In 1995, Lori Pompa, a professor with the criminal justice department at Temple University, toured the State Correctional Institution at Dallas, Pennsylvania, with 15 undergraduate students. This sparked an idea—the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program—that is now an international #TempleMade concept that changes people’s lives. In February, donors came together to support Inside-Out’s mission of collaborative learning involving incarcerated and campus-based students, reflecting Temple’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion through breaking down social barriers.

The below Q&A is with Lori Pompa, the founder and executive director of the Inside-Out Center at Temple, the international headquarters of the program.

 

What motivated you to start Inside-Out?
I took students into prisons to discuss crime and justice’s social, economic, political, racial, psychological and philosophical dimensions. On a Dallas, Pennsylvania, trip, Paul, a man incarcerated at the prison there, asked me if I would do this for a whole semester. It was a radical idea, but I promised him I would think about it. I knew I had to act, but the program grew organically. We started with crime and justice and sociology classes; now, we have classes in the social sciences, the arts and humanities, and the law, with over 1,200 instructors and 60,000 alumni globally.

How does the program operate?
Pre-COVID, I took students into a maximum-security prison weekly, and we studied in a circle, alternating between inside and outside students around the circle. We don’t research or help incarcerated people or do advocacy or activism. Inside-Out is a transformative experience where the class studies and discusses important justice issues, as equals. Since COVID, we facilitate online classes with Temple students and formerly incarcerated students.

What makes this experience transformative?
Assumptions are challenged when outside students meet similar humans inside with different lives because of sometimes chance occurrences. Since we often go into men’s institutions, where the majority inside are men of color, it reveals a dimension of racism plaguing the criminal justice system and systems that lead there. Mass incarceration will continue if we don’t see what’s happening. For a lot of incarcerated people, underfunded schools have failed them. After dropping out and finding life on the streets, some people end up in prison. But over the years, countless incarcerated people have flourished through Inside-Out. Their latent abilities come out through cross-cultural communication and complex conversations. We learn more than just the subject; it’s about ourselves, other people, preconceptions, communication and conflict, and our liberation from the things that imprison us. We call forth the best in each other and leave the class liberated and self-aware. “Inside-Out” signifies the convergence of inside and outside students and bringing what’s inside out.

What are the outcomes for students after Inside-Out?
The outside students often change majors, sometimes to the justice field, or pursue further involvement in social justice issues. The inside students often pursue further education or become social justice leaders inside prisons and beyond. Several years ago, in a Mexican prison, I spoke with an Inside-Out student incarcerated for serious crimes with a drug cartel. He told me about how an exercise focusing on “harm” was the first time he thought about how the work he did in the cartel harmed people. He said he began to weep, and that he now wants to help people when he gets out of prison. A month ago, I received an email from him, stating, “I just wanted to tell you how Inside-Out changed my life. I told you I would help people, and now I am! I’m helping people to get good jobs.”

We’ve talked about how rewarding this program is; what are some challenges?
If anything keeps me up at night, it’s the lack of resources that hinder our growth. We have grown Inside-Out with a small, dedicated team and donor support. But we want to hire more staff and provide opportunities to formerly incarcerated alumni. We also want to replicate Inside-Out in law schools because these students may represent or put people in prison but may have never set foot in a prison. This all started at Temple, and there are so many areas where we are growing and can continue to grow.

 

In February, OwlCrowd, Temple’s crowdfunding program, raised almost $5,000 for the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program from donors like you.