“Have you ever been in a fight?” the prison security instructor asks me, and only me, apropos of nothing in the middle of what could loosely be called a lecture. I am embarrassed, not just to be singled out — he is graciously giving me extra attention because I am the only “volunteer” in a room of experienced corrections officers who are required to renew their security training — but also, somehow, because my answer to his question is “no.”
I am stupidly trying to be the good student, arriving early despite an abominable lake-effect snowstorm that has rendered the Indiana Toll Road in LaPorte County nearly impassable and the country roads even worse. I take a seat in the second row. Everyone bypasses me to sit in rows 4 through 20 in this cavernous room inside a facility built as a mental asylum in 1951.
I imagine my classmates exchanging glances behind my back, smug about the fights they’ve had. The instructor follows up.
“Have you ever thrown a punch?”
Now I am embarrassed and befuddled. Is that even a different question? I don’t know how to parse this place.
“No,” I say, wondering if piloxing at the gym counts. Thank Jesus I don’t say that out loud.
Why am I here? I wonder.
I have asked myself that question a lot in the two and a half years since my husband died unexpectedly. In the early days, my goal was just to stay alive. Months prior to his death, I had scheduled my required-for-an-insurance-discount annual checkup at Notre Dame’s Wellness Center for August 11, which turned out to be three days after he died. I kept the appointment.
I stumbled into the examination room alone, sleepless — and as awake as I’ve ever been. The doctor checked everything. I don’t recall her exact words, but the gist was that it was extra important for me to stay alive now. I heard: Don’t orphan your kids.
She ordered all the tests, and I took all the tests.
I grew up without health insurance — or any of the insurances. I wouldn’t have had any idea which insurances there were in life, and I surely wouldn’t have known that life insurance was one of them. Even in my adult years, it still seemed unnatural, unnecessary, kind of posh to do health care unless something was falling off. Raised in a downwardly mobile household, I found it easier to pretend I didn’t even want the things I knew I couldn’t have, a defensive dismissiveness that’s hard to shake.
But during that visit, I relented. Life had changed, and I needed to change, too. I needed to take care of myself, put myself through the tests and then put myself on a secure shelf. Don’t take any unnecessary risks, stay safe, stay stable for the kids, I told myself then.
Yet here I sit in a prison in northern Indiana, diagramming video footage of worst-case-scenario prison uprisings in California, trying to spot whose mistakes triggered the bloodshed. I am becoming Level 1 Blue Badge-certified at Westville Correctional Facility, Indiana’s 3,400-bed, low-through-maximum-security prison. The Blue Badge will allow me to lead a class of Notre Dame students past the barbed-wire walls, scanners, thorough pat-downs, sally ports and caged elevators — and the watchful eyes of corrections officers and incarcerated people alike.
Why am I here?
A lot of people ask me just “why?”
Their whys have at least two layers. First, the why of “Why them?” Why teach people in prison, people who have broken the law and the social contract of care for others, who have caused deep pain?
Second, “Why you?” You of all people, Connie; now of all times.
Students in the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor I direct at Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns could answer that first why: Incarceration is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. My students know that people who become incarcerated earn about 41 percent less than their peers prior to incarceration. And having a prison record only increases the challenge of finding affordable housing or a job — any job — much less one that pays a just wage.
Further, my students know from University of Chicago sociologist and MacArthur Fellow Reuben Jonathan Miller’s 2023 lecture on our campus that people typically leave prison a lot less prepared than when they entered to flourish as they navigate the thousands of official policies and administrative sanctions that restrict how a person returning to our neighborhoods can live.
They know that unofficially, the stigma that people with a criminal record face forecloses on opportunity. They see how mass incarceration destabilizes communities by generating single-parent households, often in concentrated areas, that leech financial and emotional resources block by block. They know that if we want to disrupt and diminish poverty, we have to understand and address mass incarceration.
Drawing from the big-data work of Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others, poverty studies students at Notre Dame explore the connection between poverty and place. They see how ZIP codes can predict how long a person may live and how likely it is that person will move out of poverty or go to prison, given the level of opportunity in that neighborhood. Some places, they see, are practically pipelines from poverty to prison.
These students also know that incarceration is both a cause and consequence of childhood adversity. Research on “adverse childhood experiences” counts having a household member go to prison as one of the 10 core markers — such as living with violence and with mental health challenges in the home — of childhood adversity. Adults who are incarcerated are 33 percent more likely than the general population to have had one or more such experience when they were children.
