Tuesday, February 17, 1998
UCLA students volunteer to tutor incarcerated youths
OUTREACH: Prisoners see outside world through one-on-one
guidance
By Trina Enriquez
Daily Bruin Contributor
The world outside is only glimpsed through barred windows around
the room. Just beyond doors left ajar, guards tensely make sure
that all inside the room is in order.
Down the hallway from this room are the cells of the Ventura
Youth Correction Facility, a high-security prison where several of
those seated are doing time.
Every other Sunday, volunteers from the Incarcerated Youth
Tutorial Project (IYTP) spend about three hours tutoring wards, as
the young prisoners are called.
Tutors bring their own textbooks to supplement the wards’
materials, working one-on-one with the wards in specific areas of
study, ranging from literature to mathematics.
At the Ventura facility, wards may opt to take advantage of the
IYTP volunteers’ guidance as they work toward earning a high school
diploma or take basic college courses.
Yet invariably, IYTP volunteers serve as counselors for these 17
to 21-year-olds, who want contact with the outside world as much as
help with their homework.
"Sometimes we just talk about life in general," said Omar
Mahmood, IYTP director and fourth-year psychobiology and Arabic
major. "We don’t see them as hopeless cases, but as people with
potential to get out of the system they were born into."
According to Mahmood, 50 to 60 percent of wards return to the
California Youth Authority within two years of being released.
Rather than a place offering a better outlook on life and
encouragement to seek options other than a life of crime, prison
serves more as a "holding container."
"People in the prison say to them, ‘Why do you get tutored when
you know you can’t do it?’" Mahmood said.
Unlike the wards tutored at the Ventura facility, all 12 to
18-year-olds at Camp Kilpatrick and the Dorsey-Kirby Center are
tutored by the volunteers from the Prison Coalition, another UCLA
student organization dedicated to prison issues.
In the hierarchy of correction facilities, probation camps such
as Kilpatrick and Dorsey-Kirby are a step below the California
Youth Authority (CYA), to which the Ventura Youth Correctional
Facility belongs. Probation camps serve to ensure that the CYA is
not the next destination for these youth.
The Prison Coalition’s purpose is similar to the IYTP’s in
mentoring incarcerated youth. In addition, multicultural education
and workshops on conflict mediation, college and job applications
join academic material on the Prison Coalition’s agenda.
"It’s hard for one teacher to give individual attention to a
class of thirty," said Irene Farinas, Prison Coalition director and
fifth-year sociology major. "So it motivates them to have (us)
there to encourage them. And it works both ways: tutors learn from
tutees."
Volunteers from both Prison Coalition and the IYTP often find it
most rewarding to get to know those they tutor, and lend knowledge
that is not necessarily academic.
Admittedly, however, not every person tutored will respond
ideally to the efforts of volunteers.
Farinas once tutored a 16-year-old prior to his release from a
probation camp. A year later, he was back.
"It made me realize that these kids may or may not get in
trouble again," Farinas said.
"We can’t go in there thinking, ‘Yeah, we’re going to change
their entire lives,’" Farinas continued. "But at least we can do
something."