’re in a classroom that looks kind of like every other classroom, but it’s not co-ed, and the students are multi-aged, and half of them are looking at me real intently and the other half are doing the things that people do when they choose to sit at the back of the room. Not talking, not asking a lot.”
Jacob’s query about personal aspirations, though, broke their silence. They desired a solid education, a job paying a life-sustaining wage, to be under the same roof with children from whom they’ve been estranged and who, perhaps, are languishing in foster care.
It was a poignant moment, said Jacobs, tapped three months ago to lead the Prisoner Re-entry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, but also a realistic one. Personal transformation is hard work for anybody, let alone the presently or formerly incarcerated. Post-prison, things can get tough for that population, which now is being released in record numbers. Before being locked down, they were, as a group, disproportionately poor, unschooled, illiterate, marginally employed. John Jay’s institute operates with those myriad difficulties in mind as 700,000 people are exiting prison annually.
For roughly 40 years, Jacobs has been helping the formerly incarcerated navigate a post-prison world. Before becoming the re-entry institute’s executive director, Jacobs helmed the Women’s Prison Association for two decades. As both a local and national advocate and reformer, she has lectured, consulted and trained others on crime, the courts, imprisonment and, as related factors, drug addiction, mental health, housing, child welfare and well-being and employment readiness, or the lack thereof. She also has been deputy director of New York City’s Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator.
“I got interested in this work while I was still in college and had an opportunity to do a number of placements in different settings, including the D.C. jail where I was helping to do a study of the educational needs of what was, at the time, a new jail,” said Jacobs, who has a University of Maryland bachelor’s degree in sociology and attended University of Baltimore Law School.
Prisoners’ background stories haven’t changed much since the early 1970s, she said. “The men who were in the D.C. jail had very low educational achievement … men with fifth-grade testing levels. It explained a lot in terms of problems they were having in the community, with structuring a living, making a livable wage. It’s no less trying now. We send people to prison, but they had a lot of problems before they got there.”
