A thirst for education set Wendy Bariteau free when she was behind bars.
Bariteau always hated learning until it was presented to her in prison.
“There’s a lot of idle time. And idle hands, there’s a saying about that,” says Bariteau, who spent eight years incarcerated.
During that time, Bariteau became an advocate for her fellow inmates’ right to be educated. This strong form of empowerment allows the women to be self-sufficient on the outside.
“Most women who are incarcerated don’t have a high school diploma," says Bariteau. "You want to go on and be productive members of society and right now society is based on education. Right now, without an education and a criminal record check, the only thing you’ve got is construction work.”
Bariteau also stood up when there were funding cuts to a survivor abuse and trauma support program inside the maximum security prison in Quebec where she was incarcerated.
In doing her own survey of fellow inmates, Bariteau learned 96 per cent of them had been physically, mentally or verbally abused.
She fought to have the survivor support reinstated, at the risk of an undesirable price.
“They will transform your advocacy into a problem,” says Bariteau. “You will pay for it.”
Prison life isn’t that structured, other than curfew, reports Bariteau. There are activities you can participate in, or “you can spend all day sleeping if you want.”
In the absence of engagement, prisoners can succumb to the isolation from the outside world.
“I think sometimes (the prisoners) get into a rut and you need to be forced to do things, instead of staying in that circle of rut,” says Bariteau.
This is where the education angels come in and deliver what helped Bariteau “survive jail.”
Bariteau transferred from Quebec to the Fraser Valley Institution for Women in September of 2016 to finish her sentence.
Fortunately, two Capilano University social sciences professors, Kirsten McIlveen and Charles Greenberg, had jumped through bureaucratic hoops a year prior to volunteer their time to bring education to inmates inside the Fraser Valley prison.
Topics for the three-hour classes include gender roles and stereotypes, crime and punishment, addictions and colonization, and Canadian geography.
“I was in his geography class,” says Bariteau, pointing to Greenberg.
Student and teacher were reunited at CapU on a recent spring afternoon. The only difference is Bariteau is now on the outside and focused on her bright future, thanks to a teacher who looked past the shackles and saw her as a student.
The classroom setting inside the prison can be a distraction for the teachers.
Greenberg was initially jarred by the guards in the room and the fact there were no computers or other technology scattered about. Computers are banned from the prison because of their ability to connect to the outside world, as are atlases.
In this environment, the teachers revert back to an old-school teaching style. They bring in photocopied resource materials, pens and paper. Where there is a thirst for knowledge, the teachers can make it work.
Bariteau was inspired after taking a geography class.
“To me and whoever takes it, it’s a mind-opening experience,” she says, adding these classes are giving educational opportunities to women who might not have realized they had them.
The CapU instructors have built on the educational energy they created at the Fraser Valley Institution, where the classes have been well received by the inmates.
This year, in an interesting pilot project inspired by the Ontario-based Walls to Bridges program, three outside university students – one from CapU and two from UBC – were brought into the prison to study alongside the inmates, also known as inside students.
Right off the bat, these carefully chosen inside and outside student descriptors set the level playing field for the six-week Poverty, Inequality and Social Exclusion in Canada course being taught.
Kiren Aujla was one of the outside students. Her family showed “curiosity” when Aujla told them she planned to study in prison, “because it’s a world that’s very, very different from our own, but it mostly comes from a place of not knowing what to expect.”
Aujla quickly felt comfortable in her new learning environment at the Fraser Valley Institution. Once the security screening was over she was excited to find her friends in the class. The ages of the inside students ranged from the 70s down to the 20s.
“I made really lovely connections with a lot of them,” says Aujla.
It was very comfortable learning environment, attests Greenberg, who didn’t want to break up the chatter between the students who had become fast friends.
“(There were) people walking around with cookies. It was sort like a fun thing. That makes for a good learning environment. A nice comfortable atmosphere to talk about things,” says Greenberg.
Bringing everyone down to the same level is important, especially when you are introducing university courses, which can be intimidating for the inside students.
“We’re all looking at a textbook for the first time together,” says Greenberg. “This isn’t anything that we have read or studied before. So we’re all sort of entering the content together.”
Everyone at the prison has a donated textbook. And just like regular university, there are group projects.
Each group has an outside student who can access more resources beyond the prison walls. Aujla’s group explored the feminization of poverty, while the other teams looked at the racialization of poverty, and childhood poverty, respectively.
Being immersed in a prison setting while taking a class about social exclusion was almost surreal for Aujla, who witnessed insightful discussions from each inmate’s perspective. Fellow students shared their stories about social exclusion and marginalization, which brought to life what was in the textbooks.
“You can pull real-life experiences right out of that room,” says Aujla. “It really reinforces the idea that this is true, that it is happening.”
Indigenous people are over represented in the criminal justice system, McIlveen has observed. She recalls teaching a class about racialized poverty, when one inside student said “just so you know, there’s only 12 women in maximum security right now, but they’re all Indigenous.”
“Indigenous people have been imprisoned for so long, since the beginning of colonization, so it has become normalized to see First Nations in the jails,” says McIlveen.
Greenberg speaks to the coloration between education and the criminal justice system.
“The data is very clear that a lot of people when they get out of prison they end up going back to prison. A little bit of education in prison goes a long way in reducing those rates of recidivism,” says Greenberg.
But in order for inmate education to happen, stereotypes need to be broken and the outside community needs to get involved, say the advocates of the CapU pilot project.
“We need community awareness, we need community help (and) we need community involvement,” says Bariteau. “That’s the whole point of reintegration is having the community part of that reintegration. If you want to make the world right, you need community.”
McIlveen and Greenberg are hoping to soon see a memorandum of understanding in place between CapU, UBC and the Fraser Valley Institution to secure funding to establish a Walls to Bridges-type program, where there’s a one outside student to inside student ratio. In the meantime, a social exclusion and poverty course will be taught to 12 inmates at Mountain Institution, a men’s federal prison in Agassiz, this summer.
Aujla is continuing her global stewardship studies at CapU, which she says can help students figure out how to make the world a better place.
“I think I want to become a city planner,” she says.
Four months out of prison, Bariteau has big plans as well. She’s studying to become a paralegal, and eventually wants to work in the Senate.
Bariteau will also continue with her advocacy work for what she knows firsthand are invaluable lessons in prison.
“We can’t keep that population away from education forever,” says Bariteau. “Now I think I’ll be a perpetual student.”
