Fifty minutes north of Manhattan by train lies Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for men. Sing Sing is one of the oldest and most notorious prisons in the United States. Its massive stone blocks and barbed-wire fences sit on a hill overlooking the Hudson Valley. Beyond its heavy metal gates is a group of students, largely invisible to the rest of the country, earning their undergraduate degrees. Every Monday afternoon, the two of us take the train, pass through those gates, and spend two hours teaching an “introduction to neuroscience” class to those students.

Teaching in a prison comes with many challenges, but it has been one of the highlights of our professional careers. Here we describe our experience as postdoctoral fellows at New York City’s Columbia University providing instruction at Sing Sing, in partnership with Hudson Link, a non-profit organization that offers university programmes in various prisons in New York state, and Columbia’s Center for Justice, an organization that seeks to change how justice is approached through education, policy and research.

The US prison system and education

The United States is a nation of mass incarceration. There are some 1.9 million people behind bars in the country, and 14% of adults have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated for at least a year. This crisis has a disproportionate impact on low-income people, particularly in Black and Latino communities, which are affected by systemic racism and inequalities that lead to higher rates of arrest and conviction, and harsher sentences. Hudson Link and other organizations across the country are trying to disrupt the cycle and impact of incarceration in communities by providing higher-education opportunities to incarcerated individuals. Statistically speaking, education has a massive impact. In the United States, 67% of formerly incarcerated people return to prison within three years of their release, whereas less than 2% of Hudson Link graduates do.

We teach our course through Columbia University’s Prison Education Program. Official credits from this programme count towards associate’s and bachelor’s degrees. Diplomas awarded inside prison are exactly the same as those awarded outside. Thus, it is our job as instructors to provide the same quality and level of instruction to our students while working within the restrictions of the prison setting.

Entering prison

To enter Sing Sing each week, we check our phones into a depot and then wait in front of the heavy gate to be called for security screening. Above us, an ornate sign reads “Through these doors pass some of the finest correctional professionals in the world”. Security is similar to that at an airport, except that our attire is inspected: only loose, professional clothing can be worn; no bold jewellery is permitted, nor anything green, which could be confused for the prison uniforms. Our possessions must be carried in prison-issue clear bags so that the contents can be inspected for contraband. We receive an ultraviolet stamp on our hand, which will be checked when we exit the prison. We then proceed to the school building in a minivan, sparing us a three-minute walk. We are assured that every step in this process is a precaution shaped by hard-learnt lessons.

In the classroom

Preparation begins long before we enter the classroom. We are not allowed to take any technology into the prison. This is a challenge both for the students, who cannot use Google or ChatGPT, and for us, because we’ve grown accustomed to teaching with presentations and video demonstrations (how can you communicate flashing neurons with chalk?).

Furthermore, all materials have to be submitted months in advance to be approved by prison leadership. To address these constraints, we created a custom textbook for the class, in which each chapter is a different lesson (such as the motor system, emotion and the use of animal models), and there is enough information for students to learn the material even if a class is cancelled or cut short (which they frequently are). Once we’re in the classroom, we teach everything using a blackboard, and then hand out homework, to be collected the following week. We have no means of communicating with students outside class, so the cycle of feedback is slow: by the time they receive feedback, they have already submitted another assignment. And learning about the brain tends to raise more questions than it answers — we are constantly trying to strike a balance between sticking to the planned material and going on an interesting side quest brought about by a student’s question.

The students

We have taught at both Sing Sing and Taconic Correctional Facility (a medium-security women’s prison), and the students are the best we’ve ever worked with. Students range in age from early 20s to late 60s, and their sentences probably range from less than 5 years to more than 50. One might try to guess (or actively find out) what the circumstances were that led to these long sentences. However, to us it ultimately doesn’t matter: we have found every student to be warm, laser focused and curious. There are no distractions from phones or laptops — a teacher’s dream. One of the main challenges is how to teach an intense scientific course to students with diverse educational backgrounds and lived experiences. We haven’t solved the problem, but we create homework sets that partly test the knowledge obtained in class, and partly provide the students with an opportunity to apply their knowledge and creativity to the design of experiments.