Latin Behind Bars
Teaching College Latin in an American Prison
Last year, I proposed a Latin language sequence as part of the college-in-prison program facilitated by the NJ-STEP consortium. As tutoring co-ordinator at the study halls at the prison, I had heard our incarcerated college students despair about the lack of foreign language options. I finally got up the guts to ask them if they’d want to learn Latin. To my surprise, they were excited. Even more to my surprise, my course proposal was accepted. Latin was on the books.
One year later, five students had dropped the class, and five had been transferred or released. The six who remained wrote in their self-evaluations that they were glad they had learned Latin, despite the challenges it posed. One student who had entered the class anxious that he would fail celebrated his discovery that Latin was a subject he could, and invariably did, ace. Another student, a star within the college program, noted that he had finally found a subject in which he felt comfortable being incompetent.
Yet the students did not only respond to the class in terms of technical expertise. A third student, writing in response to Barbara Goff’s Classics and Colonialism, concluded with the following thoughts: “It makes one think, ‘what else may be influencing me? Does the world shape more of me than I previously thought? … Though depressing, Goff’s arguments are enlightening, if also a little scary. After all, self-reflection is terrifying.” This student articulated one of the goals of the course. As the teaching team — three co-teachers and myself — crafted and debated our syllabi, we were acutely aware that teaching Latin in a prison is problematic, and wanted to create a learning environment where our students could develop critical perspectives on the political, the cultural, and the historical implications of learning Latin.
Debates about college education in prisons are deeply bound up in contemporary anxiety about the value of the humanities. On the one hand, prison education can be seen as an extreme case of the “humanizing” work that the humanities are supposed to achieve. But at the same time, in this era of the New Jim Crow, justifying Latin-in-prison on the basis of the “humanizing” force of the humanities risks repeating the humanizing and civilizing narratives that have long propelled Western imperialism.
As scholars such as Emily Greenwood and Phiroze Vasunia have made clear, Classics in particular has been a tool and a symbol of Western imperialism, viewed as a “humanizing” (or “civilizing”) discipline that has historically posited Europe as the fount and the center of artistic, literary, and intellectual culture. Their work exposes the second risk of justifying the humanities through their “humanizing” — that is, the implication that one’s students (and worse, those who do not become one’s students) are less than human.
While few teachers would (I hope) affirm such a sentiment, it is a fact that our current educational system is designed to reinforce certain cultural practices over others, down to phenomena as apparently simple as standardized spelling and grammar. The ability to speak “proper English” counts for much whether one is navigating the meritocracy of the university environment, applying for a job, or asking for directions on the street.
Choosing to teach Latin in prison — placing Classics at the center of a social justice initiative — made it even more obvious to me how right Greenwood and Vasunia are. I noticed for the first time that Wheelock’s textbook opens with the claim that Latin is the “mother tongue” (of what? of whom?). Prison guards expressed open amazement at the idea that incarcerated men might have the capacity to learn Latin. Program directors asked us to send any Latin graduates their way. Introducing Latin as the foreign language option magnified the specter of the exceptionalism of Classics in ways that felt at odds with the (anti-imperialist, anti-racist) project of prison education.
American prisons are disproportionately populated by people of color. The prison industrial complex is considered by many to be a reiteration of Jim Crow, another cycle in the history of the exploitation and oppression of people of color in the U.S. Many of our incarcerated students, already in exile from their home environment, struggle to come to terms with the cultural alienation they experience while trapped inside the prison system. Is it even possible to perform the “humanizing” work of humanities education without simultaneously contributing to that sense of alienation and oppression?
Our response to this tension was to democratize the class. While we did not build our syllabus from scratch on the first day of class, we did invite the students to make comments and suggestions throughout the course, and negotiated the form and content of the syllabus accordingly. Our students insisted that we not make Latin an easy pass, and we complied, but did not confine ourselves to traditional grammatical instruction. Instead, the students composed epigrams, read portions of Barbara Goff’s Classics and Colonialism, and wrote response papers to essays from Eidolon (such as this piece by Dan-el Padilla Peralta). In consequence, they developed a strong sense, early on, that learning Latin is an experimental and creative, but also ambivalent project.
It is perhaps unsurprising that our students expressed their desire to memorize and recall morphological paradigms most enthusiastically when engaged in their own translation projects. It is no new wisdom that personal investment in one’s object of study increases motivation and capability. One student who struggled valiantly through two semesters of Latin attempted for his final project an English-to-Latin translation of a short love poem found in an anthology of writings by women. Halfway through this task, which he worked at in the study hall session, he turned to me and exclaimed, “How is this so easy? How is this so easy now?” Interpreting English syntax and then looking up the appropriate Latin endings turned out to be a cognitive task more suited to his own, consistently reflective mode of processing information. More importantly, I think, this was the first translation project the student had undertaken by choice. Ownership over his work had an extraordinary effect upon his capacity for success.
