The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program was created in 1997 to foster, across semester-long academic courses conducted within prisons and other correctional institutions, meaningful engagement between college students and incarcerated individuals.
A key proponent of the Inside-Out program is historian Reiko Hillyer, who brought it to Lewis & Clark College and, by extension, to the nearby Columbia River Correctional Institution. There, thirty students – 15 of whom are themselves incarcerated, the other 15 coming from the college – engage in a fifteen-week course on the history of crime and punishment in the US.
By engaging with themes such as masculinity and prison reform/abolition, as well as examining arguments for greater clemency, the film challenges the “invisible” status of US prisoners, and underlines how a sledge-hammer policy of wholesale incarceration can be highly deleterious to society.
The film also packs an emotional punch as very close bonds develop between the students over the 15-week semester. What ultimately emerges is a moving and uplifting study in human connection and a deep acknowledgement of shared values, despite the radically contrasting circumstances of the participants.
Director Eden Wurmfeld has known Professor Hillyer all her life. “We met as children in the seventh grade and, as I’ve said in the past, I feel like I’ve had the gift of her as a teacher my whole life, pretty much,” Wurmfeld tells BDE. “So when she did the training for this Inside-Out Prison Exchange Programme and started teaching this class, she told me about it in detail, and…I always kind of dreamed that maybe we could document it at some point.”
The opportunity came in 2023 when she entered the classroom, initially to create a work for archival purposes but which would also include a culminating theatre piece. “But ultimately, in the edit, it really became clear that the encounter between these two groups of people and hearing what they had to say from the heart was the gift that I felt the film had to bring to the world, and so we eliminated the theatre aspect of it and just tried to focus on what people had to say,” the director underlines. “So it grew into the film Classroom 4 because the students really were articulating that they wanted this experience to be amplified beyond the four walls of that room.”
Professor Hillyer explains the process of prep at the beginning of the 15-week odyssey. “I meet with the outside students and inside students separately a couple of times before the semester begins to give them an overview of the class, to ensure that they understand that the principles of the class are about mutual respect and learning from one another. We are not there to study incarcerated people. We are not there to save incarcerated people. We are there to learn alongside and with and from each other.”
“Before I enter the prison with the outside students, I have to read a document every single time that says visitors to the prison understand and acknowledge the possibilities of violence and being taken hostage exist,” Hillyer adds. “And so, the very first day is what you see [in the film], the two groups coming together in the very first moments in real time. And beyond that preparation, the trust and connection just unfold through the presence and intention of the people in the room, including me.”
One of the inside students we meet is Native American Nick Fiveoaks, now out of jail and working closely with the production during the ongoing Oscar campaign. During the film he makes telling observations about life inside. One of the binary (and terrifying) distinctions made among inmates is that you’re either a fish or a shark, and how, for self-preservation, he followed advice to “look up the natives, to find his people.”
Nick tells BDE that he was initially apprehensive before embarking on the 15-week program.
“I know we all pretty much felt the same way, you know. How’re we gonna get through this?” he says. “Myself, I’m twice as old as most of the students that were coming in from the outside, and having to deal with the illusion or the mindset of ‘am I gonna be judged?’ What are they gonna think of me when they first see me? And how am I supposed to respond to what I think a lot of us thought [would be] glares or awkward looks. Professor Hillyer did an amazing job coming in prior to the classroom starting and, you know, gave us the rundown of how it was going to be. I was very sceptical at first. And I had a lot of anxiety. Very nervous. As were, I’m pretty sure, everybody in that classroom. You could see it on a lot of the faces when they first came in, including ourselves.”
The ice is broken almost immediately, however, when students are asked to supply their own endings to a series of simple but deceptively revealing sentences, such as ‘you might be surprised to learn that I’; ‘the weirdest thing I’ve ever eaten is’; ‘my favourite toy as a child was…’
Did the presence of cameras in the classroom add to the tension? In the main, no, Nick responds. “There’s cameras all around all the time. Even though they’re not in your face, you know that they’re there. A lot of the times in the beginning, you know, when you had the boom mic above you or you had the [film] camera pointed at you, it was a little intimidating. But at the same time…you know, we’re being filmed 24-7. So there really was very, very little adjustment for that.”
Not surprisingly, there is a strong impact dimension to the production, which the Oscar campaign is serving to promote. “We really need this film for outreach and impact and education,” says director Wurmfeld. “For me, my truest hope is for as many eyeballs, as many classrooms, as many panel discussions, as many legislators, parole officers, prison administrators as possible – we’re interested in anyone and everyone utilising the film.”
She further explains how the Jewish Museum in New York City selected the film to participate in its Movies That Matter program. “I thought, that’s odd. This doesn’t have any Jewish content. I wonder why. And it turns out that the ethos of their film programme is to show films that have people seeing each other across differences, and then tie every film that they show to some piece of art in their museum. They did a very robust in-depth interview with Nick and Reiko and me. And they have also created this incredible resource guide for educators and high schools across the world to participate in this.”
At times in the documentary, Professor Hillyer is tearful in class, sometimes in response to the subject she is teaching, at other times as a result of the testimonies she hears from students, whether inside or out. Tight-lipped, professional distance may be de rigeur in the field of academia, but certainly not so within the vital, real-world context of Inside-Out.
“Because I teach U.S. history, because I care about social justice, because I believe in the dignity of every human being, the material of U.S. history will make me cry,” she stresses. “It is a disturbing and tragic and beautiful and inspiring story that has emotion in it. It’s kind of impossible not to feel angry or upset about the material or excited about the material that that we’re studying.”
“So I began to open myself up more to the value of integrating personal experience, subjective wisdom, lived experience into the academic classroom, and to incorporate both forms of knowledge together, the emotional and the personal and the academic, the historical and the structural,” Hillyer signs off.
