Teaching Sex in Prison

From a distance, the red brick building with the white steeple and belfry looked like a 19th century private school, but, upon closer inspection, the barbed wire and barred windows revealed more of its true nature.

At the time, Coxsackie Correctional Facility was a medium security prison housing predominantly late adolescent boys 16–21 years of age. I was their “Professor” — a 21-year-old instructor in a Prison Education Program — armed with a weekly videotape of a real professor giving a lecture and responsible for leading the subsequent discussion. However, to them, I was the sole pedagogical authority; it was my classroom, albeit behind bars.

I am pretty sure they had no idea I was an age-related peer; they called me “Teach” or “Professor” and I dressed and acted the part. Initially I was very conscious of how far apart we were in terms of life experience. However, as I got to know them better it became clear to me that the space between my life and their lives was hair-thin: different in context and privilege, but more alike as young men than we would ever have imagined. We both sought security and identity with the tools we had available to us: energy and enthusiasm and curiosity. Irrespective of our different backgrounds were all trying to manage our impulses and negotiate the boundaries between our childhood narratives, our imagined futures, and realities of the worlds in which we lived.

The classroom was in a ‘school wing’, requiring me to enter the prison, get searched, and, escorted by one or more correction officers — CO’s — pass through a series of double locked passageways. Every hallway was a dead-ended in a locked door: open locked door, step into a vestibule with another locked door, lock door behind, unlock next door, step forward, lock door behind, keep going down the hall to the next locked door, watch your step, watch your step, don’t stare.

The passageways were usually lined with inmates in various activities, most often waiting for mess or mail call or to enter some locked space — raucous, animated, supervised by CO’s who herded them like sheepdogs. I never saw the cells they lived in; they were in another part of the building.

Another locked door into the school wing, and then into my classroom where I was also locked in. The inmates were brought in after I was settled; a group of CO’s remained in the hall for the duration of my class, the classroom door was closed but unlocked during class in case they needed easy access. Gruff and humorless as we walked the corridors, it was clear they resented the fact that these kids were ‘in school’; any group laughter would inevitably result in a CO sticking his head into the room instantly breaking the mood.

I repeated similar patterns teaching adults at Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch and at Greenhaven, a maximum-security facility that looked the part: massive walls and turrets. Also at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, at the time the only women’s prison in New York.

This was a college-credit-possible course. The subject: human sexuality.

Yes, I taught sex in prison.

My students were self-selected, the cohorts less heterogeneous than the general inmate population in terms of behavioral control and focus. While few in the Coxsackie crew had finished high school (and their academic skills, as reflected in things like their handwriting, showed it) in no way did this reflect their native intellectual vitality. The adults were more likely to have a diploma or GED and be enrolled in the degree program. However, everyone was expected to do treat the class as if they were: learn the material, participate in discissions, take the tests, pass.

The curriculum was grounded in the biological basis of human sexuality: anatomy and physiology, puberty and hormones, menstruation, conception, pregnancy and fetal development, birth control and abortion, sexually transmitted diseases. The images on the video were often explicit; and I would occasionally stop the video and hold images in place so I could teach around them; inevitably I’d see the CO’s staring through the chicken-wire reinforced windows to get a look at the medical illustrations of genitals on the screen.

I will never forget the lively debate that took place in at Greenhaven — a class that included more than a few long-termers — about ‘natural childbirth’. I just sat back and let them have the floor as they passionately took positions on the benefits of Lamaze on children’s long-term development. There was another intense conversation about hormones and how they worked, using the phrase “lock and key” before I even raised the analogy.

Despite the approved science-based curriculum, we knew you can’t really talk about conception and contraception without talking about intercourse. Nor can you have any authentic conversation about the differences between sex and gender without someone raising issues of social constructs, sexual preferences, and orientation.

Those conversations always took place in the context of ‘outside’ life: spouses, friends, family, and lovers. In two years of teaching at four different facilities, the inmates never raised or addressed the issue of sex in prison, even during classroom discussions of masturbation and homosexuality. It was not my place to ask or prompt them. The women were more open about their relationships with fellow inmates, but from the perspective of trust and connection not physical expression.

One semester I organized a co-ed class, busing male inmates from Taconic Correctional Facility to the closely neighboring Bedford Hills. Everyone was so appreciative of the opportunity to have some appearance of outside life. The men were remarkably respectful; the women had a chance to make their voices heard about sex-role stereotypes and male misconceptions about things like menstruation. The curriculum brushed against the idea of rape as a crime of power and control, not sex but the students steered away from taking it up as the basis of a broader classroom discussion.

At Greenhaven, men much older than I, many of whom had served decades, used aspects of the curriculum to retrospectively analyze their lives, sharing stories and aha! moments provoked by the topics at hand.

However, despite our time together, and the topics under discussion, much remained unsaid; we never discussed why anyone was doing time.

Once Coxsackie went on lock-down during one of my classes; violence had broken out in another part of the facility. The school wing doors were locked and a smaller group of CO’s remained in the hallway. We were held over time, so some of us made small talk while other students huddled in small groups. After a while one group came up and handed me a torn piece of cardboard with some words written on it. It was a “pass” — written in big letters at the top — to protect me in case things got heated or I got caught up in some drama; they told me I could show it to other inmates, and they would know I was “cool.” While a little later I was rapidly hustled out of the facility by a small phalanx of CO’s; I sensed no risk but was grateful for their discipline.

I can’t say I did anything specific to earn anyone’s trust. Looking back, I was artless, unconsciously authentic. I knew some things, and was completely open to sharing, but at the same time I was — again unconsciously — communicating how genuinely and nonjudgmentally interested I was in their lives.

Years later, whether it was the two different AA meetings I attended while in medical training — one in an inner-city church basement, the other in an affluent suburban community center — or working in homeless hotels as a public health physician, it was always very clear to me that while two groups may appear superficially different, it is usually a matter of context and privilege, and the space between our lives is, in reality, hair-thin.