San Quentin education work results in award

Jody Lewen has only been out of college a few years, but she already making a big difference in the lives of prisoners at California's San Quentin Prison. She is director of the Patten University extension site at the prison, a unique program for California that allows prisoners to get an Associate of Arts degree in liberal arts. For that work Lewin will receive next week UC Berkeley's Haas Public Service Award.

While studying for her Ph.D. in rhetoric at Berkeley in 2002, Lewen became a volunteer instructor with the AA-degree college program at San Quentin. After years of immersion in literary theory, working behind bars at first came as a shock to her.

Subconsciously, she says, she expected the prisoners to be callous if not sadistic — yet inside San Quentin's gates she met intelligent, compassionate, and funny men.

It was this contrast that has inspired Lewen's efforts to not only provide quality education behind bars but to work with diverse interest groups toward genuine reform of California's prison system — which with nearly 173,000 inmates has the largest state prison population in the nation (with the highest post-release recidivism rate).

"Changing the criminal justice system has everything to do with how we perceive criminals,' Lewen says. 'We tend to oversimplify people in prison as evil incarnate, but they are human beings with complex, diverse histories, characters, emotions, and thoughts. They may seem like an abstraction, but they deal with the same life issues we do."

Lewen faces a litany of daily obstacles in her work: a shoestring budget, space constraints, heavy dependence on donated books, and a history of antagonism between key groups she interacts with, such as the prison guards' union and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

"Historically, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has not engaged in significant dialog with other interest groups," says Chuck Alexander, executive vice president of the CCPOA. "Thanks solely to Dr. Lewen and her zeal for an improved correctional system, we now meet regularly."

This free program enables prisoners (68 so far, come June) to earn a degree. The program was created after a 1994 congressional act excluded prisoners from receiving Pell Grants, the program is funded through the Prison University Project, which Lewen founded and directs.(UC Berkeley NewsCenter)