Our experience in teaching neuroscience in the utmost security prison

Fifty minutes north of Manhattan by train lies in the singing attached singing, which is a maximum security prison for men. Sing Sing is one of the oldest and most famous prisons in the United States. Huge stone blocks and thorny walls sit on a hill overlooking the Hudson Valley. Outside of heavy metal gates, there is a group of students, largely invisible for the rest of the country, and obtained their university degrees. Every Monday afternoon, two of us take the train, pass through these gates, and spend two hours teaching a chapter “Introduction to Neuroscience” for these students.

Teaching comes in prison with many challenges, but it was one of our most prominent career. Here we describe our experience as post -PhD colleagues at Columbia University in New York City, which offers education at Sing Sing, in partnership with Hudson linkNon -profit organization that offers university programs in various prisons in New York State, and The Justice Center in ColombiaAn organization that seeks to change how to deal with justice through education, politics and research.

American prison system and education

The United States is a nation of collective prison. There are about 1.9 million people behind bars in the country, and 14 % of adults have a member of the direct family who were imprisoned for at least a year. This crisis has an impartial effect on low -income persons, especially in black and Latin societies, which are affected by systemic racism and inequality that leads to high rates of detention and condemnation, and the most severe provisions. Hudson Link and other organizations across the country are trying to disrupt the course and imprisonment of societies by providing higher education opportunities for detained individuals. Statistically, education has a tremendous effect. In the United States, 67 % of the formerly imprisoned people return to prison within three years of their release, while less than 2 % of Hudson Link graduates.

We know our course through the University of Colombia Prison education program. The official credits of this program are calculated to the degree of Associa’s and Bachelor. The diplomas granted inside the prison are exactly the same as those granted abroad. Consequently, our mission as trainers is to provide the same quality and level of education for our students while working within the restrictions of the prison preparation.

Enter prison

To enter Sing Sing every week, we check our phones in a warehouse and then wait in front of the heavy gate until it is called to check the security. Above us, she reads a decorated mark “Through these doors, some of the finest reformist professionals in the world pass.” The security is similar to those at the airport, but our clothes have been examined: only loose professional clothes can be worn; Bold jewelry is not allowed, nor anything green, which can be confused in prison costume. Our property should be transferred in clear bags for imprisonment so that the contents can be examined for the smuggler. We receive a pool on our hand, which will be examined when we get out of prison. Then we move to the school building on a small bus, and we drag three minutes away. We confirm that every step in this process is precautions that are formed through lessons that are educated by education.

In the semester

Preparation begins a long time before we enter the classroom. We are not allowed to take any technique in prison. This is a challenge for students, who cannot use Google or ChatGPT, and for us, because we are used to teaching with presentations and video shows (how can you connect the vast neurons to chalk?).

Moreover, all materials must be provided months ago to approve them by the prison leadership. To address these restrictions, we have created a school book dedicated to the class, where each class is a different lesson (such as the engine system, emotion and the use of animal models), and there is sufficient information for students to learn materials even if the class is canceled or shortened (which are often). Once we are in the semester, we teach everything using the blackboard, then clarify the homework, to be collected in the following week. We have no way to communicate with students outside the classroom, so the comments course is slow: by the time they receive the comments, they have already provided another task. Learning about the brain tends to ask more questions than he answers – we are constantly trying to achieve a balance between adhering to the planned materials and going to an interesting side endeavor that causes the student’s question.

Students

We taught in both Sing Sing and Taconic Correctional Facility (Medium Security Prison), and students are the best we have done with them at all. The ages of students range in the ages of in the early twenties to the late 1960s, and their sentences may range from less than 5 years to more than 50 years. One may try to guess (or actively discover) what circumstances led to these long sentences. However, for us it does not matter for us: we have found that every student is warm, laser and curious. There are no deviations from phones or laptops – a teacher’s dream. One of the main challenges is how to teach an intense scientific path for students with various educational backgrounds and live experiences. We have not solved the problem, but we create home duties sets that partially test the knowledge obtained in the classroom, and to partially provide students with an opportunity to apply their knowledge and creativity to design experiences.