A teacher behind bars
I teach. Admittedly, it is not a profession that most people will wonder too much about. In the years that i have taught, I have rarely been asked about my job and my experiences teaching. Not too long ago, I got involved in teaching on my institution’s degree program in a local prison. Curiously, people asked questions about it from day one. Recently, even the Chancellor asked about it. That got me thinking. What exactly about the prison that fascinates people ad peaked their interest? Apparently, my colleagues who also taught there were asked about their experiences teaching in prison.
I thought long and hard about it. I took a closer look at the prison the next time i went there on university business. This is what I came up with.
The prison is a curiosity in this context because we were not prisoners. We went in and we came out in the same day not after years. The prison is hidden away, out of sight, almost. If you drive past it near Kajang, you will probably not even notice that it is there. It is a place of rumours: we hear of happenings in prison from people who went in, from politicians who went in, from guards usually passed on to us through media. we rarely get the chance to get first hand accounts of the place. Beyond rumours, we have myths and fractured accounts. In short, just enough information to make us wonder, even fear but not enough to satisfy our curiosity, only enough to fuel our apprehensions and misgivings.
The prison is where the state takes people away, hide them away for years. It is where the state exacts society’s right to justice on perpetrators of misdeeds: to punish on our behalf. For many, if not most, of us, the souls behind those bars are bearers of generic identities, prisoners, convicts, pesalah. Some of these people, we saw for a brief moment when the television focussed on them leaving the court. We read about them, what they did, and the punishment the court bestowed on them but we rarely know them as persons. Deep inside, however, we know that they are persons with names, identities, histories, loved ones and emotions. So, somewhere deep inside us, we wonder what happens to these people once those metal doors close. We want to know beyond the abhorrent deeds, beyond the labels and beyond the myths.
So what was it like teaching behind bars. Firstly, the Kajang prison is a complex comprising four different prison buildings and several other buildings. To enter, you first have to register at the main entrance complex. You then take your visitor’s pass and drive to the relevant prison. That is through the main doors, turn right then drive past the drug prison and women’s prison. You will come to the main administration building which looks very much like a school building. Park you car somewhere and then make your way to the cafe in front of the building. Just sit there for a while to wait for the shift change. There will be a siren and soon after that, a crowd of prison guards will exit a fort-like door complex. Observe close their behaviour when they first exit. They will come to the cafe, order a coffee or tea and possible some food. Many will light a cigarette or two. IN a few minutes, it is as if a knot is unwound. Their behaviour when they leave the cafe is starkly different from the time they first exit the building.
The prison school is actually also the juvenile and remand prison. One half the the prison building has been converted to become a school – of sorts. TO get to it, you need to enter the fort-like doors which had two massive metal doors on opposite ends of the building: the doors will only open one at a time. In the fort, you have to leave your things in a locker, this includes you phone, wallet and anything sharp. Your bags will be checked and you will be patted down. A guard will then escort you and your group if you are not alone, out the rear door into the first courtyard. You walk through it and come to a gate that lets you into a second courtyard where a hall is located. Then you walk uphill across the courtyard and come to concrete wall. The door has inch thick steel bars. Get through that and you finally come to the prison school.
Inside, the classes are library were once cells. The beds and the latrine have been removed and replaced with tables, chairs and white boards. The library even has a projector and air-conditioning. There are other classes there. The Ministry of Education provides reading classes for the illiterate, UPSR, PMR, SPM and STPM classes. Then there are a few of the prisoners doing distance learning courses.
Teaching in the prison school is certainly different. Firstly, there is a constant sense of impending claustrophobia which I had to get over. Then, there is the presence of the guard outside the door at all times. They also have a head count every hour which they could ‘muster’.
The student themselves do not really look any different from any other classes of their peers, except for their colour coded uniforms. Their uniforms reflect the length of their stay inside. I found them a lively and fun-loving bunch. I would even call them a good bunch of kids. Perhaps the best way to describe them would to call them a group of bright young individuals who had committed something stupid either intentionally or unintentionally and that resulted in their incarceration. But, I was not there to judge them on their crime nor to comment of their incarceration, I was there to teach them what I could. That was exactly what I tried to do.
In class they were, as I said before, fun-loving and lively but again a little observation is needed. Sometimes, when I assign them some work and they got on with doing it, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The classroom is almost a haven where the students are able to be ‘normal’ students for a brief moment. Outside the classroom doors, every single one of them become a different person. The different is very subtle: the way they move, talk, the words they say, even the way they stand and sit, one needs to observe closely. I think the biggest problem in teaching them is the lack of material and the lack of access. I imagined that I was teaching pre-internet age class. They do have access to computers and the net but very limited. All the possessions they have had to fit into a footlocker which ruled out too many books.
IN short, we had to make due with what we had and made the most of them. Drain every possible use of the material we had. To teach there, a teacher, particularly at tertiary level, had to know what he or she was doing because there was no falling back on instant access to off-site reference.
In the end, teaching there involves leaving behind all one’s preconceptions of what a prison is. You would need to embrace the place and the people for who and what they are and move beyond it. The students are young individuals who need to be educated and you are sent there to do just that. It helps if you can turn the classroom into something fun, and I think I managed to do that. Their grades were not great but they got by. In the end, its all about remembering why you became a teacher in the first place. The best part of it is that their sense of humour is still very much intact, which was a great blessing but to me and to them.