These are lessons we might apply to any classroom, but they have a particular salience in the prison context. As a student once explained to me, the classroom was the only space in which he felt safe to say “no” — that is, to disagree both with his peers and with figures of authority, without fear of retribution.
Giving students the freedom to claim their own labor means sharing the teacher’s ownership over both the syllabus and the purpose and meaning of the field in which the students are educating themselves. It means finding ways to negotiate the criteria for proficiency in Latin, such that the students themselves can determine what they want to achieve through their studies.
In this spirit, we kept the final projects open-ended: students were required to demonstrate engagement with Latin in some written or oral form, be it critical, creative, linguistic, or some combination of the three. Some chose to translate passages from Alison Keith’s epic reader. Others wrote short stories in Latin. One student translated the preface of Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients. Another produced a rhythmic, rhyming translation of Green Eggs and Ham.
These were accompanied by a short preface or commentary explaining why the student had chosen this task, and what he hoped to learn and to demonstrate through it. The student who translated Green Eggs and Ham explained that he wanted people to understand that learning Latin was not just about Caesar — that it could in fact be playful, even fun. Another student noted that the passage he had chosen contained numerous subjunctive constructions, which he was keen to practice. Yet another introduced his work with the following explanation: “Ovid is f*@*king [sic] extremely hard to read and translate. So I have to go out with a bang.”
Outreach and diversity are buzzwords in the contemporary academy, and Classics is no exception. Social and civil injustice has become an entrenched theme in social media and news sites. Democratic education is growing as a movement, through diversity initiatives, experimental pedagogy, and research initiatives. Viewed one way, then, the 2.3 million people incarcerated in American prisons are underserved in this movement to break down social and educaitonal barriers. While high-profile college-in-prison programs do exist, and do excellent work, the vast majority of incarcerated persons have access only to high school classes.
Many agree that college education for people in prison benefits all of us. Studies have shown that college education reduces recidivism. Taking college classes enables incarcerated students to gain qualifications and skills, develop their critical faculties, and build collaborative relationships with their teachers and their peers. Degree programs in prisons can provide a context for purposeful living and self-transformation, fostering in students a sense of dignity and mutual respect.
The work of prison education includes intentional recognition of incarcerated people as equal human beings, a condition that the carceral system seeks to erode. Validating our students as meaningful contributors to a conversation that extends beyond the prison walls is a critical step in reimagining our society as one not structured by the fears and beliefs that sustain the prison industrial complex. Training our students to read critically enables them to speak up about ideas, experiences, and concepts that they find troubling, to articulate their own perspectives, and to imagine differently the perspectives of others.
Yet, the utility of the prison context in highlighting the “humanizing” aspect of the humanities also puts us at risk of instrumentalizing incarcerated students. What are the stakes for us, as professional Classicists, in “outreach” and “diversity”? The struggle to up enrollment in order to demonstrate financial viability and cultural salience is a familiar story across humanities departments. Professional academics rely upon the labor of students to sustain individual careers and institutional structures, by affirming, through their attendance, the significance of our work. All educational settings risk instrumentalizing students toward the justification of their teachers’ careers. For a Latin class in a prison, this risk is magnified, first by the power differential between “civilian” teacher and “inmate” student, and second by the troubled history of Classics itself.
There is no easy solution to this dilemma. We cannot teach Classics in prisons — or in any under-resourced, under-served community, especially any community of color or any community that has few educational alternatives— without benefitting from the kudos of reaching Classics outward to groups of people who are in the public consciousness, and whose neglect has become the focus of the contemporary politics of education. Our goal, then, cannot be to resolve (or whitewash) the dilemma, but to accept it as a tension in our daily practice. If we are committed with any integrity to pedagogy as a practice of social justice, then we must again and again interrogate our own motivations.
We must also let the ambivalence of this project — taking Latin into prisons — shape our pedagogy. Above all, I think, this means acknowledging to our students the tensions and fault lines implicit in the very project of teaching Latin. It also means letting go of the object that we think we have set out to teach.
At a Prison and the Academy event held at Princeton University in November 2015, Dan-el Padilla Peralta argued that prison education, and the diversification of Classics education in general, opens up the possibility for “polyphonous” readings of ancient sources, and so promises to complicate and expand our vision of Classics. Teaching Latin in prison creates opportunities for both students and teachers to learn more about each other through their reflections on the past.
The humanities “humanize” not because they make us more human, but because they shape us in ways considered distinctive to human beings (a point controversial in post-humanism — but that’s another essay), because they acknowledge our universal need for intellectual nourishment and growth. At their best, the humanities humanize us through the recognition of commonality in the face of difference. If there is one thing that Classicists can contribute to the contemporary social justice movement, it is perhaps a willingness to open up the discipline to new voices, new definitions, and new criteria for success. Teaching Latin inside prison requires not only prison clearance and willing students, but also the desire to find out what Latin looks like from the perspective of somebody else.
Jessica Wright is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the humanities at the University of Southern California.