Neuroscience, a key discipline informing poverty studies, teaches us that these connections are biochemical. Our brains, especially young brains, are wired to learn from their environment. In threatening, unstable situations, our fight, flight or freeze responses activate automatically, sending bursts of cortisol and adrenaline that demand protective action.
Such reactions are effective if the danger is short-lived, but disastrous if it persists. A person surrounded by the threat of violence or directly abused or neglected as a child is at higher risk of developing chronic physical diseases like hypertension, diabetes and cancer as an adult. Those harms can be mitigated when children live with adults who provide care and safety, forming human buffer zones that ease stress and increase joy. But poverty reduces those protective resources and increases toxic stress, endangering our brains as much as a blood clot would.
Research shows further that unmediated adversity can lead to inconsolable despair for some adults. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University coined the phrase “deaths of despair” to describe the recent rise in deaths beyond what is predicted among non-college-educated white men and women ages 45 to 54. Data show households, neighborhoods and communities of concentrated despair expressed through drug and alcohol abuse, obesity and violence. Case and Deaton connect this despair to increases in murders and suicides.
Some students know all this from our coursework, some from firsthand experience visiting their own parents and loved ones in prison. More than 1.9 million Americans are currently incarcerated, and more than 5 million people have returned to our communities after incarceration in state or federal prison. While our prisons are often hidden from everyday view, the people who’ve been there live all around us, often struggling to survive. We can’t study poverty without studying incarceration. And we need to study incarceration alongside the people who know it best, the people who are or have been in prison.
Bryan Stevenson, a public-interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, says, “In too many places, the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.” In a world of plenty, the persistence of poverty is an indicator of injustice — racial, gender, environmental, labor, housing, health care, education and the rest. In too many places, it’s a crime to be poor, to be unsheltered, to be displaced, to be illiterate, to be unwell. The adversity of poverty is not just financial. Poverty is a multidimensional adversity that limits — as Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen says — the capability to be who we want to be.
I have taught all this from luxuriously appointed classrooms at Notre Dame — some with four display screens, an educational sports bar. But in August 2023, I had an opportunity to step out of that comfort zone when the need for teaching at Westville increased. Supported by the growing Notre Dame Programs for Education in Prison at the Institute for Social Concerns, I was connected with Inside-Out Prison Exchange, an international organization that trains postsecondary faculty to teach inside prisons around the world by bringing “outside” college students together with “inside” incarcerated students to take a class together. Fully together, which means inside the prison, sitting in a circle, everyone doing the same assignments the same way, all earning three college credits.
Notre Dame faculty have been offering these courses since 2012, but my first semester starts on this snowy day in January 2024.
Security takes up major bandwidth in my preparations. Graduate school didn’t teach me how to navigate prison security. Can you take in paper clips? Staples? Seriously, you can? OK.
But try taking in a cellphone or a smartwatch connected to the internet: A sign posted outside the prison in English and Spanish says that’s a Class C felony. I make sure my students and I don’t cross these lines.
I use less bandwidth preparing the syllabus, though the shift from teaching paperless at Notre Dame to teaching technology-less at Westville proves significant. No pulling up videos on the fly as class conversations take us places I haven’t anticipated, no digital polls, no newsclips. We are paper and pencil only, inside and outside of class.
Our first text for Poverty and Justice: Inside-Out will be Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, By America, given its author’s signature fire for assiduous research and his uncompromising vision that we can and must end poverty. I’ve had great success teaching his Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, for which he won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. Desmond brings research to life through firsthand, ethnographic storytelling, taking students who haven’t had much direct experience with poverty into the homes and hearts of people who have. And for students who have had that direct experience, he provides familiar scenes of the struggle not with some faceless “system” of oppression but with the individual landlords, judges, lawyers, employers, social workers and others who do their work supported by the policies and practices that the broader community ordains, which often condone and protect exploitation.
Inside-Out advises instructors to meet with their inside and outside students separately during the first week so students can ask questions from their point of view. So, on my first day of class, I put 11 copies of the book into my security-approved clear bag to take to my inside students. The bag is just like the one I use for football games at Notre Dame Stadium. I have triple-checked my outfit and materials to ensure they comply with prison policy — no underwire bra, neutral-colored clothes, no paper clips (for good measure).
