Inside/Outside

by John Hopkins

Inside/Outside

The students file into the room and settle into their seats, joking and trading small talk. Anne Nurse, assistant professor of sociology, looks at her notes one last time. It's a cold, grey day in February, but inside this windowless classroom it could be any time of year, any place.

Nurse calls the class to order. "Okay, today we're going to talk about social disorganization theory," she says. She tells the students about the Chicago School theory, developed in the 1920s—which includes the hypothesis that urban crime rates will always be highest in a transitional zone that lies just outside of the central business district. Occupied by recent immigrant groups, these areas traditionally have higher turnover, more poverty, and more ethnic conflict than do working class and wealthier residential areas.

"What do you think of this theory?" Nurse asks. "Does it make sense today?"

Several students argue that it doesn't describe the cities they know. "There are only two groups now—transitional and working class," says one student. "The rich aren't in the city at all."

Another student disagrees with the idea that crime is dependent on geography. "It's the people, not the zone. You can move them out somewhere else, and they'll mess that up, too."

Nurse points out that this is a good example of the "culture of poverty" school of thought, which maintains that poor people are fundamentally different—more fatalistic, less able to plan for the long term, less interested in hard work.

Adam is having none of it. "Look at the jobs poor people have to work—hard, physical jobs—and you tell me who are the lazy ones."

So it goes for the rest of the hour and a half. A bell rings, and the class members part ways. Half of them form a line and are escorted down the corridor. Nurse and the rest of the students wait a few minutes and also head down the hall. They pass through three sets of locked doors, retrieve their coats, turn in their orange visitor badges, and walk back through the metal detector to the parking lot for the 30- minute van ride back to campus.

Nurse has taught Sociology 213, Criminology and Deviance, every year since coming to Wooster in 1999, but this spring was different. Her class met twice a week at the Indian River Juvenile Correctional Facility in Massillon, Ohio, a maximum security prison housing 190 young men, aged 13 to 21, who have been convicted of offenses that range from robbery and assault to homicide. Half of the students in Nurse's class were from inside the facility, half were from the College.

Although Temple University in Philadelphia has conducted similar programs in adult prisons since 1997, this was the first such class to be held at a juvenile facility. Nurse, who has studied and written extensively about the juvenile justice system, attended a training program at Temple to prepare for the experience.

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