How Princeton students started tutoring in prison

More than 2.2 million people are imprisoned in the United States, and the barriers to re-entry into society are high. Those who receive some education in prison are 43 percent less likely to return, according to a RAND study.

The Petey Greene program, begun in 2008, aims to supplement education in prisons by sending in college students as volunteer tutors.

We sat down with Executive Director Jim Farrin to find out more.

So who is Petey Greene and how did the program start under his name?

The original idea for the program came from a 1958 classmate of mine at Princeton named Charles (“Charlie”) Putkammer. He tutored in prisons during his junior and senior year of Princeton. Later, when he and his wife moved to Washington DC, he found a program where he could be a mentor. His first mentee was Petey Greene. Charlie started working with Petey and told him that he had a great personality and should be on the radio.

About seven years later, Charlie was coming back form a trip to India and saw a bulletin board, which had a big sign “Petey Greene Introducing Dr Martin Luther King Jr.” He went to the event, but was unfortunately 20 minutes late, so he thought he’d sit down in the back of the room. But Petey Greene saw him and said, “Wait a minute… I want to stop this program. Dr King, do you mind? Someone very important just came in. His name is Charlie Putkammer. This man changed my life, and I want you all to give him a great round of applause.”

Then Charlie, with tears in his eyes, decided someday if he made enough money in the stock market he was going to start a program like this at Princeton.

How did you get interested in the prison system? 

Life is interesting. I like the expression “what goes around, comes around.” In 1957, I was trying to figure out a thesis topic. I was somewhat of a rebellious student in that I didn’t want to follow the paths that were already there, so I found a little known judge in Colorado named Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey.

He was very interesting. He didn’t like incarceration; he liked rehabilitation. As a judge, he took some incredible risks. Barr decided to give people bus tickets. He would say: here is your ticket to this station; here’s the money once you arrive to take a taxi to the reform school.

Barr trusted them. He looked them right in the eye and said if you don’t do this, not only will you be letting yourself down, but you will be letting me down – because I’ll probably be fired. He had something like, out of 300 being sent to prison, one that didn’t go. That made a big impression on me.

Have you ever gone to tutor in the prisons?

I taught a self-help course in a prison, which everybody told me that I couldn’t do, that I’d be laughed out. They were partially right. But, it was a great experience. I got to see what it’s like to teach 28 people with a whole lot of different abilities. And a few were really changed by the course. Right now though I’m work primarily as an administrator.

How has the expansion process of the program worked?

The biggest change in the program was in 2011, when I put an ad out to all the volunteers, which was about 40 at the time, saying I was looking for students interested in being leaders of the program. Three people got back to me, and those three people changed the program tremendously.

They said, first of all – Jim, we like you a lot. But you’re seventy-something. You’re not the best recruiter. So they took control of the recruiting, and we went from 40 volunteers to 80 in a single semester.

Another breakthrough was in 2014, when I convinced Charlie Putkammer (our sole funder at that stage), to set up a program of Putkammer fellows. We hire seniors to go develop the program in a specific state. The organization now reaches out to Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington DC. We’re up to 24 colleges and I think 24 facilities in those states.

Our dream is to someday take it nationally. We’re looking very seriously at Chicago right now because we have an ex-Petey Greene Putkammer fellow their who worked for the DOC in quantitative methodology. It’s very important for our program to measure what we do. We want to get more sophisticated in receiving feedback so that we can better appeal to funders.

As far as we know, we are the only program focusing on getting the students through their GED, getting them into college.

Have you spoken with former inmates who have received help from Petey Greene tutors?

One guy told me that tutors from Rutgers had helped him quite a bit, and that had made a tremendous difference. A few have told me that as a result of the experience, they’ve gained more confidence.

There’s a statistic from the RAND Study in 2014 that shows that even with just one or two courses in prison, you reduce the recidivism rate for those people. Because the minute they complete a class, they think, “Wow, I just took a course. What’s stopping me from taking more courses?”

One dollar invested in prison education comes back in three years to save five dollars in reduction in recidivism. It is in society’s interest to really give better education to people inside who’ve made a mistake and deserve a second chance.

We have a tremendous speaker working with us named Walter Fortson. What he always says is, “I didn’t get a second chance. I got an opportunity, and I took it.”

He went from prison, to a halfway house, to Rutgers University. He graduated with a 3.75 average. He got a Truman Scholarship, of which there are only 50 or so given in the United States. Princeton hasn’t had one for a couple of years now. He went to Cambridge and got a Master’s in Criminal Justice. And now he has joined Petey Greene.

What he shows is the power of having the opportunity to get education.

Have you seen any changes in the prison education system in the past eight years?

Looking at it largely through the lens of New Jersey, there have been some great changes. First there was something called the Education and Rehabilitation Act. Now, someone who is going to be incarcerated for ten years or more has to receive up to a 12th grade education level. If you’re in for five years you have to receive up to a 9th grade education level. This was amazing progress. And in New Jersey, they’ve actually closed a prison and are turning it into a drug rehabilitation center.

We’re also seeing a drop in the number of prisoners. The two facilities Princeton students tutor at, Garden State and Wagner, used to have about 1200 prisoners. Today they have 800. Consider that in a lot of prisons in New Jersey, up to 50 percent of the people are in there for nonviolent crimes. And of that 50 percent, 80 percent are drug offenders. A lot of us, including me, think that is more of an addiction than a crime.

How do you think Petey Greene impacts the college students who volunteer?

One of the most profound experiences was in 2009, when a volunteer asked me to attend the final exam of her speech class. She said: “It was in prison rather than in Princeton where I learned the value of drawing strength from weakness. My most memorable moment came when I was honest and vulnerable. It was in admitting my weaknesses and flaws like the students that I grew as a person.”