I check my email one last time before I leave campus, since I will be offline for hours. I see a message from our contact at the prison, a warm man in person, a man of few words in writing. It says, “softcover books only.” I look at my bag full of hardcover books. OK. I have never thought of books as dangerous in that way.
The roads are bad again, so I have to leave, ready or not, and clearly I’m not as ready as I thought. I take the books and slide onto the icy Toll Road, determined not to be late.
In my preparatory zeal, I have made photocopies of Desmond’s prologue. I clutch those copies as I pass through security. A corrections officer unlocks the gate around the elevator. Then a cheerful administrator leads me to my classroom, suggesting quietly that I not look into the bathroom across from my classroom, because the half-wall windows put its occupants in plain view.
Calm comes over me, like the feeling I had before I walked down the aisle on my wedding day. Yes, this is a new experience, but I am ready. I am entering a classroom. I know classrooms.
My inside students, who learned that morning they would be starting a class that day, are even better prepared. They join in, and maybe even enjoy, my silly icebreakers.
Desmond is up next, and I’m a little nervous for him. The students read the prologue aloud, one at a time, one paragraph at a time. I say they can pass if they don’t want to read. No one passes.
We pause after each paragraph and talk about what surprises, delights and challenges us. They are outraged by Desmond’s account of a public university’s spending millions of dollars to build a lake in the desert while people live poor and homeless nearby, sleeping on sizzling streets. They cannot believe a university would be so wasteful while its neighbors suffer.
Then a student reads this: “After arriving in prison, many incarcerated Americans suddenly find that their health improves because the conditions they faced as free (but impoverished) citizens were worse.” A shiver of recognition ripples through the room.
We finish reading, and I ask, “What do you think?” One student says, “There’s a ‘wow’ in every paragraph.” They are all in on Desmond.
So, I have to get the book in. And I feel some urgency: We are hosting the author at our inaugural Poverty Studies Distinguished Lecture in February, and I want the students to read his book beforehand. Could I just explain to the warden that the paperback version isn’t out yet? Ah, no. This isn’t an “ask for an exception” kind of place.
As I leave with that first-day-of-class energy, an idea I had jokingly considered seems less absurd.
The summer after my first year in college, I landed not one but two factory jobs with hourly pay above minimum wage, about $4.50 then. My pride deflated as quickly as my budget when I was laid off from the one job wiring electrical transformers after two weeks, so I did my best to keep the other job. And it seemed relevant: I was working at a bookbindery, and I was an English major. Practically an internship.
That summer, I ran the gluing station. My job was to put the book block, the bound inner pages of texts, on the mechanical steel arm, press the pedal to lower it into the glue roller, then lift the book block and immediately, precisely, permanently affix the glossy red or blue hardback cover onto the outer pages like a suit of literary armor. Presto, I’d made a book.
The solution to the Desmond dilemma comes from that factory job: If I could make books, maybe I could unmake them.
Checking out of security, I see my administrative contact. I hail him and explain the situation. “If the books don’t have hard covers, are they good?” He says he’ll check with the deputy warden and tells me to bring the books to his car. I take that as a green light.
I slide to my car and dump the books out of the clear bag. “Sorry,” I whisper to Matthew Desmond and librarians and book lovers everywhere. I pull the hardcover boards back behind the spine, deploying the wrist move my security instructor taught me to use if I am attacked. I grasp the book block and I shuck that cover off like an ear of Indiana sweetcorn. Tendrils of liberated, hardened glue drift through the car as free as cottonwood seeds in May.
I do this 10 more times. The sound will haunt me forever, but it works. I take the books to the administrator waiting in his car, and the next morning he emails: “Got the books in.”
In my shucking stupor, it hadn’t occurred to me to send the dust jackets in with the coverless books. So I bring the jackets when all 23 of us gather for our first class as a full group.
As I distribute the dust jackets, I see that my inside students are ahead of me. Each one has improvised his own protective cover with a pastiche of Post-its and paper scraps lacquered with Scotch tape. Some have copied the font from the title page to create their own Poverty, By America cover.
I have asked students to read through Chapter 2. One inside student has read through Chapter 5. Another has finished the book. Yet another asked a staff person to look up sources Desmond cites and print them out. He has read and annotated those texts as well.
