By Jen A. Miller
The criminology class taught by Stephen Metraux, PhD, sits in a circle of plastic chairs, cafeteria tables pushed to the side. Students in bright skinny jeans and Greek Week t-shirts are interspersed with others in button-down shirts and jeans or dress pants. Together, they act out a scenario in which they take on the roles of offender, victim, police officer, and other interested community members and decide the fate of a young woman who robbed an elderly woman. In this role play, the class acts out an alternative approach to sentencing called restorative justice. The discussion that follows is lively as the students reflect on what they went through and debate whether restorative justice could work in a real life setting.
What’s different about this introductory criminology class, though, is that the class is taught in jail. Half the students are enrolled at the University, and the other half are incarcerated in a work-release program.
Dr. Metraux leads the University’s first class in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, a national program that aims to have students on both sides of the law share perspectives and better understand each other and address myths about each other. He started working with the program in 2005.
The program started nationally in 1997 at Temple University, and it now involves nearly 200 classes and 5,000 students in 35 states and 100 colleges and universities.
For this first University of the Sciences entry into the program, the University students—“outside students”—interested in the course had to meet with Dr. Metraux to make sure they understood what would be asked of them and that they were appropriate students for this kind of course. Prison students—“inside students”—were chosen with the help of the Philadelphia Prison System and prison social workers.
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“The class brings a group of undergrad college students and people who are incarcerated together,” said Dr. Metraux, associate professor and interim director of the healthy policy program. “It’s a situation where the process of the class is as important as what is actually taught. Both sides have a lot of misperceptions of each other.”
Dr. Metraux’s academic and research focus of study is public health, specifically homelessness, which touches on many broader public health issues. Ninety-eight percent of the persons incarcerated reenter the community, “which is a lot of times a difficult transition. Often they’ll end up becoming homeless, and a lot of them will be reincarcerated if the transition goes wrong,” said Dr. Metraux.
“The class is really interesting,” said Caryn Robinson PharmD’11 who is also earning a minor in social sciences. “It provides a lot of different views on things that you wouldn’t get in a normal classroom.”
“I wanted to get an insight on the system,” said Alexander Long, an inside student. “I’ve been trapped in the system half my life. I am a product of my past and will continue to be a product of my present unless I change. I’m blessed to be in this.”
At the end of the role-playing scenario, the class hadn’t come to a concrete solution on the fate of the fictional burglar, or whether or not restorative justice would work, but it did prompt a discussion about how some parts of restorative justice could be applied to the system already in place.
Dr. Metraux said that, so far, the class has been a success, especially for the first time it’s being taught. He hopes to teach the course again in spring 2010.
“I’ve never taught a class where the enthusiasm has been that high. The outside students had perfect attendance,” said Dr. Metraux.
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