“I had six kids in my class—and all six of them were in for one type of murder or another,” history teacher Ed Baruch said.
Murderers, rapists, violent and untrustworthy people… These are the stereotypes for adult prisoners. However, many prisoners are still juveniles, and they need to be educated while they are incarcerated.
East teachers Heather Burek and Ed Baruch both taught in prisons for juveniles.
According to both teachers, prison education offers an effective opportunity for juveniles and young offenders to continue their studies.
Baruch has worked at prisons in Colorado and England.
When Baruch was working in England, he taught in a Category B prison, or a maximum security prison. The kids were in for many violent crimes.
“In the facility in England you had to go through metal detectors,” Baruch said. “If I wanted to go into my classroom or the education facility, I’d have gone through about seven or eight different forms of security.”
A question often asked of high school students who have been incarcerated is whether the rehabilitative experience of prison education has improved their sense of morals.
“The data in England and in the US is that the majority of kids who are sentenced reoffend,” Baruch said. “In England, it was about 75 percent of the young offenders reoffending. They go out, I see kids leave, and they come back a month later.”
Baruch said that when students leave prison without a high school diploma and with criminal records, it is a challenge to reform.
“I think some of them become institutionalized pretty young,” Baruch said. “If you’re all of a sudden in and out of a prison when you’re 15 or 16, then you’re kind of used to it and that’s life. And all of a sudden being outside of a prison is a little weird because you don’t have the skills to deal with that.”
High recidivism rates in juveniles prison also signal a self-perpetuating cycle of crime.
“[Oftentimes], [kids] would just get back into prison,” Baruch said. “And that’s where [they’re] most comfortable, unfortunately.”
Burek taught in the Department of Juvenile Justice of South Carolina at Birch Wood High School.
According to Burek, although there are several successful cases where young prisoners “learned their lesson,” many juveniles who enter prison school often end up worse off than when they entered.
“Every day they’re living with people who might be good at the crime they committed. They might learn better skills,” Burek said. “Instead of just shoplifting a lot, they might learn how to break into a car. They might get better [at crime], and so the recidivism rate was sometimes higher than it needed to be.”
However, from Burek’s experiences, the kids she taught are not necessarily “bad.” Burek always felt safe in her class because her students would protect her.
“They changed my view of people that are incarcerated. A lot of times, people are in the wrong place at the wrong time where people make wrong decisions,” Burek said.
Burek emphasized that many juveniles are not inherently inclined to make wrong decisions, but rather might be misguided due to their upbringings, especially if they come from a family with a history of crime.
“As children, you’re raised by whoever you live with [to learn] what is right and wrong,” Burek said. “If you have a family who teaches you that drug dealings are right, you don’t know any better until you are in trouble with the law.”
Juvenile prisoners, when making decisions, tend to only consider taking care of their immediate family without regard for the social consequences of their actions, according to Burek. Her goal was to try to help steer them back to the right path.
“They would deal drugs because they needed to feed their family,” Burek said. “But they were not thinking about ruining other people’s lives. And so they just need to understand that they must think about other people too, so it can make everybody better.”
Image by Linda Li/The ECHO
