Inside the Prison of Institutional Language: A Pedagogy of the Obsessed
“The construction of knowledge needs to be embedded in a context where learners can actually participate and apply what is learned. The social aspect is not enough by itself.”
Like clockwork, a cloud of noise from the California Medical Facility, hereafter CMF, drifted into range a quarter mile down the tree-lined service road every Wednesday early evening. My first drive along this road the day I interviewed for the job, I thought I would come upon a mansion or a castle. The green canopy was stunning, spangled with bursts of setting sun. Then came the metal striking metal, clang, clang, clang, the hounds’ ungodly howling for food, reverberations of insanity off concrete.
Guard towers punctured the sky, rifles cradled by correctional silhouettes under mushroom crowns of roof. It was the supper hour for the prisoners, the time for mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, the time for medication lines, magic pills to quiet minds.
I stepped from the security of my Volkswagen Rabbit, a silver diesel, a freelance part-time, freeway flying professor in the early 1980s with a community college hourly contract signed by the warden, about to enter America's first legitimate experiment in punishment, healing, and education, wrapped up and tied with a bow.
Where else but in California?
Behind guarded and surveilled walls, my students did their homework for class behind bars. My students had at one time been first graders with imaginary friends on playgrounds. Now they lined up for plastic cups filled with pills instead of milk dispensed by guards from behind secured booths with tower guards outside in their shaded perches above the yard, the yard—a wasteland of jungle gyms and neglected dumbbells.
*****
Other adjunct faculty taught in the prison program, anonymous, each of us driving down the tree-lined road perhaps at different hours on different days. We never spoke, never formed the collegial bonds common to academic departments, never even met one another—not much different from teaching online today.
We were called freeway flyers, free as birds, no office hours, no emails in 1983, no department meetings. Just hourly contracts. We were independent contractors, yes, hired guns, to the college and the prison alike, our professional solitude oddly matching the isolation of our students.
There were no shared learning outcomes, no standards to meet, not even a standardized test. My job was to teach a section of Composition 101, the course introduced in 1890 at Harvard to become a requirement for all novice academics. Invariably, my students were the cream of the crop of criminals. Some already had advanced degrees. One was a priest. Another was the owner of five automobile dealerships.
In my course they became deeply knowledgeable about deeply important topics like the history of the semicolon, the etymology of the comma, and deeply useful tropes like asyndeton, polysyndeton, chiasmus, and even more exciting things to wet the pedant’s appetite. What they really enjoyed was the chance to get out of the cell and spend a few hours in intelligent conversation. Even psychotic criminals occasionally crave intelligent conversation.
*****
The warden's rulebook covered everything from curriculum to clothing. Curriculum was whatever I said it would be, not unusual for freeway flyers. Most crucial: Never ever wear blue jeans or anything resembling blue jeans. That color belonged to the inmates.
When alarms punched like jack hammers through the constant chatter on the mainline during the supper hour—and they did, with primal urgency, for unclear reasons—anyone in denim blue jeans had to plaster themselves against the concrete wall, animal-still, while guards went on performance alert.
Civilians earned protection through pants color alone, our freedom marked by polyester and the certainty of khaki. It was a very weird form of spotlighting, me standing alone in my khakis in the middle of the mainline, the inmates lined up leaning against the wall, watching me.
CMF, America's first multi-purpose prison, served mashed potatoes, Salisbury steak, and higher education with equal institutional efficiency. As instructor of record for English Comp 101, the venerable gateway to the university, I carried my books through sally ports and past medication lines. My students prepared for class in cells, while I organized my stuff in my car, parked in the tenuous security of the visitor's lot, gathering courage for the long walk to my classroom.
*****
The entry ritual never varied. ID check, pat down, paperwork signed in triplicate. The guards were all business, and they made eye contact with one another continuously stationed there at the main port between heaven and hell.
