[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm truly delighted to welcome our guest today, Professor Reiko Hillyer, chair of the history department at Lewis and Clark.

Professor Hillyer, a pleasure to be with you today.

Great to see you again.

Nice to see you, old friend.

Old friend.

You are responsible for a short documentary film.

It's not that short, but it's incredible.

And before I ask you any questions, I'm going to urge all of our listeners and viewers to go to Google, wherever they stream content and search "Classroom 4", the number four.

It's a documentary short film that, chronicles the professor's, unique model of learning, that is students, at Lewis and Clark, and, system impacted incarcerated individuals together learning.

And this is something you've done for years and is finally visible to any viewer who wants to see how this groundbreaking course is taught.

So go check out Classroom 4, and congratulations on all the accolades it's been getting.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for lifting that up.

Let's start right there.

When you initially embarked on this revolutionary concept, did you think it would have the longevity that you've maintained of teaching a course inside of a prison?

And having students at Lewis and Clark blended in with students from the, prison population.

Do you think it would have these legs that it's had?

I want to make clear, that it, long predates me, and I am, it is not unique to me, in the sense that I was trained by the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Center, which is run by Lori Pompa and 25 years ago, she had this idea, along with, an incarcerated person who was collaborating with her to bring her criminology class inside the prison.

And, the long and short of that story is that she developed this pedagogy in collaboration with incarcerated people, that brings incarcerated people together with, free students, inside the prison to take class together and alongside each other as peers and equals, integrated together in that setting, producing a completely, as you say, revolutionary method.

And since she founded this center at Temple University, originally almost 25 years ago, she has run training, workshops, week long, very intensive trainings, which I have now been privileged enough to be able to co-run with her.

And now hundreds of faculty at universities, teach these kinds of courses around the country and even around the world.

And she would probably say she didn't think that it would have such legs, but what I love about the film is that I wanted to capture the magic of what happens in this encounter, and have it translate beyond the walls, because the principle behind Inside-Out is to break down the walls, to dissolve the barriers between inside and outside.

And we get to do that one step further, because of this wonderful film, directed by Eden Wurmfeld.

So I'm hoping that the film does translate, the magic of different kinds of people coming together in dialog, and further sort of remove the veil between the free world and, the world of incarcerated people.

So, this is the model you've been working with and you've taken it on the road, in screenings around the country over the past year, in diverse places.

What has been the feedback that surprised you most from the lay population that is, watching the film?

Hm... [sigh] Um... I think the most surprising feedback is the feedback I got from, someone the other day, who is a very politically engaged and thoughtful person, who said to me, I am not a prison abolitionist, and I could never imagine a world without prisons.

But this film gave me a glimpse into what it might be, and made me realize that not being able to imagine a world without prisons is a failure of imagination, not the success of prisons.

In other words, I really believe that that's part of what we're doing in that class, is to sort of create a kind of community that is forbidden outside.

And in that sense, it's kind of an act of abolition.

But I wasn't necessarily sure that people viewing the film would see it that way, because that word is so loaded.

And so, that to me was a transcendent, comment.

And I really appreciated it.

I know I asked you for a singular, experience to, characterize what what surprised you, and I'm grateful that you had that experience and shared it with our audience.

More broadly speaking, but also at a granular level of criminal justice reform and, how to reform a system that is, troubled in many ways still.

Has there been any specific insight you've taken with you on, how to do justice better in this country?

And that, of course, is a very broad question, -but it could be answered by you -Yeah.

in a very specific context, in a very specific state.

-what's your experience?

-Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I suppose there are a million ways to answer that question.

And if we had the answer, we might not be in the mess that we're in.

But I would say just drawing from my own experience and the belief system that has grown over time, informed by my own scholarly research, I think that one of the things that could really be useful is more contact between free people and incarcerated people.

I think that when we render incarcerated people increasingly so over the decades more invisible than we can be more prone to accept, fear mongering narratives or, you know, our compassion just doesn't have that reach.

But once you sit across from someone who's incarcerated and look them in the eyes and just talk to them as humans, you know, we really begin to appreciate just how manufactured the lines between us are.

