PRISON

Tutors work with inmate students

* Learning to read is a step to protecting themselves from returning to prison

For some students, school seems like prison. In Heather Kennedy's literacy program, school is prison - and prison is school.

Kennedy oversees an inmates-teaching-inmates literacy program at the Montgomery Education and Pre-Release Center in West Dayton, working with convicts who have 18 months or less remaining on their sentences.

It's one of 39 basic-literacy units covering most of Ohio's 29 prisons. The units - each consisting of one teacher, 30 inmate-tutors and 60 inmate-students - are designed to provide individualized attention for inmates who read below the sixth-grade level. The goal: To prepare them for life in the outside world.

Timothy Chapin tutors fellow inmate Carl Draise at Pre-Release Center. JIM WITMER / DAYTON DAILY NEWS

"The program works because we're answering individual needs," said Kennedy, who has been teaching at the prison almost three years. "One of the reasons these guys fell between the cracks in their own schools is they didn't get enough individual attention."

Kennedy, a certified tutor trainer, teaches inmate-tutors how to use a phonics-based reading program and oversees the tutors as they work one-on-one with inmates. Tutoring is a full-time job for the inmates. Each tutor works with one student in the morning and another in the afternoon.

"It's the best job there is," said inmate-tutor Timothy Chapin, 36, a former Tipp City man serving a term for forgery and receiving stolen property. "You get to work with people, you get to see people learning something."

Prison inmates tend to have literacy problems. All inmates are tested when they enter the Ohio prison system, where 30 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women read below the sixth-grade level, said Jerry McGlone, superintendent of the prison school system, called the Ohio Central School System.

Ohio prisoners, on average, have a scholastic achievement level of midway through seventh-grade, and 85 percent don't have a high school or GED diploma, McGlone said. Most lack marketable skills. Half have suspected learning disabilities, and 16 to 18 percent of youthful inmates qualify for special education.

Statewide, 2,400 students and 1,200 tutors are in the basic literacy program. In the fiscal year ending in June 1997, there were nearly 15,500 Ohio inmates in literacy and GED-preparation classes.

The local pre-release center has a high turnover. Because they're short-timers, Kennedy's students often get released before they reach their educational goals, and tutors are likewise hard to keep.

"This month we're going to lose 25 percent of our inmates," Warden Donald DeWitt said. "It just kills programming."

Most of the inmates at the minimum-security Montgomery center did not commit violent crimes, although there have been some involuntary manslaughter cases; none of the inmates are sex offenders and most are in prison for the first time.

Violent criminals still need to learn how to read, but the state's maximum-security prison at Lucasville doesn't have a literacy unit, nor does the new "supermax" prison in Youngstown. Other prisons with violent offenders do have programs to teach reading.

Prison officials stop short of calling schooling a cure-all, but Kennedy and McGlone said education helps to prevent returns to prison.

"If a person's literacy skills are so low he or she can't get a job, then the person is apt to turn to crime," Kennedy said.

Many of her students were abused or neglected as children, and weren't exposed to books. "When they get behind in first- and second-grade, it starts to snowball," she said. "They get a fight-or-flight reaction to school. They get behind and school is not a pleasant place for them. They feel like zeroes; they feel like failures."

It's "a real shock for my guys" when they find they can succeed in an academic environment, Kennedy said.

She helps soon-to-be released inmates find out how to continue their educations on the outside. Even if some inmates don't finish the program, she said, "everything they do here is something that can never be taken away from them."

Chapin, who holds a master's degree in labor and industrial relations and once taught at Kent State University, said he had one student who jumped from the fourth-grade reading level to the ninth-grade level in three months. He said he has tried to be a good influence on fellow inmates since becoming a tutor in January.

"When I was going through school, I was fortunate enough to have a couple of really good teachers," said Chapin, who was scheduled to be released May 2. "A good teacher can really make a difference."

Edward Isome III of Cincinnati said he'll continue his education after his release from prison on May 31. He wants to get his commercial driving license reinstated and resume a career as a trucker, so studying for the driving test is part of his curriculum.

Even though he's serving time for a child support violation, Isome, 36, a ninth-grade dropout, said he wants to get an education partly so he can help his kids. "I'm married and I have kids and I want to be able to help them as they're growing up - and also help myself."