Then the first gate groaned open with a low-key buzz to admit me into a sally port, that space between two automated gates, like those iron gates securing gated communities, a space where time stops, where bodies wait to be approved to enter the next waiting area. There were probably four lengthy sally ports to sally before reaching L wing, the education wing.
I learned to read sally ports like a prison text. When both port gates slam shut, you're caught between worlds. You’re standing in a crowd of literal misfits locked away for good reason, in a prison just a cut above San Quentin, where violent inmates often plot to secure a transfer, lusting for the evening cup of magic pills.
Guards, free men and women making a living like me, processing inmates in batches the way schools move students in monitored hallways from classroom to classroom, except here the students are legally court-certified, medically-verified, very, very special with ungodly antisocial predispositions.
I never experienced any explicit danger on the mainline myself. Except once.
*****
Another evening begins in L wing. To gain entry from the sally port, I press the buzzer, and the night watchman, a correctional officer assigned to monitor college classes, lets me in. We greet one another stiffly and go our separate ways.
My classroom is stark. There are no windows, no flag, nothing on the walls except green paint. The soundproofing creates an oddly stiff space, cut off from the institutional rhythms still sounding inside my racing head. I arrange the moveable desks in neat rows before the inmates arrive, each desk precisely placed in the empty room. This small ritual of preparation helps center me before class begins. In addition, I space them well separated assuming they are more comfortable in their own territory.
For two years I taught in that classroom with its green-painted, bare walls, a color likely chosen because of its hopeful tones, the green of new grass, new leaves, new learning, me learning lessons about composition instruction that no graduate school theory learned in my MA in English program could have prepared me for. Ironically, I’d not taken any courses in a teacher-prep program at that point. This would be my student teaching.
*****
The fundamental problem became clear: You cannot teach academic writing as public discourse—with its logical, ethical, and emotional dimensions—to people serving lengthy sentences for heinous crimes. There is a distortion between writer and audience that makes true communication impossible. I'd not seen anything like it again until the recent phenomenon of the Trump supporter.
What’s worse, they had absolutely no interest in reading one another’s work. When I tried peer response groups, the activity rapidly transformed into “I can top that.” Yet I was duty-bound to read every essay and give them feedback.
*****
Their essays revealed the true limits of prison composition. Almost every writer circled obsessively around one theme: "I am innocent." Their protestations followed intricate paths of denial, like one inmate's meticulous account: "I did not shoot my wife, stuff her body in the rafters of the garage, drive to school, pick up my two boys, drive to San Francisco, live off of a MacDonalds contest for free food, and dumpster dive at a Chinese restaurant." His writing rose to thunder on that final point: "I DID NOT DUMPSTER DIVE!"
The missing diamond ring became his fixation, the one he'd forgotten to take from his wife’s finger "in the heat of the moment," now presumed to grace the finger of some cop's girlfriend or mistress or a prostitute. In his telling, this oversight transformed from evidence of guilt into proof of police corruption, thereby clearing him of guilt.
Another student, a particularly gifted writer who could have done some beautiful work, channeled his rage into linguistic architecture, crafting elaborate descriptions of courthouse spaces. His prose turned jury boxes and witness stands into stage sets for institutional betrayal, the polished wood and leather chairs flickering between symbols of justice and elegant outhouses for the elite. These weren't essays I was reading so much as fevered testimonials, each writer trapped in his own version of innocence.
I retreated to the safety of syntax and sentence mechanics. I have never been more grateful for having paid attention in my linguistics courses. My curriculum narrowed to the machinery of language—what makes an adjective an adjective philosophically, why nouns are definitely not just person, places, or things—we went on wild rides in search of words to add to the list.
We talked about the origins of punctuation marks, how a semicolon become a semicolon, a question mark a question mark. When I told them the origins of the comma, I saw a renaissance in comma uses. The root of the word ‘comma,’ I explained, is the Greek word ‘captein,’ which meant ‘a castrated rooster.’ I can’t remember where I discovered this tidbit, and I may have been wrong not being as careful then as I am now, but in my mind whenever I see a comma splice a think of a castrated rooster.
