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When I entered the prison for the first time, I was nervous, undoubtedly, but I also felt guilty for feeling nervous, especially because I had willingly entered Westville Correctional Facility to take a class.

In the fall of 2023, I enrolled in Professor Pam Butler’s course, “Rethinking Crime and Justice: Explorations from the Inside Out.” The three-credit Center for Social Concerns (CSC) class — cross-listed with American studies, Africana studies, gender studies, and poverty studies, among others — was one I had wanted to take since I learned of the opportunity to take courses inside of a prison back in my first year at Notre Dame.

“Rethinking Crime and Justice” is part of the international Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, where roughly 12 inside students (people incarcerated) and 12 outside students (students at the host university) come together to study issues related to crime and justice. Inside Out courses have been offered at Notre Dame through the CSC since 2012, and the courses are held inside the Westville Correctional Facility, a state-operated men’s prison about 45 minutes from campus.

Each semester there are different variations on the content of the Inside Out course offered at the university; however, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Notre Dame paused its 2020-21 course offerings at Westville.

When the course became available again and I had the time free in my schedule, I immediately applied. Following the program description/requirements, the application emphasizes, “This is not a service course. It is not an opportunity to help people in need. It is not about mentoring, ministering, or building lasting friendships. Rather, this is an opportunity for you to learn and think about crime and justice with people who have different experiences of them than your own.”

Coming into the class as a sociology major, I was interested in crime as it relates to society, as well as the broader societal consequences of mass incarceration. In the summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to work with formerly incarcerated individuals through Take Heart, Inc., a local non-profit that aims to provide youth in South Bend with mentors who share their lived experiences. My work with Take Heart led me to pursue a thesis in sociology, examining the consequences of the school-to-prison pipeline. Motivated to understand the carceral system on a deeper level, I applied to the course with the hopes of learning about the intersection between crime and education.

My peers all had various other reasons for wanting to take the class. Senior Kiera Votzmeyer was inspired by her career goals to enroll. “I am planning on attending law school next fall, and I can't think of any better preparation for this [career] than understanding and getting to know the human beings whose lives have been most directly impacted by the law,” she said.

Isaac Bersten, a program of liberal studies major in the junior class, said, “I wanted to get out of the abstract and learn with those who have actually been through the system. I wanted to hear different perspectives and further develop my own by changing the setting. I did not know much about restorative justice and I wanted to learn more.”

Some of my classmates came to the course with more experience working with system-involved people. For example, senior Mollie McKone had previously volunteered at the prison in 2021.

“While visiting Westville, I saw a group of students from Notre Dame standing in the security line that was there for their Inside Out class. I knew then that I wanted to be a part of that class before my time was over at Notre Dame. After taking the course in the spring of my junior year, I was asked to be a TA for the fall class. It was such a wonderful experience that I could not pass up the second opportunity to go back,” said McKone.

Though my sociology background provided me with a general understanding of mass incarceration and a surface-level grasp of how the criminal legal system works, this class gave me the opportunity to delve into these problems and gain insight on both an intellectual and an emotional level.

Over the course of our semester together, the inside and outside students worked in small groups with every member of the class. I learned bits and pieces about each person’s story — I learned about their families, their values, their hopes, their dreams, their fears, and I shared mine. We celebrated Notre Dame football victories, lamented over lost basketball games in the yard and asked each other questions about what brings us joy.

Although confined to the walls of our classroom and the few hours each week we got to interact, our relationships and the intellectual community of our class blossomed. “Some of the most memorable [moments] have been the small exchanges and laughs when transitioning from one activity/discussion to the next. I never expected to see such big smiles in such a dark place, and I wholeheartedly believe these snippets of laughter and joy are a testament to the strong bonds we forged with one another,” said Votzmeyer

Bersten similarly struggled to pinpoint only one specific moment that left a lasting impact. However, he noted how moments, like Votzymeyer mentioned, allowed him to develop a greater sense of solidarity, rooted in the shared understanding of the criminal legal system as it stands to separate people from their communities and their families.

“[The class] further taught me how complicated and interwoven the social and legal relationships we all have are, and how difficult changing the system can be. It reminded me of the human cost of our collective failure to administer justice in our society and how similar we all are, beneath the different identities society projects onto us,” said Bersten.