Right.

And of course, people can learn about your scholarly account of what the system was like in A Wall is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century U.S., to put some meat on the bones of what you're describing, the way in which the system completely changed.

And I do want to ask you the historical origin of that change.

Of course, people talk about the war on crime generically in the 60s and 70s and, you know, the importing of, gangs and drugs.

But it predates that, right?

When do you say is the critical moment in the history that, this became the new normal, the mainstreaming of that wall?

Yeah, I actually find, I may have misunderstood the chronology you just gave, but I actually find that, the real thickening of the prison walls, by which I mean longer sentences, fewer opportunities for release through other means, such as parole, clemency, the demise of furlough, which used to allow people who are incarcerated out for hours or days, the demise of conjugal visits, which used to allow spouses and families to come inside the prison.

All of these features that allowed more fluidity between inside and outside, all of these features or practices, were changed in, about in the mid 90s, early 90s.

They are part and parcel with the tough on crime, lengthening sentences.

War on drugs, mandatory minimums.

But what they reveal is that criminal justice system or the criminal legal system is not just about sentencing.

It's also about changing the lived experience of people who are incarcerated.

In other words, people who are incarcerated for decades saw their conditions decline.

They saw their contact with the outside world disappear.

They saw the potential, the very plausible potential of having their sentence commuted by the governor almost automatically completely dissolved before their very eyes.

So what I do in the book is chart this thickening of the walls.

But in so doing, I've realized that something who are people who are incarcerated for a long time have already known, which is that over the past 40, 50 years, their conditions and their possibilities of being free have gotten worse.

Right?

So you can be 80 and have been done everything right and you're still considered dangerous.

So I don't want to just stop at the prison gates in studying how mass incarceration metastasizes and changes qualitatively, because what happens when people are exiled in that way is that it hardens our, you know, sense of difference from them.

We don't get to see their growth.

We don't get to see them change over time.

We don't get to see them in our communities.

Because they're no longer, you know, people serving very long sentences are not perceived as people who are potentially reintegrating into our communities.

They're in exile.

So when you talk about the dehumanization of system impacted people, but specific, specifically people who are, behind bars, committed crimes.

And in most cases, I guess more specifically, I'd ask you, in the history that you wrote, under what circumstances or why did it become acceptable to basically create that wall so high, so impenetrable, and, you know, and, to basically otherize or dehumanize the people in the system to that extent that they shouldn't have contact with the outside world?

Yeah, I don't have a definitive explanation for that, but the way I see it, it's part of a, it's a culmination of a long process that begins, as part of a long backlash against the freedom struggle of the 50s and 60s and other historians, have explored, the ways that, you know, conservative, resurgence in the 70s and 80s is in many ways, a counterrevolution against the gains of the freedom struggle and law and order not only becomes a rhetoric that can replace, more overtly racist language, but it also becomes a policy, that racial, you know, "facially neutral", can turn "civil unrest" into "crime" and then use, policing and sentencing to curtail, the democratic gains of the movement.

But I think what happens by the 1990s is we also have alongside all of that, an attack on the welfare system and the welfare state and the demonization of the poor alongside, the demonization of drug users, all painted with the broad brush as criminal and dangerous and parasitic.

And so any kind of, rehabilitative feature of a prison came to be seen as like, you know, the Cadillac driving welfare queen.

Like, why should we be giving any public amenities, to people who are undeserving?

And I think that the fact that, you know, that kind of language and, you know, revanchist, economic policy was going on at the same time, really gave a lot of heft to the idea, that people inside prisons should have the barest life.

And, also alongside the fear of crime, they're dangerous if you release them.

Right?

And, then you have the whole idea of sort of like, welfare cheats and revolving doors and people who are always just trying to game the system, the idea of fraud, becomes very, very prevalent in the language of Bill Clinton.

Right?

And so it's this sort of suspicion of all kinds of poor people and people of color, that I think culminates in a lot of this policy.

You know, you said it's a hard question to answer.

I think you've described the emotions, and the manipulation of, a public, very acutely, to understand the psyche and the psychology of what's going on here that led to this dynamic, which takes me back to your course.

