Despite Difficulties, Tutors Teach Behind Bars

Last Monday at 6:30 p.m., Samuel K. Bonsey ’10 was in prison. As the social chair of Suffolk County House of Correction Tutoring Program at the Phillip’s Brook’s House Association, he has been going to the facility once a week for two years.

The Prison Education Committee, one of the few PBHA tutoring programs that focuses on assisting adults, gives its volunteers unique access to a community that is both isolated from mainstream society and in desperate need of aid.

“This segment of the population, I think, is very much feared, ignored, [and] neglected,” says Rachel M. Singh ’10, the co-director of Suffolk County House of Correction Tutoring Program.

The Suffolk tutoring program, which largely focuses on providing support for the facility’s GED classes, is not without its challenges. Both Singh and Bonsey note the prison’s oppressive regulation of their interactions with the prisoners they tutor, such as prohibitions on contact with prisoners after release and sharing personal information. Getting inmates to focus can also be a challenge, given the prison’s bureaucracy and the amount of material to cover, and several volunteers described a sense of frustrated progress.

But tutors say that challenges are worth it: “We have to realize that even just being here and listening to them is a huge service,” volunteer Jessica K. Bryant ’09 says.

Several volunteers have built personal friendships with prisoners, which give them insights into both the workings of the penitentiary system and the role of social circumstance in life choices. As a result, the program “challenges the notions we have about human value,” says Bonsey.

But even with the program’s regulations and difficulties, relationships with prisoners occasionally continue in surprising and inspiring ways: “I had a crazy moment actually this week, when I was on the bus back from prison, and the woman that I tutored last year got on the bus,” Bonsey says. “We were just hugging and laughing. She looked great. She told me she was on the way to a job interview. Just to see that transformation was incredible.”