Our final class was such a stark contrast to our first. For one, I was sobbing uncontrollably as I tried to emotionally prepare to cut ties with this group of people that I had come to care for so deeply. Seeing the amount of growth that took place, both in myself and in my inside and outside peers, clarified for me how much precious life, excitement, passion and curiosity sit in Westville as these men are incarcerated and isolated from the world. My outside classmates and I shared in the vans on the way to and from class about how we wished our classes on campus were more like our Westville course because the perspectives the inside students shared were so thoughtful and provoking. We longed for relationships in our “normal” lives as intellectually stimulating as the ones we forged with each other in the class.

The class is not set up to “build lasting friendships,” yet the opportunity to critically consider crime and justice alongside people from whom we have been separated illuminated for me on a profound level how the system operates to keep people apart. “The criminal legal system, and the stories we tell about it, have constructed a whole network of physical, structural, geographic and social boundaries between [the outside students] and [their] inside peers, whose lives are more directly and obviously impacted by the criminal legal system. Our class proposes that thinking together across those boundaries is a necessary part of changing that system and attendant narratives around crime and justice,” said Professor Pam Butler.

The current criminal legal system impacts human beings, yet as Bersten expressed, courses on criminal justice policy tend to remain abstract, excluding the very people most directly impacted by the criminal justice policy about which we are meant to be learning. This course was powerful and challenging because it asked us to move beyond what we have learned on campus and discuss our thoughts and responses to research and scholarly writing on crime and justice with people who might have vastly different opinions and experiences of the matter.

McKone articulates how the academic rigor grounded in personal connection allowed for intellectual conversations that far exceeded her expectations. “Reimagining a world without prisons forced me to reevaluate my beliefs and understanding of justice, accountability and responsibility. Inside Out forced me to think critically and imaginatively about possibilities for building safe and healthy communities. This experience provided me the opportunity to learn from and really listen to the experiences of justice-impacted individuals,” said McKone.

Votzmeyer shared a similar perspective: “It is by far the best class I have ever taken at Notre Dame. It is easy in the classroom on campus to become super meta and abstract in our thinking, and, in doing so, we overlook the very people who are impacted or maybe have experience in the very issues we are talking about. Their perspectives and thoughts rooted in life experience have proved invaluable to my learning not only of key concepts related to the criminal-legal system and restorative justice but, arguably more importantly, how to interact with other people and build genuine connections across identity cleavages that feel insurmountable,” she said.

On our last day, one of my classmates gave a final speech, beautifully capturing this concept: We were a group of people who were not supposed to “get along” or form a community. The students came from all over the world and had different economic backgrounds, races, ethnicities, sexualities, carceral statuses, criminal histories. Nevertheless, we formed a classroom of equal peers that connected as a means of more deeply engaging in an examination of the criminal legal system.

Dr. Connie Snyder Mick, director of academic affairs at the Center for Social Concerns and director of the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor, is currently teaching “Poverty & Justice: Inside Out.” Senior Gabbie Spontak shares her motivations for taking this course: “I wanted to take this course because it offers such a unique opportunity to learn alongside peers who wouldn't usually get the chance to interact with one another! In most other opportunities to work with incarcerated people, it is often through volunteerism which means there are so many power dynamics involved. The Inside Out course allows for many of those power dynamics to be removed. I think being equal peers really allows the inside and outside students to learn from one another and have more fruitful discussions and relationships.”

Spontak continued, “I think the main way this course has contributed to my Notre Dame education has been by recognizing the role of life experiences in the classroom. I think in many of my other classes — even the ones that are more discussion-based — so much of the content is exclusively focused on evidence/facts or the text being discussed. The Inside Out course has encouraged me to consider how my lived experiences impact my views and how the lived experiences of others impact theirs. Not only has this enriched our course discussions, I think this is an essential life skill that the course has taught me.”

McKone offers parting words: “If you are able, I urge everyone to take this course. I can truly say this was the best class I have taken at Notre Dame and will always think of my Inside and Outside classmates fondly. As one of our Inside classmates shared on our last day, ‘This class made me feel human again.’”