We also read two articles about recent events. The first is a brief account of Pope Francis pressing further when people say they give to the poor. “And tell me,” he says, “when you give to the poor, do you look in the eyes of the person, touch their hand, or throw the money there?” The pope commands us, “Touch, touch poverty, touch.”
We also read how city commissioners in Kalispell, Montana, called on residents to reject the “homeless lifestyle,” to which some responded by harassing, beating and shooting guns at people living on the street.
Two different kinds of touch, the students concur. Some of the inside students share that they have been homeless and know the kind of violence described in the second article.
I wonder, Were my students the ones who beat the homeless, or were they the homeless who were beaten? Maybe neither. Maybe both.
During the group interviews I held to select students for the class, one of the inside students said he’d never had an interview before. I paused and set my jaw, then said, “Glad to be part of your first.”
Back at Notre Dame, I asked students in my Introduction to Poverty Studies class what an interview means to them.
“Opportunity,” they replied. Interviews mean opportunity. And this grown man in Westville had never had one. We sat with that, thinking about second chances — and first ones.
Teaching at Westville, I learn quickly that some of the inside students have never written a paper before. Ever.
“What’s a draft?” one student asks, reviewing the syllabus.
“Drafting is a way to see and revise what you think,” I say, in part.
Later, handing me his first paper, he says, “I drafted it four times and decided to turn in the first one.”
I pause and compute. He handwrote the paper from start to finish four times and turned in the first version. There’s no copy and paste, no backspace key here. Most students write in ink, without so much as an eraser. They sit and think, then put their minds to paper in indelible ink.
One inside student always writes in pink and purple ink. On page two of one assignment, I find a weird orange stain in the upper righthand corner, like the thumbprint characters my kids made in preschool. A note says, “Cheetos sorry!” With a pink smiley face. It is a thumbprint.
Artificial intelligence is not an issue. These papers are dripping with humanity: sweat, tears, coffee, soul. The most artificial thing on the pages is that blaze orange Cheetos powder.
In solidarity with the inside students, the outside students handwrite their papers as well.
I receive this huge stack of ideas on pulsing paper, and it takes me back, maybe to elementary school, maybe to someplace more primordial. Handwritten papers smell human. Handwritten papers look human. They have a human presence that evokes my own childhood, when I wrote my soul into a paper journal that still holds the print of my palm, like those plaster casts that schools do for Mother’s Day.
Also in solidarity with the inside students, the outside students agree to stick to the texts we use in class and not to do outside research. They are thrown by this at first but then seem freed by the challenge of doing all their own thinking, of trusting what they have to say.
They have a lot to say. As the inside students learn from the outside students to incorporate more academic support for their claims, the outside students learn from the inside students to move the other way, writing from their hearts and not just their heads, writing not for me or their classmates but for themselves. Some do this in verse, tapping into a creativity that is often suppressed in the confines of their outside classrooms.
I use the word “profound” in my comments on an inside student’s first paper. He comes up to me as close to tears as I imagine you can get in prison, pointing to that word, shaking his head. No one has ever called him that before, he says, or maybe just conveys without words.
What brilliance is locked behind bars? I wonder.
The students have mixed reactions to another book, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a muckraking novel of poverty and privilege in early 20th-century Chicago. While Sinclair’s style is a little off-putting to some, the theme of exploitation through labor, politics and religion is all too familiar. “We don’t need to read this,” some inside students say. “We live this.”
But for other students and other people sheltered from such predatory acts, Sinclair’s story of the relentless oppression of the poor shocks the conscience. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, credited The Jungle with inflaming her social activism and leading her to live in solidarity with people who experience poverty and injustice.
“There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside,” Sinclair writes, “and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.” As we share our own stories and apply Desmond’s work to our lives, we understand. We connect that second kind of prison — the prison of intentional exclusion from economic, social, political and religious life — to that first kind of prison, the one that hosts our classroom.
We also read philosopher Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Wrestling with Immanuel Kant, John Rawls and Aristotle, Sandel walks us through that seeking, questioning stance. What should we do when bad things happen to us? And: What should we do when we do bad things to others? Inside-Out training advises professors and outside students not to ask the big why of inside students: Why are you here? As in, what crime did you commit? And we don’t, though some offer their life story, often sharing memories of their childhood dreams and demons.
But we do ask the bigger why, the one I ask myself: Why are you here on this earth, at this time, in this place? Why are any of us here?
