An Analysis of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program: Outside Students’ Empathy, Social Connectedness, and Criminal Justice Activism

Abstract

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program unites college students and incarcerated individuals for semester-long courses. The present study assessed the association between Inside-Out participation and perceptions of incarcerated populations, as well as criminal justice activism. Specifically, we compared Inside-Out participants to students who submitted a request to enroll in Inside-Out but ultimately did not participate, and students who neither participated nor requested enrollment, on: empathy, social closeness and similarity to incarcerated individuals, and criminal justice activism importance and confidence. Inside-Out students expressed greater affective, but not cognitive, empathy, and felt closer and more similar to the incarcerated, compared to their non-participating peers. Inside-Out students and those who requested enrollment did not differ in activism. Both groups scored higher than students who neither participated nor requested enrollment. Present findings demonstrate that empathy and social connectedness towards incarcerated populations are uniquely associated with Inside-Out Program participation, not simply an interest in its curriculum.

Keywords:

• Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program
• empathy
• social connectedness
• criminal justice activism
• incarcerated individuals

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Dr. Norma Rodriguez for taking the time and energy to provide valuable feedback on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We asked Pitzer College’s Office of the Registrar to send a recruitment e-mail to students who were previously or currently enrolled in Inside-Out. Though we did not disclose the research topic as Inside-Out in other recruitment scripts, the Registrar required us to inform students as to why they were being recruited. Thirteen Inside-Out students completed the study after the Registrar e-mailed students, but due to the anonymous nature of data collection, we cannot determine whether they participated due to the Registrar’s e-mail or other recruitment.

2 Removing this specific participant from analyses did not change the statistical significance of our primary hypothesis tests.

3 Coders were instructed that if they did not feel comfortable coding a certain theme for a response, they could leave their code for that theme blank, which can explain the slight changes in degrees of freedom across analyses.

4 Data obtained from Fact Sheets from each Claremont College’s individual website (excluding Harvey Mudd).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elaine Fouché

Elaine Fouche works in the social services department at a Seattle based psychiatric hospital. She received her BA in psychology and legal studies from Pitzer College.

Steffanie Guillermo

Steffanie Guillermo is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Pitzer College. She received her PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research examines social cognitive mechanisms underlying racial/ethnic stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.