Someone asked me, “what’s the point? They are prisoners.” I thought, that is exactly the point. They are paying their dues to society and the state, society on the other hand had its own obligations to them: they need education and to learn, and I have been given the responsibility to do just that. What happens to them in the future, what they can or will do with what they learn, all that only Allah knows. Its about carrying out one’s own responsibilities not about judging others. Its about being a human being and a teacher.
I thought long and hard about it. I took a closer look at the prison the next time i went there on university business. This is what I came up with.
The prison is a curiosity in this context because we were not prisoners. We went in and we came out in the same day not after years. The prison is hidden away, out of sight, almost. If you drive past it near Kajang, you will probably not even notice that it is there. It is a place of rumours: we hear of happenings in prison from people who went in, from politicians who went in, from guards usually passed on to us through media. we rarely get the chance to get first hand accounts of the place. Beyond rumours, we have myths and fractured accounts. In short, just enough information to make us wonder, even fear but not enough to satisfy our curiosity, only enough to fuel our apprehensions and misgivings.
The prison is where the state takes people away, hide them away for years. It is where the state exacts society’s right to justice on perpetrators of misdeeds: to punish on our behalf. For many, if not most, of us, the souls behind those bars are bearers of generic identities, prisoners, convicts, pesalah. Some of these people, we saw for a brief moment when the television focussed on them leaving the court. We read about them, what they did, and the punishment the court bestowed on them but we rarely know them as persons. Deep inside, however, we know that they are persons with names, identities, histories, loved ones and emotions. So, somewhere deep inside us, we wonder what happens to these people once those metal doors close. We want to know beyond the abhorrent deeds, beyond the labels and beyond the myths.
So what was it like teaching behind bars. Firstly, the Kajang prison is a complex comprising four different prison buildings and several other buildings. To enter, you first have to register at the main entrance complex. You then take your visitor’s pass and drive to the relevant prison. That is through the main doors, turn right then drive past the drug prison and women’s prison. You will come to the main administration building which looks very much like a school building. Park you car somewhere and then make your way to the cafe in front of the building. Just sit there for a while to wait for the shift change. There will be a siren and soon after that, a crowd of prison guards will exit a fort-like door complex. Observe close their behaviour when they first exit. They will come to the cafe, order a coffee or tea and possible some food. Many will light a cigarette or two. IN a few minutes, it is as if a knot is unwound. Their behaviour when they leave the cafe is starkly different from the time they first exit the building.
The prison school is actually also the juvenile and remand prison. One half the the prison building has been converted to become a school – of sorts. TO get to it, you need to enter the fort-like doors which had two massive metal doors on opposite ends of the building: the doors will only open one at a time. In the fort, you have to leave your things in a locker, this includes you phone, wallet and anything sharp. Your bags will be checked and you will be patted down. A guard will then escort you and your group if you are not alone, out the rear door into the first courtyard. You walk through it and come to a gate that lets you into a second courtyard where a hall is located. Then you walk uphill across the courtyard and come to concrete wall. The door has inch thick steel bars. Get through that and you finally come to the prison school.
Inside, the classes are library were once cells. The beds and the latrine have been removed and replaced with tables, chairs and white boards. The library even has a projector and air-conditioning. There are other classes there. The Ministry of Education provides reading classes for the illiterate, UPSR, PMR, SPM and STPM classes. Then there are a few of the prisoners doing distance learning courses.
Teaching in the prison school is certainly different. Firstly, there is a constant sense of impending claustrophobia which I had to get over. Then, there is the presence of the guard outside the door at all times. They also have a head count every hour which they could ‘muster’.
The student themselves do not really look any different from any other classes of their peers, except for their colour coded uniforms. Their uniforms reflect the length of their stay inside. I found them a lively and fun-loving bunch. I would even call them a good bunch of kids. Perhaps the best way to describe them would to call them a group of bright young individuals who had committed something stupid either intentionally or unintentionally and that resulted in their incarceration. But, I was not there to judge them on their crime nor to comment of their incarceration, I was there to teach them what I could. That was exactly what I tried to do.
In class they were, as I said before, fun-loving and lively but again a little observation is needed. Sometimes, when I assign them some work and they got on with doing it, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The classroom is almost a haven where the students are able to be ‘normal’ students for a brief moment. Outside the classroom doors, every single one of them become a different person. The different is very subtle: the way they move, talk, the words they say, even the way they stand and sit, one needs to observe closely. I think the biggest problem in teaching them is the lack of material and the lack of access. I imagined that I was teaching pre-internet age class. They do have access to computers and the net but very limited. All the possessions they have had to fit into a footlocker which ruled out too many books.
IN short, we had to make due with what we had and made the most of them. Drain every possible use of the material we had. To teach there, a teacher, particularly at tertiary level, had to know what he or she was doing because there was no falling back on instant access to off-site reference.
In the end, teaching there involves leaving behind all one’s preconceptions of what a prison is. You would need to embrace the place and the people for who and what they are and move beyond it. The students are young individuals who need to be educated and you are sent there to do just that. It helps if you can turn the classroom into something fun, and I think I managed to do that. Their grades were not great but they got by. In the end, its all about remembering why you became a teacher in the first place. The best part of it is that their sense of humour is still very much intact, which was a great blessing but to me and to them.
Someone asked me, “what’s the point? They are prisoners.” I thought, that is exactly the point. They are paying their dues to society and the state, society on the other hand had its own obligations to them: they need education and to learn, and I have been given the responsibility to do just that. What happens to them in the future, what they can or will do with what they learn, all that only Allah knows. Its about carrying out one’s own responsibilities not about judging others. Its about being a human being and a teacher.
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