We wrestled with asyndeton, polysyndeton, chiasmus, periodicity. These glittering Greek terms offered neutral ground where we could discuss the arrangement of words without confronting the weight of their meaning. In the end, teaching composition in prison meant learning which questions not to ask, which doors not to open.
*****
Grading these writers could have been a nightmare if I had not deep sixed my scruples and squeezed my grading scale to A or B. Nobody minded a B so long as the reason for it was a breach of grammar, syntax, or conventions. To satisfy my wife, who constantly reminded me that these guys might get out of prison someday, I refrained from making substantive comments. I found this practice hard to sustain at first. I’m the type that has always loved to dialogue with my students about their writing.
At semester's end, the chronos awaited, institutional forms in triplicate that required careful attention. One copy for the inmate, who had to sign off on th form indicating agreement; one for the prison; and one for the state, each carrying my observations into some vast bureaucratic memory.
I learned their power through a mistake in my first term. One of my most 'normal' students, a man who could have passed for a community college student anywhere else, wrote in non-standard English at the start. His classmates never saw his work; I was glad for him that we didn’t do peer response.
By semester's end, he had mastered complete sentences, even growing enthusiastic about "dressing up" his prose. In my chrono for him, I celebrated this progress, not realizing how ‘non-standard English’ might be interpreted in a parole hearing. Even worse, I wrote the phrase “functionally illiterate” in a careless, offhand way.
“Terry, Fred T. wants to see you,” I heard on the other end of the phone. “I know the semester is over, but he says it’s important.”
After a special early afternoon drive to CMF, I wended my way through the mainline to L wing and found myself in Fred’s office. I had not seen him since the interview.
“I’m sorry to make you have to take an extra trip,” he began. Then he explained that Roger Baxter (a pseudonym) refused to sign his chrono. Nobody had ever refused to sign before. Roger didn’t like it that I said he used to write in non-standard English, and then you mentioned something about ‘functional illiteracy.’ Roger’s not functionally illiterate. Why the hell did you say that? That could cost him at a parole hearing.”
My words, meant to document growth, might have inadvertently marked him as less capable than he was. This wasn’t an invitation for me to highlight his how much he had learned. I had to rewrite it in handwriting on the spot, a task I did with far fewer words and far less specificity.
The chrono transformed classroom observations into institutional judgments, each comment potentially affecting years of an inmate's life. Far more potent than a letter grade, each chrono could potentially face legally close reading. After that, I wrote them with the carefully precise vagueness of much educational communication, with the attention of someone defusing a landmine, aware that my choice of words could either free or further confine. My name would be on each chrono. Ir wouldn’t be hard for a disgruntled parolee to find me.
*****
Steve stood out even in this unusual group. A sign painter in prison industry, he stayed after class to walk with me back through the sally ports, his creative spirit and wicked humor making the concrete corridors feel almost normal. I couldn't reconcile his gentle demeanor with whatever crime had brought him here. He never wrote about his crime. In fact, he was the only writer for whom I made real comments. He was a guitar builder in the prison shop, and I play guitar. Then one evening, during our walk, he told me.
"I was in Charlie's family," he said casually. He knew my mind would go immediately to Manson, a famous CMF inmate.
"Oh?" I managed.
"I'm pretty much over him," he continued. "You know, he had some magic. He did. He'd call us together in the barn, and he'd start preaching to us and—you're going to think I'm crazy—the squirrels would stand in the door and listen. Birds would sit on the window sill and sing to him."
"Oh?" I said again, my voice distant.
"I'm in Helter Skelter. Bugliosi writes about me. But he's wrong. He says I'm mentally retarded. I'm not mentally retarded. I just can't spell worth crap."
*****
It happened in class. It was the most startling experience I've ever had in any classroom.
I had passed back quizzes from the past week’s class, another sentence-combining quiz with no right answers. One inmate had missed the previous class and therefore didn't get back a quiz. I didn’t make a big deal about it.
