What I Learned About Parenting in Prison
I was only a year out of teacher’s college when I took my job at the Detention Centre. I was hired to teach literacy and life skills in a central booking facility for the whole of the province of Ontario. Youth between the ages of 12 to 17 who were arrested and awaiting trial landed in my classroom, located in the basement of the family court building in downtown Toronto. Depending on what entrance I chose in the morning, I had to navigate a buzzer for identification or a metal detector. Then I had to sign for keys to get through the three locked doors that took me down to the designated school hallway in the basement.
I was to teach three 50-minute periods a day to an ever changing group of faces. The ratio was eight residents to one teacher, with the added adult presence of a child and youth worker who sat outside my door ready to jump into action. I remember feeling lucky that a sliver of natural light would sneak through the small window that butted up against the industrial ceiling of my classroom. But a basement is still a basement. Dark.
Today, looking back at my naive 23 year-old self, I see that darkness differently. Now as a parent to an 8-year-old, I recognize a truth that has since emerged from the shadows of that time and place. I had more life skills to learn than to teach in those days. And in the present tense I am more literate now about taking those learned skills into my job as a writer, educator and parent. The truth is my definitions of teaching, learning and what it means to be a mom were shaped and challenged in jail.
These days most of my students are teachers and administrators themselves. A question I ask them at the beginning of the term is what role education plays in what it means to be human or in striving to be human. What I observed on the “inside,” as detention is sometimes called, was how the humanity of the incarcerated was not inherently valued. This reality is in many ways similar to the world beyond bars where children aren’t treated as fully human. Certainly not in terms of agency over their bodies, their time, or their ability to make decisions. These are the life skills they are supposed to gain from us adults (or so we tell ourselves). And yet, detainees and children alike are relegated to spaces without choice, ordered about on imposed schedules, and hyper aware of punishment should they dare to push back. In fact, that list describes a traditional school day as much as it does the monotony of prison!
And yet, the work of lifelong learning has a sneaky way of disrupting some of the truths that we are sure of, all that we think we know with such clarity. For example, there is the truth of the monotony of life in prison. There’s no bright side to uncover here. And yet it is also true to say that the monotony in my classroom was always being interrupted. There was no way to plan a traditional lesson when the class list would change daily based on court appearances and visits from lawyers, psychologists or family. So the students and I had to constantly adjust. Daily! Pivot after pivot taught me to stay nimble. Flexible. And what better lesson in parenting – and writing – could one ask for?
So, I learned that flexibility is a survival skill - full stop. Adult plans are fallible. Wearing my mom hat, releasing plans to make space for new ideas born of a toddler’s free mind is…well…freeing! And if that’s not a great lesson to be taken to the page as a writer I don’t know what is. We can’t be too precious about our words. Catch and release. Start in a new direction and keep moving. New words will follow.
As well, I found that help comes with the arrival of unexpected allies. I can still picture the exact moment when it all kicked off. I was rooting through a desk drawer, searching for something small, when out of nowhere two students turned on each other. In a flurry of arms and legs, desks thrown and papers flying, I reacted and tried to jump in to stop the fight. But three of my students, 15 and 16 year-old boys who were taller and wider than me, formed a wall that I could not get through. The guards finally took action after what felt like ages and the whole event ended as fast as it had begun. In tears I left the classroom. When I gathered myself to return I found those same students who had formed the human wall now reordering the room, neatly piling papers on my desk and picking up chairs.
“Miss we couldn’t let you through. You would have gotten hurt,” said one of the young men, handing me some fallen pencils.
At that moment he was my teacher. They all were, living out a life lesson they knew I needed to learn—we were all in that place together and we needed each other. There was no teacher without her student and no student without his teacher, just as there is no parent without her child. The humility of it all!
Finally, I learned that it’s all a mess. But parents, teachers, students, writers—we can do the work to clean it up together. The messy truth of teaching in prison, and parenting in general, is that without relationship there is no learning for anyone involved. When it comes to discussing the education of young people who fall outside the boundaries of already flawed systems, one must face the inherent learning limitations imposed upon detained or incarcerated youth and their teachers. In Canada there is a disproportionate number of Indigenous, Black and 2SLGBTQIA youth who are statistically shown to overpopulate youth detention facilities. The numbers point to broken social systems and structures that cannot be fixed with some educational bandaid. Thus, the reality for teachers tasked to work within the marginalizing structures inherent to the youth criminal justice system is messy. Without building up trust that is inherent to caring relations between us, there is no chance at repair.
That truth extends to writing and rewriting the mess of my life as a mother. I am compelled to write words that mean something while raising a little blond boy. For in the midst of this mess it is my job as a mother and as a writer to help him learn the power of his privilege and the responsibilities that come with it. He will become a white man in a racist patriarchal system that favours someone who looks like him. I want to keep writing pieces that show him what it means to speak truth to power—that he and all of the allies he gathers around him in childhood can make for a better world as he grows up.
What I took forward from teaching in detention was a desire to embrace the mess and focus first on relationship building. That underpinning truth has scaffolded the way I parent. My most important learning moments as a mother have been found under piles of paper and books and arms and legs. That’s where care and joy is so often buried, waiting for us to find them. Together.
PS: My new book Finding Joy: Radical Collegiality and Relational Pedagogies of Care in Education is now available from Brill.