Loading

Writing a new self Story by Sam Bishop; UAF photos by JR Ancheta

Class helps Fairbanks inmates earn college credit — and feel more human

Ian Dodds handed out white paper sheets with five short paragraphs printed on them. It’s an unfinished piece, Dodds explained to the 10 men encircling a table at the Fairbanks Correctional Center.

Keys on chains jangled rhythmically off to Dodds’ right, in the hall approaching the classroom. Two officers in dark blue uniforms strode quickly into the education room, their eyes looking intently at the men.

Not to recognize them. To count them. Their lips moved silently.

Dodds’ words slowed, almost imperceptibly, but didn’t stop. He’d like some feedback about his writing, some constructive criticism, he told the other men in short-sleeved yellow jumpsuits. No pressure, though, you don’t have to respond.

The officers walked out. Several students shifted in their seats. Dodds, 44, lifted a heavily muscled and tattooed arm, passing a hand over his shaved head.

“Language is the manifestation of thought,” he began reading from the paper, his voice quiet, quick. He recalled the language of “a conversation I had in another place, lifetimes ago.”

Ian Dodds in January 2020 became the fourth person to complete the Area 111x writing course offered at FCC.

“At 10 years I was short and holding council with two ‘murder ones’ and a Tlingit that had a thing for hammers,” he read. These men faced “a grip of time” in prison.

“Ninety-nine years is a grip,” Dodds continued. “I’m not sure but I think that comes from the old term for a suitcase, like some of the old blues song lament — ‘I packed my grip.’ It means you gathered everything you had, the whole kit, and went about your way. Looking at 99, I suppose everything else falls away in life and that is your grip.”

Few of the men listening to Dodds in mid-December 2019, if any, faced a grip. But they all faced time “inside.” For the past two years, for reasons as varied as their crimes and incarceration times, they have met almost every Tuesday in the education room at the jail for this free college-level writing class — Area 111x.

Photo caption: From left, UAF English graduate student Greg Hindy, associate professor Sarah Stanley and professor Rich Carr talk after an Area 111x class in January 2020.

Inmates say the 1.5 hours a week spent in the jail’s three-room education center does far more than teach writing. It helps them feel human, connected and full of potential — even occasionally influential.

“This is an experiment in group therapy. This is learning another person’s perspective and empathy,” Dodds said in a January interview at the jail. “It’s an opportunity to change your life.”

Weekly attendance fluctuates, driven up and down by intersecting forces: transfers to prisons elsewhere, court hearings, attorney meetings, even an individual’s motivation level on any given day. Usually at least a half-dozen students attend, sometimes almost three times that many.

“This is an experiment in group therapy. This is learning another person’s perspective and empathy.”

Path continues ‘outside’

Steven Murphy showed up every week he could between October 2019 and January 2020. The writing work “helps my mind,” he said in a January interview at the jail.

“I like the constructive criticism. There’s people who care about each other and about the writing,” Murphy said. “We all took this class for different reasons, but we can all push each other to do the best we can.”

Murphy, 30, grew up in Fairbanks and attended West Valley High School but didn’t graduate. He earned a GED a few years after dropping out. He’s had multiple clashes with the law, and his most recent arrest, on theft charges, came in August 2019 — he said he got “sticky fingers” while drinking.

At FCC, Murphy saw a bulletin about Area 111x posted by C. Howard, the jail’s education coordinator. (She doesn’t use her first name).

Howard made space for the class starting in January 2018 after being approached by Sarah Stanley, a UAF English associate professor who now leads most sessions.

Stanley and other volunteers are part of a statewide group called the Learning Inside Out Network. LION, among other things, advocates for ways to connect people inside and outside prisons.

In January, Murphy was about to leave the jail for a supervised program through the state’s Wellness Court. He hadn’t completed Area 111x. But, because the class is portfolio-based, he hoped to continue writing and finish once he was back “outside.”

The Education Center inside the Fairbanks Correctional Center is home to many classes, including UAF’s Area 111x writing course.

That’s just the kind of path that Howard, Stanley and other LION volunteers hope more Area 111x participants at FCC will follow.

