In 2022, Tennessee amended its state constitution to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. Before this, prisoners did not have the right to refuse work assignments; doing so came with stiff penalties, including time in solitary confinement. In here, school is a job. Students get paid $0.26 an hour to show up to their assigned class, Monday through Friday, usually for about six hours. So a lot of students weren’t necessarily there because of a desire to learn.
But the fact is that if you want to afford edible food in prison, or you need a bar of soap to wash your ass, you need a job. Like many prisons, South Central Correctional Facility in Tennessee has a severe job shortage. And most of the jobs are in the education department—there are about 150 job slots there, more than any other part of the prison. Pretty much the only other jobs are in the kitchen, which is harder work for less money. So one way or another, getting one of the better-paying jobs here involves taking the general educational development (GED) test.
The GED is used to show that someone who didn’t graduate high school has the equivalent of a high-school education. Adult basic education (ABE) classes in prison revolve entirely around the GED. Their purpose is to get people to take the test, which is usually administered twice a year.
ABE classes are all independent study. Students go to class at the assigned hour, but it’s more like study hall or going to the library—everyone just works on their own material at their own pace. The teacher is there to answer questions if anyone has them, but there’s no group lesson.
The study books we have access to range from fourth-grade level to 12th-grade level. Once a month there’s an assessment test. So if a new student tests at a seventh-grade level, those are the books they’ll get. If they start testing at an eighth-grade level, then they get the eighth-grade books, and so on.
“As students matriculate through the ABE program levels, classes become more rigorous and an increase in the depths of knowledge is expanded,” the Tennessee Department of Correction states on its website.
If someone tests at an 11th-grade level or higher on all subjects, three separate times, they’re then scheduled to take the GED test. Often in the month leading up to the test there will be a math clinic to provide extra support, since that’s the section most people struggle with, but other than that people mainly study on their own. Our new tablets have GED prep courses and assessment tests, but there’s no way for the teachers here to look at anyone’s scores or review that material at all.
One teacher told Filter the salaries are on par with those at public schools in the free world. They said that about 80 percent of students pass the test on the first try. Once you pass a section, you don’t have to keep retaking it along with the others, you just have to pass every section at some point. There’s no limit to how many times you can retake the tests.
Other jobs in the education department pay even more than being a student. Teachers aides start out at $0.43 an hour and can make as much as $0.59 an hour, grading papers and keeping records and helping the students who have questions. But there are only a dozen of those job slots. There are even fewer for tutors—those pay $1 an hour, the highest of any job that’s not part of correctional industries. To be a tutor, you have to pass the GED test, even if you graduated high school or college before coming to prison.
Of the few other jobs that aren’t in the education department or in the kitchen, the higher-paying ones—like clerk positions or those at the correctional industries print plant or call center—require having a GED.
Besides being able to afford basic needs, the other big reason people take the GED is because if they don’t, it’s common to be denied parole. Often at a hearing the parole board, when issuing denials, will encourage anyone without their GED to pursue it. Two years later when they come back for the board to consider their case again, if they haven’t gotten their GED in the intervening time it’s unlikely they’ll be making parole.
This also happens even if the suggestion didn’t come from the board directly—often it comes from a case manager, whose job involves coming up with the plan for each prisoner to follow in order to be successfully rehabilitated. So folks who don’t have their GED end up with a case plan that recommends that they get it, and the parole board wants to see that you’re following your case plan.
Unfortunately, the limited number of student jobs are already out of reach for many of those who need them. Despite the fact that the majority of adults in prison can’t read at a fourth-grade level, there are no study books designed for earlier grades.
Image (cropped) via Pennington County Sheriff’s Office/YouTube