Now, you say you're, you know, following the, methodology of, someone who invented this, course, interspersing, free students with system impacted ones.

You are at Lewis and Clark, where I also know this is practiced at Wesleyan, the Center for Prison Education.

These are ostensibly liberal institutions, that support rehabilitation, that don't want to lock people up and throw away the key.

And I imagine, you know, that even in these liberal institutions, there are people who maybe the parents of enrolled students at Lewis and Clark who are concerned by this.

And of course, this has been a thread of donors when they don't like the politics of something they'll threaten.

But I wonder, from your experience at Lewis and Clark and also, from any of your counterparts at Wesleyan or elsewhere around the country, has there been a deepening chill to disengage from this because of that very wall that you're describing?

People still not ready to push through that wall and want to, you know, don't want to accept the basic proposition of what you've done.

Mm hmm, mm hmm.

Luckily here, I think nothing has chilled as far as this kind of work.

My sense is that commitment to it has only grown as we, you know, are looking for hope as we seek ways of trying to build hope into our lives and find hope as a practice.

But I also think, you know, with all of this language of empathy being a weakness and compassion being a kind of social suicide, which is, you know, it is just I mean, talk about chilling.

I think there's all the more, movement, at least on this campus, to resist that.

I think that even if people aren't conscious of it, they may be craving opportunities to open their hearts in good faith and not be driven by just fear or bitterness, you know, anger.

And there are people who are maybe more conservative or skeptical.

But if they sign up to take the class, what they're doing is just simply saying, I have an open mind, and I would like to look behind the ideas that I hold and consider the people who are most affected by them.

And or I'm totally politically neutral about this, and what I really want is the experiential learning of getting out of my comfort zone.

My last semester as an undergraduate, because I'm about to enter the real world and everything has been very cozy and sheltered in my time on campus.

So there are different kinds of things that people can draw on it with different levels of intensity or political, you know, motivations.

There's also the status quo.

And the status quo is that as the carceral state has grown and grown.

That means and I don't have the number handy, and you probably have the latest data on this, but I think it's 1 in 3, or 1 in 4.

People have had contact with the carceral state, meaning they've, served a sentence or they've been accused of serving a sentence.

I mean, I think if you just tally all the people accused, it's probably more than one third, but it's a significant portion of the population, especially relative to other countries.

So, for those people questioning, why can't we have these mixed student courses, well, you know, that could easily be a neighbor, friend or family member.

What an amazing insight.

I mean, that is a really amazing insight.

And I don't know the numbers either, but one thing I will say from my experience anecdotally, and I suppose I could, you know, produce data over my years of teaching this, but, we think, first off, about the Lewis and Clark students being, you know, the privileged, sheltered ones and the incarcerated students being, you know, from rough backgrounds and "despite these differences," quote unquote, you know, people come together.

Well, it turns out a goodly number of our college students have had a family member, or a loved one incarcerated or their best friend from high school, or they, you know, or they're considering to be maybe they'll be a police officer and they're trying to decide whether or not that's what they want to do, you know, or their parents are in law enforcement.

Right?

There are folks in our college population who have that background.

And perhaps this class is one of the only places they can share it, right?

I mean, we talk about diversity at least some of us, you know, as being a value in a classroom, but we don't really talk about this kind of diversity.

It's not necessarily diversity you can see, and at the same time, there also people who are incarcerated who may have been in college.

Right?

So if you take away those walls, right, it may be that the kinds of things people find that they have in common, kind of realigns, you know, our assumptions.

I've definitely had students who have had family members incarcerated, who were either, you know, predisposed to be sympathetic because of that or they were, still very resentful, and angry or felt abandoned or what have you, and came to a greater peace because they spoke to people who were incarcerated who could have sort of served as stand ins for their family members.

So there was a lot going on besides the content of the class.

And to my earlier question about where this class, this model of learning is being modeled, do you have examples of, public institutions, that are also doing this?

Whether that's University of California, Davis, Berkeley, University of Nevada, Reno, because Lewis and Clark and Wesleyan, the two examples are private.