“On the outside, they call and say, ‘Dr. Stanley, I took that class from you in jail, remember? What do I do now?’” Howard said. “And she says, ‘You know what, you come here and meet me and we’ll get you to a counselor.’”

Stanley’s group has also created the LION’s Den in the Gruening Building, where students on the “outside” can get help with their writing for two hours twice a week.

“One of the biggest things to stop us from doing something is fear,” Howard said. “That fear is eliminated if we know there is somebody there waiting for us. So by having this college class and meeting someone, that fear is eliminated.”

Writing for relief

Dodds grew up near Houston, Texas, although his mother was from Nenana. He earned his GED while serving in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, based out of New York. That’s where he found himself at the end of his tour in 1997. He wouldn’t talk about his four years in uniform. Public records show the division deployed to Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia during that time.

“I pretty much lost my mind” after being discharged, Dodds said. He had post-traumatic stress disorder and separation anxiety, he said.

His next career, he said, focused on robbing drug dealers. High risk, “but I had trained for it,” he said.

Finding his way back to Alaska, Dodds was arrested for robbery and sent to the state’s Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward. He soon went into six months of “segregation,” or solitary confinement. He got out for a week and went back in for another six months.

“I started writing when I was in the hole,” he said. He did so to keep his sanity while he watched other inmates lose theirs. “You have a bunch of lunatics smearing feces on themselves and yelling 18 hours a day.”

The prison allowed no books in the hole, so he relied on his writing to transport him out of the place until his sentence ended.

In January 2019, Dodds was arrested again in Fairbanks. The state charged him with multiple crimes for breaking into a business and stealing weapons and a truck.

The Fairbanks Correctional Center, located off Airport Way on Wilbur Street, on a cold day in January 2020.

Trails to expression

Arriving at FCC, Dodds found the writing course. At first, it was hard to catch up.

“It was all butterflies and stumbling over my words,” Dodd said of his first attempts to participate.

New Area 111x students receive a dark blue folder adorned with a LION logo sticker. The folder contains a single sheet with questions to prompt writing, a booklet for journal keeping, a few articles about writing, a No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil stenciled with the LION name, and a sticker saying “Area 111x: If you’re lost, you’re here.” The printing costs are covered by a grant to LION from the UA system’s Faculty Initiative Fund.

The folder also contains a map of the four “trails” students will follow as they build portfolios of their writing. The “language trail” requires an essay that discusses the nature of a word. The “stories trail” requires a description of the student and his community. The “inside/outside expedition” leads to a proposal to collaborate with someone else. The “letters trail” produces a letter, written to a real person or entity, advocating for a specific change.

If they complete the portfolio, they’ll get college credits for WRTG F111x, Writing Across Contexts. “That’s the 111x experience right now,” Stanley said. “Those are the same assignments.”

Students who have completed high school or earned a GED can jump into the class at any point.

Dodds, now Area 111x’s fourth graduate, said writing comes naturally to him — “it just flows.” He enjoys playing with the rhythms. He instinctively employs active verbs.

But he found early on that people in the class had trouble deciphering his work, he said. “It was like decoding something,” he said. “It was too much, and it was off-putting.”

Stanley and Rich Carr, another UAF English professor who helps in the class, taught him to ground his work, he said. “She and Rich kept calling me back to it. You don’t want to appeal to just one person.”

Ian Dodds, a graduate of the Area 111x writing course at FCC, talks with Sarah Stanley, a UAF associate professor of English who often leads the classes.

In early January, after receiving his Area 111x certificate, Dodds was expecting a transfer to a facility in Wasilla where he would enter a treatment program for his PTSD and substance abuse troubles. Facing 17 years with five suspended, he hoped that completing the Wasilla treatment program would help cut his future time in prison.

He wants to return to Fairbanks and enroll at UAF.

Writing for change

“Ian, he’s a phenomenal writer,” said Daniel Crow, a fellow student. Unlike Dodds, Crow finds writing excruciating. He has trouble even getting past the punctuation on a single sentence, he said.

