At the crack of dawn on January 10, 2005, the journey began.  Twenty-four San Diego State University criminal justice students and their professor boarded a charter bus. They were en route to California Men's Colony, the first stop on a statewide prison tour that gave these students a glimpse of life behind the walls of some of California's correctional facilities.

Many of the undergrads in Professor Paul Sutton's "Prisons in Theory and Practice" course had never set foot in a prison before they spent a five-day week visiting a variety of correctional facilities from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento.  The trip's jam-packed itinerary included stops at the Correctional Training Facility, Salinas Valley, Mule Creek, Folsom and Sacramento state prisons and Central California Women's Facility. 

"Every prison is different.  I have selected a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly," said Sutton, who has been running this prison tour since in 1984.  "In terms of the smorgasbord of their experiences, I have tried to construct [the tour] so there is no repetition."

Sutton's goal is to give these juniors and seniors a real-life look at prisons, from the best possible vantage point - the inside.  He subscribes to the philosophy that students learn more from being immersed in an experience than they do from listening to an instructor in a classroom.

"It becomes so much more real that you never forget it," Sutton said.  "It generates questions in your mind because you are sitting face-to-face with this reality," he said.  "That is what I love about this kind of immersion experience.  You can't escape it.  Pretty soon, you are gripped by it, you are engaged by it and then, you want to know more."

According to Sutton, the students start out in this six-week, intensive course not knowing much about inmates, correctional staff or prison culture.  Often, he said, they have preconceived notions about incarcerated offenders and whether or not they deserve compassion from the outside world.

But the prison tour tends to change students' perceptions of inmates, and the correctional system as a whole.

At California Men's Colony, the first prison the students visit, inmates who are serving life sentences for murder escort them around the facility.  It is a powerful introduction for many of the undergrads to prison life, Sutton said.

After the inmates guide their guests around the prison, they sit down for a few hours and talk with the students, providing them with some insight into their world.

"By the time it is over, they are friends," Sutton said of the students and inmates.  "[The students] have made a 180 degree turn from where the started that morning by the end of the day," he said.  "That juices them up for the rest of the week."

At the other prisons the class travels to, a variety of staff members, including corrections officers, investigators, public information officers and chaplains show them around the facility. 

Additionally, students talk with other people while they are at the prison, like medical staff, educators and counselors.  Sutton hopes that by meeting all of these different people, who have diverse, yet equally important functions within a correctional system, the students will have a broader perspective on the institutions and how they operate.

"Ultimately, I hope they gain an appreciation for the complexity of issues they thought were simple," Sutton said.  "They think one thing about inmates and it's just not that simple.  They think one thing about guards and it's just not that simple.  They think one thing about prisons and it's just not that simple."

While students soak up knowledge by witnessing the hustle and bustle of everyday prison life, perhaps the best insight they gain during this trip comes from the unexpected incidents that sometimes occur while they are on the inside.

According to Sutton, the class's recent trip to California State Prison Sacramento proved to be a more intense learning experience than he had anticipated.  When the students arrived at the facility, officers were in the process of investigating an incident that had happened in the yard a few days before and resulted in an inmate's death.

Sutton said the students were allowed to ask questions about the investigation and view autopsy pictures of the slain inmate, who had hidden a weapon inside of his body before he died.

"When you are able to walk through an entire incident like that, it tells you so much more [about] the ins and outs and the workings of prison and prison culture," Sutton said.

Another dramatic moment occurred halfway through the tour, when the murder of a corrections officer by an inmate at the California Institution for Men prompted the Department of Corrections to lock-down every correctional facility in the state.

Sutton said that was a rare chance for the students to see what happens during a state of emergency and to talk with the corrections officers about how they felt after losing one of their own. 

"[It was] an opportunity [for them] to observe the reaction of an entire state department to the ultimate tragedy that can befall it," Sutton said. 

While the students are exposed to some heavy-duty prison events at some points during the tour, they do have one less intense day, when they stop at the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco.

Delancey Street, a residence housing between 400 and 500 substance abusers, is the only non-prison stop on the tour, Sutton said.  But, he said, it is good for the students to absorb what is going on in this kind of rehabilitative environment, too.

"Most of the time, when we are in the prisons, there's not an awful lot to get excited about," Sutton said.  "When we get to Delancey Street, people actually see life in change."

After visiting Delancey Street, the students are free to roam around San Francisco and decompress for a couple of hours.  Then, they meet back on the bus and forge on in their expedition, with a few more prisons left to tour.

The whole time students are on the bus, they are watching films about the criminal justice system, like news programs and documentaries, or engaging in discussions about their prison tour experiences, explained Sutton. 

"While they are on the bus, they are never resting," he said.  "They don't get much escape from prison for that whole five days.  That is part of the experience."

Sutton encourages the students to keep a journal to document what they have seen and learned and how they are feeling, which is helpful for when they return and are required to write the 20-page paper on the reality of incarceration -- the basis of their grade for this three credit class.

According to Sutton, who runs about four of these tours for students each year, the entire trip, from start to finish, is physically, emotionally and psychologically demanding on the students.

But he said, the vast majority of them step foot back onto the SDSU campus with a different mindset about prisons than they had before and a determination to make some kind of difference in the world.

"They realize, whatever I do, there are things to be done and I want to do them," said Sutton.  "[And] that is the kind of juice that I run on."

Resources:

To learn more about the prison tour, go to http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~psutton