Examinations: an inside story

EXPANDING your mind without the use of drugs... that's how Paul describes studying for the Leaving Cert. Paul is serving a seven year prison sentence.

Four of us are sitting on chairs arranged in a circle in the yoga room of Cork Prison's education unit. Apart from the chairs, the room is sparsely furnished. The atmosphere, though, is relaxed.

Paul, Dave (four year sentence) and Bernard (seven and a half year sentence) hand around sweets and cigarettes. I feel guilty eating their sweets when they must be so hard to come by. "No, no," they insist, "we each get a turn to go to the prison shop once a week.'

They are all 24 years old. They are casually dressed in jeans or tracksuits. They manage somehow to lounge and look comfortable in the stiff, upright, polypropylene chairs. From time to time a prison officer puts his head in the door, leaving it ajar as he exits. Each time one or other of the prisoners rises, walks across the room and gently closes the door. Our conversation continues undisturbed.

Paul is 15 months into his first prison sentence. "Being in prison is like being on a different planet," he says. He left school at 16 with a good Junior Cert which included four honours, and embarked on a series of low paid jobs.

This year Paul is taking two Leaving Cert exams - history and English.

"I want to get qualifications," he says. "When I get out I'll have something behind me and I'll be able to get a better paid job."

Dave says prison is "a terrible place". He is on his second sentence. "I was thrown out of school at 15 for breaking a window," he says. This year he is taking Leaving Cert history, but is also studying woodwork and French.

Bernard has been in prison twice before. He dropped out of school when he was 14. Initially he was suspended. The school then offered him two or three classes a week. He got fed up and "decided to bail out".

"The Junior Cert home economics course is very interesting," says Bernard. "I was never into studying on the outside."

ONLY a relatively small number of prisoners sit Junior Cert and Leaving Cert exams. This year in Cork, five inmates are sitting for the Junior Cert, while three are taking the Leaving Cert.

The exams are usually taken only by long term prisoners who are available to start the courses in September.

A far larger number of prisoners take NCVA courses, which are more flexible and better suited to prisoner's needs, says Mr Colm O'Herlihy, the prison's supervising teacher. As in other prisons, the main focus of prison education is on health and basic education.

"Almost two thirds of the prison population is involved in education. "We recruit actively," says Mr O'Herlihy. "If you can get them hooked on one subject, the likelihood is that they will embark on others.

In prison the areas of greatest interest are physical education, art and home economics (which includes childcare), he says.

Cork prison boasts a purpose built school complete with art and pottery, woodwork and music rooms, a home economics kitchen, a library, a sewing room and a room for literacy.

Special category prisoners have their own school within the prison. Up to 21 teachers are attached to the education unit, including three home economics teachers.

THE prison teachers are highly praised by Paul, Dave and Bernard. They're on first name terms with them. They like coming across the yard to the school, where they find the atmosphere friendly and relaxed.

All three have bad memories of their own school days.

"We were the messers," Paul says. They gave all the others three stars but they only gave us one." The prisoners believe that the area you come from dictates the way you will be treated by teachers.

"If you come from a bad neighbourhood, you're treated from day one as a hood," Bernard says. "If you live in a yuppie area you get more attention.

Bernard liked primary school and did well there. But he found the transition to second level school difficult. He was dogged by the reputations of family members who had gone before him.

"My brothers and uncles had been through the school and your name goes before you," he says. "The teachers weren't as helpful as they were at primary school. They had a grudge against me from the start and were waiting for me to make a mistake."

Bernard believes that if he had attended a different school, he would not be in prison today.

Dave too feels that he was a target for unsympathetic teachers. "My mother used to say if the cat had kittens I'd be blamed for it," he says.

For Paul, school was a foretaste of prison. I had a copy book which had to be signed by every teacher who taught me," he recalls. "I wasn't allowed to move around the school and was escorted from class to class by a teacher. Just like here."

Bernard says he has learned more in one year studying in prison than he did in three years at second level.

"At school if you didn't understand something the teachers Just passed on," he says. "Here if you have a problem you discuss it with your teachers and you're given an explanation. If you don't understand something you need it explained. It's not, that you want special attention.

On the face of it, prison may appear to be the perfect place to study. Prisoners are locked in their cells from 7.30 p.m.

However, clearly prison life has it drawbacks. The fact that many prisoners share cells can cause difficulties for people who are trying to study.

Dave and Bernard, who both share cells, are lucky. Dave's cellmate is, he says, quiet and uses headphones to listen to radio, while Bernard's cellmate helps him with his work.

Of course, there is a tedium and monotony about prison life which prisoners find frustrating.

Prisoners lack the social interaction - the lunch time and coffee break discussions - that add an extra and beneficial dimension to many VTOS programmes, for example.

"Sometimes, you'd just like to tear up your books," they say. "You'd like to be able to go for a walk and let what you've studied sink in."