The 39-year-old Fairbanksan has no trouble talking, though. He forms rapid, articulate sentences sprinkled with unusual words like “didactic.” He noted that his adoptive grandfather was a UAF English professor.

Crow grew up in Fairbanks but has family roots in the Yukon River village of Circle. He has intense memories of violence from a very young age, which he said made it “heart-wrenching” to complete the story-of-self assignment for Area 111x. Of his five younger brothers, only one has never been to jail, he said.

“I’ve been tumbling through life,” he said. “I pick up things.” He was a cook and a freelance tattoo artist. In recent years, he did well enough financially to buy a 2006 Range Rover. As he drove it on the Old Steese Highway in March 2019, a trooper tried to pull him over for a probation violation. Crow accelerated, rolled the car and was charged with failure to stop. His case is “awaiting resolution,” he said in January.

Photo caption: Daniel Crow, a student in the Area 111x writing course at FCC, works on a computer in the Education Center.

Crow joined Area 111x a month or two after arriving at FCC. He said the course is invaluable for incarcerated people like him, and particularly Alaska Natives.

“One hundred years ago, my people didn’t speak English,” he said. “It’s really important to understand what’s written in front of them and not be intimidated.”

Such understanding can improve environments and relationships, he noted. Area 111x students have seen it happen.

An earlier Area 111x graduate, in a “letter of change,” asked jail officials for permission to paint several murals, first in the education area and then in other areas. The requests were granted. So, too, was his request to separate lights in the gym so early morning exercisers in one half wouldn’t illuminate the inmates in the other half, which is used for sleeping quarters in the overcrowded facility.

Howard said the well-researched letters catalyzed the changes.

“This is what usually happens when inmates want something: ‘I don’t know why the lights are on in the gym. It’s making me so mad. If I live anywhere else, this doesn’t have to happen.’ Does anyone listen to that? No,” Howard said. “The Area 111x teaches them, ‘This is how we act.’ How to be persuasive, but [also] how standard culture at this education level writes to each other.”

Reinforcing ‘regular people’

Stanley said the idea for Area 111x evolved from the earlier efforts of a UAF graduate student who founded a women’s writing group at the jail, which continues today. (Area 111x is only offered to men; Howard said there are too few women at FCC, and most stay too briefly, to sustain a similar class.)

Others heard about the effort to offer the course and joined the team, Stanley said. Several people with UAF’s eCampus, including Kendell Sadiik, Chris Lott, Jessica Armstrong and Chris Beks, helped drive the idea into reality. LION conferences, funded by the Faculty Initiatives Fund grant in November 2018 and April 2019, drew dozens of people and helped reinforce the momentum.

While Area 111x offers a way to earn UAF credit, the instructors volunteer. Stanley teaches Area 111x on top of the three classes required by her UAF faculty contract.

“If I think about it as a learning opportunity for me every week and not some kind of product I’m delivering, it’s healthier for me that way. And I think it’s true,” she said.

She enjoys the spontaneous social interaction with the students, an element of teaching that has declined with the move to online courses. FCC inmates can’t take those because the internet isn’t allowed inside. UAF has eliminated paper-based correspondence courses.

Area 111x also fits with Stanley’s personal and scholarly interests. She toyed with the idea of working with writers in jail as a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst 15 years ago. More recently, and coincidentally, her father, a Catholic deacon in her home town of Kansas City, began doing prison ministry.

“Advocating for better access to quality higher education is something I believe in,” she said.

But in a jail? Since starting the course, Stanley has encountered a few people who don’t like what she’s doing, who believe prison should be foremost a place of deprivation. Deprivation is core to a certain conceptual model of prison — it gives people strong incentive to behave lawfully.

“It doesn’t solve our problems by doing that,” Stanley said. While many prisoners have caused trauma for other people, their bad behaviors have roots in their own traumas, she said. Giving them nothing but four walls and barred halls increases the trauma and extends the cycle.

“It’s sick, and it just starts to get a lot more complex,” she said.

From left, Greg Hindy, Sarah Stanley and Rich Carr gather in the Education Center at the Fairbanks Correctional Center.

