Hopes programme linking Cork prison learners and UCC students can be expanded 

The Cork lead behind a programme which sees students from University College Cork and Cork Prison collaborate says she would like to see the project expanded to prisons around the country.

Twenty-three students from Ireland’s first Inside-Out prison-university education programme graduated recently.

The programme is a collaboration between University College Cork, the Cork ETB Prison Education Unit, and Cork Prison.

Over the course of 12 weeks, final year criminology students from UCC shared a classroom with learners from Cork Prison.

“We don’t talk about prisoners or criminals, but we talk about inside students and outside students,” says Dr Katharina Swirak, Inside-Out Lead, Department of Sociology and Criminology at UCC.

The course represents 10 credits of the Bachelor’s Degree in Criminology, and students debate university-level academic texts, drawing on their own life experiences, and explore social issues such as poverty, racism, ableism, and gender inequality.

Dr Swirak started the programme in 2019 with her colleague Dr James Windle after being dissatisfied with the relationship between the university and the prison.

Previously, they took students on a tour of Cork Prison once a semester.

“I felt always very uncomfortable with that, because these visits can be a little bit voyeuristic,” she says. “Even if you don’t talk to people behind bars, you might see them on the landing just cleaning, or you’ll see them in in the kitchen preparing a meal, but there’s never a conversation.”

She heard about the Inside-Out Programme, which was founded by Lori Pompa of Temple University in Philadelphia, and began a Cork version.

The group starts out with 25 students, but along the way numbers can decrease.

“You lose inside students because they get moved to another prison, or they get released. So this year we graduated 13 outside students and 10 inside students,” she says.

Topics covered include person-first language, labelling and stigma, masculinity and identities, desistance and reintegration into society after prison.

“We end on a positive note, where students design their ideal scenario of how more just and safe cities or communities would look.”

Groups of inside and outside students work together on a project on a topic of their choice.

“That’s where they come up with all their creative ideas, and we sometimes have support from the art teachers in the prison education unit,” says Dr Swirak.

This year, one group designed a wooden board game called ‘Snakes and Labels’, using the woodwork workshop in the prison.

“This was two inside and two outside students who’d never met each other before, but they all had an interest in woodwork,” she says. “They designed two dice, and one dice is for negative choices, one is for positive. They’re trying to portray how making choices in life can lead you in one direction or the other.”

At the end of the course there is a graduation ceremony, which is important.

“They work very hard to change themselves. They engage with a lot of services,” she says. “But very little of that gets seen, obviously, because it’s a prison. So having that ceremony and acknowledging the work they’ve done always gives them a real boost.”

The programme gives students confidence to engage with education on their release. Few of the inside students would ever have been to college, and most would be early school-leavers.

“One of this year’s participants hadn’t finished school before joining Inside-Out. Now he’s committed to doing his Leaving Cert because he wants to continue with college after,” she says.

An inside student from 2019 is now completing a masters at UCC. “He said Inside-Out reignited his passion for learning,” says Dr Swirak.

The UCC students benefit too.

“Our students are usually final year students,” says Dr Swirak. “They have nearly their whole undergraduate college career behind them, and they say it’s usually the best module. It takes them out of their normal environment.”

It helps students reflect on their privilege: “The things your normal, average college student takes for granted, being supported by family to do well, paying for grinds, being supported to go to college.

“Most people behind bars, they have been very disadvantaged in life,” she says.

“We do meet them in prison. You could go to a community centre or something as well, and have these dialogues.”

Education is important for rehabilitation.

“Education is a right and it’s not a privilege,” says Dr Swirak. “Taking people’s liberty by putting them into prison is the punishment.

“Punishment beyond that, we know from research if we make punishment harsher, if we don’t provide education, if we don’t provide other rehabilitation services, we are not making things better for anyone, even for the victims’ families or for the outside community.

“At some stage people will come out, and what type of person do we want to come out? Someone who has engaged with learning and understands that they can make better lives for themselves and find new places where they can belong meaningfully and productively,” she says.

Dr Swirak would like to see more education for people after they leave prison.

Project Rebound in California is one example where this has worked well.

“They can prove that engagement in education after you come out of prison brings your recidivism rates nearly down to zero,” she says.

This is the only Inside-Out programme in the Republic of Ireland, and there are similar courses in Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University.

“We’d like these types of programmes to be offered in all prisons across the country. Because it makes a connection between people in the local prison and the local university.”