The above question may seem quite deceitful and controversial at first sight. In this article, I will try to convince you, Dear Reader, that surprisingly, anyone may be a role model.
If we consider celebrities, politicians or sportsmen/-women as role models, people who are not always crystal clear and morally intact, why cannot it be a person serving their time in prison? After all, it is up to us, recipients, how we are going to respect our role models, how we are going to follow in their footsteps or copy their behavior.
Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia provides us with the following definition of the term “role model”: “a person whose behavior in a particular role is imitated by others”. It is easy to draw a conclusion that having such a role model in one’s life is a very important factor. Of course, it is possible that our role model will be a very bad example. And here, in my opinion, is the core of the problem – to have (or to be such) a proper example to follow so that one can behave in the right way. In the way which is generally considered positive. Obviously, not only young people need role models in their lives. Sometimes we all need such models, be it at work, in the community we live in, or in the country where we reside.
At the beginning I mentioned that anyone may be a role model and I believe that whoever is reading this article could agree with me that in certain moments of their lives, they had such a person. Beginning from the very early stages of our lives these were our parents or siblings. Later, most probably peers, teachers, colleagues or friends. Maybe a boss at work. Most probably, more seldom – politicians. It all depends on the moment of our life we are at, place we live in, with whom we spend time, where we learn or with whom we work, etc.
So, can we find a role model in a prison environment? Let’s have a look at it from two sides. At the beginning from a point of view of a convicted person. It is certainly very difficult to have an impact on a prisoner, for, by definition and as a rule, prisoners are the ones who do not want to follow others. They do not want to listen to other and they simply “know better”. They prefer to be as they are and very often, they do not want to admit that would ever follow anybody. Unless these are people from their criminal world. It goes beyond saying that a role model for prisoners could be a prison guard, a penitentiary tutor, a teacher in a prison school, etc. However, on the other hand, prisoners can also make good role models. And I do not mean the mentioned above example of a crime world representative to follow which in fact is inspiring other inmates to commit more evil deeds. What I mean here is so called preventive inspiration – a term I coined for the purpose of this article.
Can we be inspired by prisoners? By people who committed crimes? By someone who spent many years being isolated from the rest of the society? I can only assume that if I made a street, oral survey in any given town or city, after having heard such questions, majority of respondents would give as an answer a very firm “no”. However, we should all realize that not all of those who are serving their time behind bars, are only degenerates. It happens that many convicts are the ones whose lives were very negative and are well bruised as people. Certain sequence of events led them to the place where they are. Moreover, many of them are ready to share their life stories to preventively inspire others to avoid mistakes which brought them to prison. Preventive inspiration proves itself to be best among young people who are most prone to negative influence of their peers.
Nowadays, many young do not have proper patterns to follow. Life style is very dynamic. Many of those young people are lost in their lives. Very often they are rejected which makes them make wrong choices. This, on the other hand, may lead to very disastrous results. In an answer to this diagnosis, a few years ago, „Busola” socially excluded education association from Płock, Poland, created a project named “Voice from behind the bars”. The objective of the project is to send prisoners serving their time in Płock prison to schools in order to have lessons with youngsters. The form of the lesson is a talk and the “teachers” of the lessons are inmates. The target group of the lessons are pupils of secondary schools and this is who the lessons are made for. The main idea of the project is to organize meetings between with young people, during which inmates share their negative life experiences. The aim of the meetings is to show how, many a time, wrong choice may have extremely negative results in future life, or even how it may completely ruin one’s life. We think, that preventive measures in such a form of meetings with prisoners, force the youth to auto reflection and to think about their own lives (or the lives of someone who is close to them) and in the final effect, have a positive influence on them. Thanks to getting to know with negative life experiences of other people (in this particular case – people serving time in prison), young ones will consider the question of making the right choices in one’s life and what consequences negative choices may bring. This assumption is not based on any official document or study. It rather comes out of the everyday observations, discussions with teachers, conversations with parents, etc. According to our knowledge, before we came up with the idea of our project, young people from Płock did not have a chance to participate in such an advisory class. The project proved to be very successful. In total, we visited 30 schools, 50 convicts took part in “live” classes, and if it comes to young people, almost 3100 of them listened to our prisoners during “Voice from behind the bars” lessons organized in Płock schools.
„Busola” socially excluded education association is a voluntary association of teachers, workers and supporters of the Continuing Education Centre at the Płock penal unit as well as the Occupational Therapy Workshop operating at the Płock penal unit. Members of the association are also others who act and work in the field of prison education. What is very important is the fact that the majority of members are active prison educators. The main goal of establishing the association was to provide prison students and occupational therapy workshop participants as well as the socially excluded ones with educational, pedagogical, cultural, sporting, touristic, health-promoting and training activities. Other goals of our association are supporting self-development and equaling educational opportunities among prison students and occupational therapy workshop participants as well as the socially excluded ones, health promotion and health protection. We also organize educational activities for prison educators for the sake of their professional development.
Benjamin Franklin once said: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. We fully agree with this saying and we think that our project “Voice from behind the bars” is an ideal example of such a philosophy. It clearly fits into our constitutional activity and we profoundly believe that among those 3100 young students mentioned above, who listened to our mentees (convicts) during live meetings at schools, are such individuals who took to their hearts message brought by our project. Who knows? Maybe thanks to our lesson and its preventive inspiration we managed to convince someone not to misbehave and to do the right thing in their lives.
I recommend visiting our website to have a closer look at the project and to see photos taken during the visits at schools – http://en.busola.edu.pl/project/voice-from-behind-the-bar/.
Hubert Skrzynski