Howard, the education coordinator, said most inmates aren’t inside for life, so they need tools to reintegrate into society.

Howard served in the military after high school, raised a family with her husband and then worked in federal law enforcement. That experience led to a five-year stint as a state correctional officer.

When the education coordinator job came open two years ago, she decided she “wanted to see another side of the facility.” In addition to Area 111x, she now manages the jail’s GED program, which provides inmates with three hours of instruction every morning — essentially a small high school. Graduation rates have more than doubled under her watch.

Howard’s dual role as an educator and a correctional officer is unusual, but it gives her a broad perspective on the nature of inmates. Their problems often dissipate after entering prison, she noted.

“They have substance abuse problems. They have mental illness issues — either they’re not taking their drugs or they’re taking the wrong kind of drugs,” she said. “But when they’re in jail, there are a few who are odd ducks, but for the most part they are regular people who want to better themselves.”

In one early December session, four of the Area 111x students present either faced murder-related charges or were awaiting sentencing for murder. In three of those cases, the victims were women. Others in the class were charged with assault, burglary, robbery and theft. Their alleged actions had destroyed and upended others’ lives.

Stanley said she doesn’t dwell on her students’ alleged crimes or her feelings about those crimes. She’s working on their futures.

“Do I want to live in a world where people are judged by the absolute worst thing they did, forever? I don’t. So I don’t think about it,” she said. “We’re talking about metaphor. We’re talking about a word. We’re relating in that way.”

A transformative experience

“It seems like two metaphors,” Steven Murphy observed after listening to Ian Dodds’ piece on a “grip of time” during the mid-December meeting.

In the metaphor, the grip might represent either a container or the act of grasping. Or both at once.

Dodds nodded, staying silent as more students weighed in.

“You know, Ian, I always am a fan of your work,” said Daniel Crow.

The last lines in Dodds’ piece might be stronger in present tense, though, Crow said. Instead of “I was human. I had family. I was empowered by language,” it could be “I am human. I have family. I am empowered by language.”

While “workshopping” writing at four sessions from November 2019 to January 2020, many students offered such insights to each other. Some would simply share that they did or did not like a piece of writing, but Stanley urged them to give specific critiques, and most would.

No heads rested on the tables. Side conversations rarely disrupted the class. Banter ebbed and flowed.

“It’s not so easy for you guys,” a student teased, gazing around at the circle after Stanley described a more complicated and difficult assignment in mid-December.

Another student flipped him off.

“Just smile,” Stanley recommended.

“Oh, I meant to make a peace sign,” the flipper said.

“It’s so easy to get them confused,” the teaser responded.

Such moments offer a glimpse into how tension in the group might escalate, perhaps even to violence — always a worry in the jail. One student attending a January 2020 class had a fresh, deeply colored black eye.

Stanley said she hasn’t seen any fights in the class during the two years she has led it. “I feel totally safe there,” she said.

She credited the atmosphere in part to others involved.

“I think that has a lot to do with the education environment that Howard has helped design,” she said.

Also, yoga instructor Jody Hassel, whose class at the jail precedes Area 111x each week, has introduced the idea of “trauma-informed practices” from her work, Stanley said. Many Area 111x students attend yoga, and Hassel often joins the writing sessions afterward.

For a teacher, being trauma-informed means, in part, to refrain from direct orders, Stanley said.

“You don’t say, ‘Everybody get out and write.’ You give a lot of options,” she said. “You approach it more descriptively. You try to have an inquiry. You put an ‘s’ on things, so there’s never just one way of doing things. That’s fun, and we celebrate that.”

Dodds said Stanley’s approach worked for him. “She listened to me, whether I was right or wrong. She let me speak.”

That’s a transformative experience for inmates, Howard noted.

“This one single class changes how they think about themselves,” she said. “They can say, ‘I’m a college student. I finished a college course. I have my student ID.’ They become more than they were before.”

Update: The Learning Inside Out Network received the 2020 University Professional and Continuing Education Association West Region Engagement Award. LION is being honored at the 2020 UPCEA West Region Virtual Conference, Oct. 12-14, 2020. Registration is free and open to everyone at UAF.