So is this happening yet on a public stage with public support?

It does.

I mean, you would have to go to the website, Inside-Out Center, I think, but I know that Indiana, University of Oregon, that's a public institution.

They have a huge Inside-Out program.

They're deeply embedded in, Oregon State Penitentiary in, Salem, Oregon.

I had a student come into my class in the Portland prison who had spent 22 years at OSP and took ten Inside-Out classes.

So, there are public institutions that continue to do this work.

One thing is, you're a one hell of a teacher.

I mean, you again, you're giving credit to other people.

But watching this and seeing the reaction of your pupils, students, fellow Americans, it's it was impressive.

And this leads me to ask a question about the Inside-Out formula for laypeople who might think, you know, I'm not a PhD or a masters, but I have a specialized skill that I think could be applicable.

Do you think this Inside-Out model, should be open to the public, basically, so that even if you're not affiliated with an educational institution, you could either, applied it to teach or apply to study, would that make you nervous?

Or is that something you think you'd support?

Well, there are different degrees of answering that I suppose, and one... And let me just put more texture on it to say, a retired lawyer, Yeah.

or retired plumber Right, right.

Yeah.

-or anyone, you know?

-Yeah.

I got you.

It just so happens that I'm trying to, promote or get funding for, arrange, the possibility of using the Inside-Out training as a method of training folks to teach in this way, but in the community, Drexel University has something like this called Side-by-Side.

We want to call it Face-to-Face.

But the idea would be that, you know, from our point of view as a college would be that we would offer a class in let's say, the philosophy of just and unjust wars and, half of the students would be veterans from the community, and half the students would be undergrads.

You know, or maybe it wouldn't have to be that overdetermined.

You could just be reading, you know, Plato or de Tocqueville or, you know, Frederick Douglass, for that matter, or developing, a choir.

Right?

So I think that we can bring this model to other kinds of community engaged, classes within the context of the university and as a dialog.

I mean, there are other methods out there, one other one that I've trained in is called Community Dialogs.

And this is a sort of a structured method of bringing different kinds of people together to, engage in really deep listening.

And, you know, there are times to argue and there are times to lecture, and there are times to also sit in a circle and deeply listen.

And that's what really makes this particular class special.

And anyone who is open hearted and can listen, respectfully listen, I think would be welcome in such an environment.

I think the short answer is you have to be credentialed to mediate, moderate, teach a course of this nature.

But you are not closed off to the possibility that people who do not have traditional, educational backgrounds as teachers or students could be, useful in this same model.

Right, I want to be clear that Inside-Out is a method that is trademarked and we can't just call anything Inside-Out and have it confused with the generations of people who've devoted thousands of hours to develop this, you know, but surely there are lessons to be taken beyond it that don't need to be trademarked.

-I mean, setting up exercises -Right.

where people are sharing personal experience and finding common bond, is a beautiful thing.

And I'm asking you specifically because if people do check out the documentary, they may want to become involved and not, and they're not presently -affiliated with a school.

-Right.

Right.

And they may think, wow, I think I could offer something as a teacher, or I could offer something as a peer, as to learn with people in the system.

Let me just ask you, as we close, the model you described of veterans and undergraduates, was that also motivated by a desire to reduce, polarization in our communities, and specifically the idea that we should have disparate geographies, talking to each other across different ideologies?

Absolutely, absolutely.

The idea of meeting each other, I mean, of course, this is the work that you've been doing, meeting each other on a human level.

And starting with respect and listening, really does, is a disarming thing that can open up, different kinds of conversation.

One of the things is that, in a conversation, are you communicating to persuade, or to argue, or to convince another person, or are you conversing to listen?

And both are valuable.

But I think that if you set up in a very structured way, in good faith, that kind of open inquiry and start with icebreaking questions that don't have to do necessarily with ideology, but with your favorite childhood toy, then you might find the currency to have a more, you know, connected honest conversation.

Professor Hillyer, thank you for the work you do.

-I encourage -Oh.

all of our viewers and listeners to check out Classroom 4.

Congratulations on that and everything you do.

Thank you.

Thanks for your time and your interest.

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