He sat staring straight ahead as the others looked at their work and chatted with one another about my comments. After I had lighted on sentence combining as a prison-appropriate pedagogy—not much to concern me about substance—I became a clinical commenter. “Good strategy. You combined two separate subjects in separate clauses and used one main verb to create one sentence from two.”
Then I heard a chair kick back a bit, a scraping on the floor. The heavyset black inmate rose still staring straight ahead, doubled up fists, small punching the air in gestures of mounting frenzy. 'Where's my fucking quiz,' he said and began to move toward me. At that moment I heard ten more chairs kick back and screech and saw every student rising up ready to hold the quizzless guy in check.
I pushed the button on my beeper, a guard arrived, and the quizzless man shuffled out of my life. My students told me later that Mr. Quizzless spent three days in the hole and had been denied access to education in L wing.
Still, I marvel at the few degrees of separation between after school detention in the library and a few days in the hole.
*****
For two years, I taught at CMF, accumulating insights about composition instruction devoid of substance that shattered my graduate school theories. The fundamental truth emerged slowly: You cannot teach writing as public discourse with its logical, ethical, and emotional dimensions to people serving lengthy sentences for heinous crimes. Their isolation and restrictions create a distortion between writer and audience that makes genuine communication impossible. I wouldn't encounter this particular intensity of distortion again until years later, in the rhetoric of Trump supporters.
Teaching writing in prison reveals fundamental truths about human writing that become even more relevant in our AI era. When my students fixated on their innocence, they weren't just writing essays. They were attempting to reconstruct their identities through language. How many high school students have the opportunity to tap into this powerful motive?
Their obsessive returns to courthouse descriptions and missing diamond rings were failures of argumentative writing, yes, but they were also attempts to rewrite reality itself. This human need to shape identity through writing, even among psychopaths, remains crucial in an age when AI can generate flawless academic prose. What opportunities do writers in public classrooms have to rewrite their reality as fiction or poetry?
My retreat into teaching sentence mechanics, those glittering Greek terms like asyndeton and chiasmus, demonstrates something profound about writing instruction. When the weight of meaning becomes too heavy, teachers can seek refuge in technical matters—or assign writings that analyze literature, not real life. I could have tried that. But my students' raw, urgent essays, however flawed, carried the heavy weight of authenticity that no AI could replicate. How do we open the door to the heavy weight of authenticity to our learners using only the argumentative essay based on somebody else’s text as a lever?
The incident with "quizzless" shows how writing in prison was never just about writing. The thwarted physical violence that erupted over a missing quiz paper suggests how deeply personal writing becomes when it's one of the few remaining forms of self-expression available. CMF wasn’t awash in opportunities for moral and intellectual intimacy. In our AI era, when students can generate essays with a prompt, this connection between writing and personal identity becomes even more crucial. My inmate students wrote from a place of real need to be heard, understood, and believed. I wasn’t ready to hear them as their composition teacher. How often do our students have the opportunity to write about something they need to be heard and understood?
Perhaps most tellingly, my observation about the impossibility of teaching argumentative writing to long-term inmates points to writing's social cultural nature. Though technologies are involved, the substance is always human except in the most objective, formulaic kinds of IKEA technical writing.
The distortion between writer and audience I noticed prefigures our current struggles with AI-mediated communication. AI is being represented as a distortion between writers and audiences. My inmates couldn't write effective arguments because their isolation had severed normal human discourse much as our students today might struggle to develop authentic voices in schools that sever them from normal human discourse. AI becomes an attractive option for cognitive offloading since nobody is reading anyway.
The fundamental lesson seems to be this: Writing instruction isn't primarily about teaching correct forms or even critical thinking. It’s about teaching humans to maintain their authentic perspectives on their lives and to write from that perspective in systems that threaten to silence them. Whether those systems are prisons or state standards or AI-language models, the challenge remains: How do we motivate the hard work of authentic human expression in the face of institutional constraints which devalue substance and privilege form and structure?