By Emma Hall
The Sacramento Bee
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Los Rios Community College District’s Prison and Reentry program, which teaches college classes within local correctional facilities, has an uncertain future after the district investigated nine faculty members.
The crux of the investigation, faculty members said, is the distribution of student-written letters.
Kalinda Jones, the program’s faculty coordinator, said these letters included ones detailing student concerns and a class project where students write letters to their future selves, a project the program has done for years.
The district claimed the physical transportation of letter possibly violated a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation policy, which requires a prison warden to approve the transport of letters.
The investigation has now been completed, a spokesperson with Los Rios said, which found no evidence of any wrongdoing by any Los Rios employee.”
However, the future of the program is still uncertain, said Jones. During the investigation, faculty contracts to work inside the prison expired, and for classes to be held in the fall, a contract must be negotiated.
This contract clarifies clear working conditions and protections, like safety, training and academic freedom for professors, Jones said.
Because Los Rios’s faculty union does not have information about working conditions specific to prisons, they must work with the district to outline them. The contract later needs to be voted on by the faculty union’s executive board, which does not meet during the summer.
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Despite this, the district said they plan to still “offer classes this fall and are continuing to work with faculty to put together as complete a schedule as possible for the upcoming semester.” The district said there are ongoing conversations “about how to provide the best possible environment for faculty in this program.”
“Our goal had always been to continue the program and offer as many classes as possible this fall, and from the district’s perspective any investigation was unrelated to that goal,” said Gabe Ross, chief strategy and communications officer for the district.
Student pen letters of concern
During the winter of 2023, several incarcerated students wrote letters to the college’s student senates expressing concerns and criticism about the program. Students reported they did not have proper counseling needs and classes were taught without books and computers. The district said they hired a counselor the year before.
“I feel like incarcerated students are being treated like three-fifths of a student,” said program alum Angelo Ward, who is now studying at Sacramento State. “It’s like our voices don’t matter because we are incarcerated. Out of sight, out of mind.”
For Ward, the program gave him a different perspective on life. As a Black and Pomo Native American man, he recalled being dismissed and racially profiled. As a result, Ward said he would take his anger out on others.
His courses and instructors taught him to grow, to interacts with others differently and that he has a voice to make a positive change. Today, he working on becoming better, not just for himself, but for his daughter. Programs like this have shown to be beneficial for incarcerated students. Higher education lowers an individual’s recidivism rate and provides a new life path for incarcerated students.
Ward believe his instructors did nothing wrong, and said the investigation began with student letters expressing concerns and the formation of a student task group.
Faculty like Jones said this mistreatment was done because the district could get away with it. Unlike their non-incarcerated peers, incarcerated students can go unseen.
“This would never happen on campus,” Jones said. “It’s just because our people are hidden behind wire fences.”
Even now that the investigation has been concluded, Jones still doesn’t know if students will receive the resources they requested. Jones said that the district has not followed the corrections education penal code, which requires colleges to adhere to specific requirements for their prison education programs.
“Los Rios has not aligned resources for incarcerated students to make sure they have an education that is equitable to students on campus or that aligns to the penal code,” Jones said.
Ward said when incarcerated students spoke up to administration, it felt like their concerns fell on deaf ears. He said district administration was encouraging of the task group in the beginning, but over time, he said it seemed like the support was “for show.”
The goal of this task group was to “receive some type of aid” to the program, Ward said.
Faculty said the district was slow to provide resources to classes and failed to meet the program’s accommodations.
“I’m just frustrated and just saddened,” said Veronica Lopez, one of the professors. “This is an amazing program and it changes lives. Student after student has said it has changed their perspective.”
The letters at the center of the investigation
The biggest point of the investigation was the transportation of letters.
Letters addressing student concerns about the program were sent to student senates from Jones. After she sent the letters in an email on Dec. 5, Jones was told she was being investigated.
Later that month, Jones said she was called into a meeting right before Christmas break, where she said she was read a statement saying she “put the safety of Los Rios administration and classified employees at risk.”
Jones said she was told she could not teach at another prison until the investigation was concluded.
For her, she said it’s “still unclear what exactly (the district was) investigating.” She said the only details she received was that she “illegally used district email to distribute student letters.”
“There’s no distributing student letters. It’s student work that they did for a project in class where they were advocating,” Jones said.
In March, eight other faculty were notified that they were also being investigated.
“I would have never imagined I would be investigated because I was cc’d on an email,” said Veronica Jones, the prison reentry faculty coordinator. “I was doing my job.”
Not only do faculty involved in the sending letters don’t believe they violate any law, but they said the district is “criminalizing” their curriculum.
“They’re kind of picking and choosing that law to sort of criminalize us, when it obviously doesn’t apply to people teaching inside a prison,” faculty member Joshua Fernandez said in June. “That law is for people who are actually transporting personal letters outside of the prison. That’s what that law is for, not for people teaching.”
Faculty are were investigated for other reasons. Fernandez, who teaches English, was told teaching material that wasn’t explicitly on his syllabus was “a criminal act,” he said.
Legally, all that’s required to be on a syllabus is the course’s description, time and grading structure, Fernandez said, the rest is up to the instructor.
Jones said she has never heard complaints on letter project before, and that it was even praised by college administrators, including her department chair, Folsom Lake College Administration, district academic senate faculty members and Los Rios Prison Education Administration.
“I don’t think that (Los Rios) is willing to provide the resources behind it, or the respect,” Jones said. “We would never be where we are with this investigation if they had just asked faculty some questions. Just ask for clarification, just have communication with us.”
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