New jail instructor works to break cycle
The forbidding walls girding the Garland County Detention Center restrict the movements of the approximately 300 inmates it holds on any given day.
The free world may be unencumbered by the physical barriers found at 3564 Albert Pike Road, but the circumscribed existence continues outside those walls for those without the tools that enable social and economic mobility.
Education, or the lack thereof, is the biggest impediment to the underpinnings of a life beyond dependency and incarceration.
Without that foundation, it can be easier to assimilate to a jail cell than life on the outside.
Wells Autrey, the new adult education instructor at the jail, has seen how the foundational deficits that proceed from an unenriched childhood have made the correctional system the safety net of last resort for those caught in the inertia of recidivism.
As a GED instructor in the Arkansas Department of Correction’s Wrightsville, Hawkins and Ouachita units, he saw the end result. As a drug-abuse-education officer with the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department, he saw the early manifestations when he visited elementary schools.
And as a high school math and science teacher, he saw the effect of an educational system that had relegated those ill-equipped for the academic rig-
or of the classroom to an inferior status long ago.
The imprint it leaves is indelible, marking many in the correctional system with an insecurity and self-doubt that makes navigating the free world treacherous.
“There’s some underlying bias of a teacher to separate them and think of them as lesser students, so they don’t get the challenging curriculum they need” he said. “They act out and do things because they’re frustrated.
“How is your self-esteem going to survive in an environment like that? You’re going to quit, and then you don’t have a job. You don’t have a way of making a living. You’re going to get involved with other people that hate everybody, and eventually you’re going to get thrown into the criminal justice system.”
Autrey is the fruit of the adult education program’s success. Administered by National Park College, it’s served almost 900 inmates and graduated more than 50 of them from the GED program since the jail opened in July 2015.
More than 250 have graduated from the workforce alliance for growth program, or WAGE, and more than 30,000 hours of instruction have been rendered.
Those credentials led to the increased state and federal funding that allowed the program to bring Autrey on full time July 1. He’s part of a staff that includes part-time instructors Tina House, Chris Brakebill, Lee Davis and Hap Hall and parttime paraprofessional Steve White.
“The full-time job came about because of the success the inmates have had,” said Bill Ritter, director of the college’s adult education division. “Our program is being recognized for the successes that the students have had.
“It means more money coming our way. We can hire more people and affect even more lives.”
Freeing potential from the binds of self-doubt is Autrey’s biggest challenge. Resignation has taken hold of many of his students, requiring him to foster an inner belief that can break through the frustration of the uninitiated mind.
“They have to break that barrier where they look at a math problem and say, ‘I never could do this stuff,’” he said. “You try to make them feel at ease about not knowing how to do something. That’s probably the most difficult part of the job, to get them to believe they’re intelligent despite the fact that they don’t know how to do anything in the book.”
Autrey said it took him more than 30 years to get his college degree, so he empathizes with those who struggle to achieve in the classroom. He tells his students a limited knowledge base isn’t always indicative of a limited capacity for learning. Oftentimes, it’s a function of poor instruction.
“Doing well in public school is not a marker for being intelligent or unintelligent,” he said. “It’s a mark the school failed you, because they couldn’t teach you in a way that you can learn.”
Autrey said he encourages his pupils to “learn how to learn.” The students are more receptive to the mantra at the detention center than at the ADC, where inmates without a high school diploma or GED are required by law to attend school.
“In the prison, I had a lot of students that were adversarial,” he said. “Not physically, but from a teaching standpoint when you asked them to do something.”
The GED program is an incentive at the detention center, qualifying graduates for reduced commitments on misdemeanor sentences. Inmates who complete the program can reduce their sentences by up to 10 days for every month served.
And like all graduates of NPC’s adult education program, they are entitled to half off their tuition in any degree or certification program offered at the college.
“That’s a major draw to get that inmate to take that step and get their diploma,” Ritter said of the jail’s good-time policy. “We want to increase education and reduce recidivism and make Garland County a better place to live.
“That way our tax money isn’t going to support the inmates, and the inmates are out becoming taxpayers and supporting their families and keeping them out of the foster care system. It’s a big cycle we’re trying to break.
“Wells is uniquely qualified for this position. We could’ve looked a long time and not found somebody who’s as qualified.”