Desmond gives us a rallying cry of common purpose. We are here to seek justice and abolish poverty in all its dimensions. By the end of the semester, the students are hardened against poverty, furious at the injustice we trace to Sinclair’s time and long before, furious with ourselves for the ways we have tolerated and perpetuated this pain.
I realize today that another why was pushing me to leave my cushy classroom in 2024.
My daughter had completed her first year of college remotely due to COVID, taking classes from our kitchen counter. In her second year, she headed to college in-person just two weeks after her father died. Then one night during her third year, while I was talking to her on the phone, the university sent an emergency alert: Active shooter on campus. Secure-in-place immediately. Run, Hide, Fight.
Thus began hours of listening to police scanner reports of a shooter, or maybe five shooters, working across campus — police responding to every call, reporting back to the skilled, sober dispatcher whose voice I still hear. We wouldn’t know until the press conference in the middle of the night that while many of the reports were false, some were true. Five students had been shot on campus with various injuries, including paralysis. Another three students had been shot and killed. One of those three was my daughter’s roommate.
Why did this man who had no connection to any victims or the school shoot them and then kill himself? Why had he been allowed to have a gun after his contact with the legal system? Why should a young person die so senselessly while sitting in her Cuban literature class?
That night, the tally of mass shootings in the United States in 2023 reached 69. It was onlt mid-February. The next morning, Valentine’s Day, students painted their own question on the school’s official message rock: “How many more?”
Why here, why now, why us? the stone keened in red script.
Our metaphor of the smoking gun fails us. It says if you find the smoking gun, you’ve found the shooter and the case is solved: If you know who, you know why. But that’s not always true. So often, not even the shooter can say why. Despair can accumulate and detonate into random, unspeakable violence, a burst of excruciating brokenness. Asked why he continues to fight for justice in a broken system with people who are broken themselves, Bryan Stevenson says, simply, because “I’m broken, too.” Brokenness is the human condition. We live broken together.
I am surprised how many people ask me if a “guard” is present in my Westville classroom, using a word for “corrections officer” that my colleagues at Westville dislike because it misrepresennts their work. “No,” I say, speaking as a professor and a parent of two daughters in college, “there isn’t a ‘guard’ in any of my classrooms.”
The prison’s security instructor gave me one kind of security training. Faith and scholarship provide others.
In her work on poverty, vulnerability and exclusion, Dorothy Day writes, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” Day makes me wonder how we transcend loneliness and despair to connect. Is such connection and community possible in prison? Can we move from deaths of despair to lives of repair? Stevenson says, “We’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
But another lesson emerges for me in the wake of widowhood and the mass shooting, while teaching in the heart of mass incarceration — a new verse of Stevenson’s hymn: We’re also all more than the worst thing that ever happened to us.
I didn’t know it at the time, but some of my whys were not about the inside, but rather about what I had carried from the outside into Westville prison.
Like all those insurances I hadn’t known about or understood, prison is what happens after the damage is done. And maybe like those insurances, prison education programs are a way we make things a little better. We give some people in prison a bit of education that, research shows, helps when they’re released. It reduces recidivism and increases employment. That’s good.
But I cannot shake what these men say while reflecting on the last day of class: This experience has helped them feel human, they say, some for the first time. I cannot shake the feeling that we should have shown up for them a long time ago when their homes and communities started to dehumanize them, when despair first boiled, before they committed crimes that hurt and dehumanized others — before the child who was called “white trash,” for instance, became the adult who is a white supremacist. Why didn’t we show up sooner? Why now, why not then? Why wait for Westville?
While we wrestle with those questions, a new $1.2 billion prison arises outside our classroom. The cycle of poverty, pain and prison persists. As these men learn in prison, their children and families carry on without their emotional and financial support. Incarceration is not just an adverse experience for the incarcerated; it’s one for their children and partners and communities, too. These men have children; these men were children. They were born outside, born free.
So, I’ve taken myself off that shelf. Shelf life was always an illusion of safety, an illusion of life, anyway. We aren’t living if we aren’t connecting, asking whys we cannot answer, learning and loving especially when it’s hard. Teaching has taught me that life is a kind of fight — a fight against despair and for justice, inside and out.
Connie Snyder Mick is a senior associate director at Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns and director of its academic minor program in poverty studies.