Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program inspires PhD student Hannah Cowles

Hannah Cowles

Oct. 28, 2009  - When others were thinking of beach getaways in June, Hannah Cowles was preparing for a trip, too. Except Cowles didn’t need beach towels or sunscreen where she was headed – a maximum security prison near Philadelphia, Pa.

Cowles, a PhD student in the Indiana University School of Social Work, was so taken with a course on an initiative called The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, she decided to become a certified teacher of the program by attending the program’s National Instructor Training Institute at Temple University and Graterford Prison.

Inside-Out was founded in 1997 by Lori Pompa, a member of the Criminal Justice Department at Temple University. The program is built around the idea “that incarcerated men and women and college students might mutually benefit from studying crime, justice, and related social issues together as peers,” according to the program’s website.

Cowles had been looking at courses for the spring semester when she spotted a class on the prison exchange program and decided to take it as it fell within her area of interest. The class was taught by Susan B. Hyatt, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at IUPUI. Hyatt, along with Roger Jarjoura, an Associate Professor at the School of Public an Environmental Affairs, co-founded the Inside-Out Indiana at IUPUI. Little did Cowles know the course would ignite a new passion and research interest for her doctoral degree.

During the spring semester, Cowles and other classmates from IUPUI went to the Indiana Women’s Prison on Indianapolis’ near-eastside. There, they studied alongside women incarcerated in the facility who agreed to participate even though they wouldn’t earn any credit. “They were doing it just for the sake of doing it,” Cowles said.

Cowles’ group decided to design a program aimed at individuals serving lengthy sentences. “People with sentences of 10 years or longer don’t have access to services,” she noted. The group put together a program that would address things like substance abuse, grief, appropriate relationships.

The experience left its mark on the IUPUI students, Cowles said. “For the outside students, it blows their minds away, the kinds of people being put behind bars and what they have to offer,” she said.

One of the “outside” students who took the course became a police officer upon graduation. “She said for every arrest she made or interaction with an offender, it would be burned in her brain these women who were sitting there and how they were treated,” Cowles recalled. The student indicated she “would act with that (memory) in the back of her mind as a police officer from that day forward.”

Cowles was so taken by the model that it changed her mind on the types of people who were incarcerated that she had felt comfortable working with up to that point and it opened a door to an area of research she now wants to focus on.

Cowles worked as a juvenile probation officer for three and a half years in DuPage County, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. The experience was eye-opening to say the least.  “I saw minority youth getting handed out harsher sentences and being held to a higher level of accountability than wealthy white families. That really upset me,” Cowles noted.

Cowles, who earned her MSW degree while working as a probation officer, realized she wanted to find a way to have a bigger impact on the criminal justice system than she would as a probation officer. Now, she sees research opportunities on the prison exchange program as allowing her to do just that.

“I never worked with adults or women,” Cowles said. As a probation officer, she found

boys easier to work with and even shied away from girls. “So the course was a real opening of my mind to the possibilities of working with adults and women.”

In essence, Cowles described the model as creating an opportunity to have a learning experience with people with whom you would not normally share a classroom. “What’s interesting about the model is it is not content specific. You can plug in any area of interest to the model and teach it.”

When the spring semester class ended, Cowles decided to pursue training that would allow her to teach a class based on the model and paid $2,000 to travel to Philadelphia to attend the prison exchange program’s training institute. As part of the training, Cowles visited the county jail in Philadelphia. “It was just a sea of men. I’ll never forget it.”

At Graterford, Cowles met with men incarcerated there who were members of a think tank who work with the Inside-Out program. “All of them except for one are lifers,” Cowles noted. One man who worked with Pompa to develop the program sees the program as his legacy. “Without it, he doesn’t know what he would have put his energy toward,” Cowles said.

The issue of young people being sent to prison for the rest of their lives is one that particularly interests Cowles. “How can we get to the people given long sentences as children and still be able to give them avenues of worth and value,” Cowles said. “I feel this program does that, it gives them an opportunity to give back, to interact with people they wouldn’t normally be able to.”

Cowles is working to develop a syllabus for a course to be offered this spring.