Inside-Out / Outside-Inn

Last night was the last full meeting of the Inside/Out Program at the Minimum Security Prison
& we worked so hard on various componants of a new re-entry program. I felt lossed when we left as some of the men had walked with us down to the gates to say good-bye .
May 10 is our last program with them.

I have most occasions walked thru the security gate up to the classroom module by myself however on this occasion 2 others from the program had waited it for me & we'd walked together- after havining moved thru the high gated walked walk with huge round barbed wire placed on the top, we came upon 3 inmates feeding pets from the inside.
almost up against the wall is a creek. Prisoners feed the birds from inside the wall by forcing thier hands thru the fence and leaving saved bread crumbs. This time they were crounched down on their knees feeding a tame Beaver that had swum up the creek.

" The gate slams shut, the key turns in the lock, and suddenly, the students and I are in a world that is no longer comfortable or predictable. This kind of learning changes lives -- it disturbs where we are comfortable, challenges what we thought we knew. This is "Inside-Out" or, by its more formal title, "The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program: Exploring Issues of Crime and Justice Behind the Walls. Having class inside of a prison is compelling - an experience that's hard to shake. And that is one reason we do it."

with the exception of some other programs thru the Peace and Justice Center I don't think I have experienced such a self and personal altering program as Inside/Out. . I looked back at one inmate almost in tears.

I don't believe that our current criminal system address the re-entry needs of any of our incarcerated men, women and teens. Certainly not evey by a long shot. We are simply warehouseing people - to forget them and maked them our dissapeared ghosts but at some time most of them do return back into our communities have had not intervention in the least but simply doing time. By then they have become conditioned to life. A life without connection. We are doing our communities and ourselves a grave disservice by not addressing the issue head on.

1. Book: Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence ( International Reconciliation Movements) by Andrew Rigby

Food For Thought

Excert from the above in the Preface- Page One.

" Later on I read Max Weber's essay, "Politics as a Vocation," and recognized his distinction between the two ideal types of ethical systems to be pursued in the world of politics: the ethic of ultimate ends or conviction, characterized by an uncompromising commitment to a set of values and ideas, and the ethic or responsibility, which acknowedges the need to be guided in one's political conduct by an awareness of what is practically possible within the world as it is and the parameters of existing conditions. two modes could act as fallible guides to action.

The ethic of conviction can lead to the belief that the good end justifies morally dubious means, a path that can lead to the Gulag and the concentration camp; or it can lead to a distain for all but the purest of means and a consequent failure to resist immediate evils in any effective mannner.

The Pathway directed by the ethic of responsibility has equally great pifalls. you campromise once, then anoother time, and you are on the slippery slope of chosing between relative evils, with all vision of what ought to be driven from your mind.

Hence the ongoing problem of trying to figure out how to live in the world-as-it-is, while trying to bear witness to a world-as-it-ought-to-be."