An inmate works on a welding project inside South Carolina’s Camille Graham Correctional Institution’s Welding Vocational Program building, Tuesday. The welding course is part of the institution’s high school program. The prisons school district, which is operated by the Corrections Department and monitored by state education officials, has more than 6,000 inmates who have already earned a GED in the district’s nine high schools around the state.
By MEG KINNARD
COLUMBIA, S.C. It’s not yet “back to school” for South Carolina youngsters. But thousands of state prison inmates are already hitting the books behind bars, learning reading, welding and arithmetic lessons in a prisons-only school district.
About 60 percent of the state’s 24,000 inmates do not have a high school diploma when they enter prison. On average, they have less than an 11th grade education, according to the state Department of Corrections.
That’s something officials want to change.
The prisons school district, which is operated by the Corrections Department and monitored by state education officials, has more than 6,000 inmates who have already earned a GED in the district’s nine high schools around the state.
“Education is the basic building block for everything,” warden Judy Anderson said Monday, during a tour of the 1,600-inmate Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institution, one of several prisons where students go back to school.
In many ways, classrooms at the state’s oldest women’s prison resemble traditional high school classrooms — the only difference being the tan prison uniforms worn by the inmates.
And, unlike most school programs, there is no semester length; courses range from two weeks to six months, depending on how quickly a student learns.
Students in one classroom take notes and follow along in textbooks as their instructor discusses the importance of nutrition and healthy eating habits.
In a computer lab across the hall, 15 inmates click away on desktop computers, practicing multiple-choice questions posed by instructions to help ready them for the GED exam.
When students aren’t in class or doing maintenance work elsewhere on prison grounds, thousands more — about 11,500 statewide, since 2002 — are earning vocational certificates in skills ranging from word processing to welding.
The inmates say the programs help them not only pass the time behind bars but also prepare them for life after prison.
In the welding shop at Camille Griffin Graham, half a dozen women practice their skills in booths along the walls, their faces shielded by flip-down masks as sparks fly from the metal before them.
One, an experienced welder who also serves as a teaching assistant, says her student work helps her forget the fact that she’s living behind bars.
“If I didn’t enjoy it, then I wouldn’t be down here,” says Christy, 36, who received her GED in March and worked as a welder for several automakers before coming to prison. “It’s like walking into a different world. I’m not in ... prison.”
Saquandra, 23, an inmate who dropped out of school after tenth grade to care for her daughter, says its the instructors and teachers around her who have pushed her to get her GED.
“It’s like they bring a whole other hope to me, and a light bulb popped off,” said Saquandra, who hopes to become a geriatric nurse after her release in about a month.
She adds she doesn’t want her daughter “to take the same path that I took.”
Both the classroom and vocational training are vital for inmates as they work to better themselves in preparing to transition into the work force, says a former South Carolina prison inmate who now runs an employment agency where he teaches inmates to make resumes and do job interviews.
“I basically want to give them hope,” said Steve Harbin, 60, a former state employee who served five years in prison for breach of trust with fraudulent intent. “If they leave here and they don’t have any hope, what are they going to do?”