Prison focuses on education for teen inmates

BOWLING GREEN, Mo. -- It could be a typical classroom.

A teacher stands before a chalkboard instructing her students, who sit patiently at their small desks, raise their hands and never speak out of turn.

The room's walls are plastered with inspirational quotes and mottos. Projects completed by students hang nearby. Textbooks pile high on the teacher's desk and shelves.

But with a closer look, things are not what they seem.

A guard sits outside the classroom. Beyond him, a 15-foot-high fence is topped with barbed wire. Towers stand above the fences with more guards watching.

The students inside wear identical yellow jumpsuits. These "students" have robbed, raped and looted. Some have even killed. Too young to be around adult criminals, they serve their time at the Northeast Correction Center in Bowling Green, Mo., separated from the more than 1,900 adult inmates in the same penitentiary.

Two Cape Girardeau teenagers are among the seven youths being held here.

Semaj Lumas, 16, and Isaiah Lane, 15, were sentenced to 10 years for the July 21 robbery of KFC, 2101 William St. The pair had been certified as adults, meaning after conviction they would go to an adult prison instead of a juvenile facility.

Now every morning the two wake up at 6 a.m. in a row of bunk beds with five other juvenile inmates. The room is nearly barren, just the beds, a community television, a table and chairs. They eat breakfast on the table only feet from where they had slept the night before. Then school starts.

"We just try to get them ready for whatever comes their direction," said Jim Moore, the correctional center's superintendent. And whatever may come next may be release from prison, or time in a penitentiary with adults.

Bowling Green has seen youths who come in for as little as 120 days and youths who faced up to 30 years in prison. But the prisoners can't remain at the small, sectioned off corner of the correctional center forever. When the convicted youths turn 17 years old, they are shipped off to another prison and introduced into an environment of hardened, adult criminals.

But before that happens, Moore said the youths spend their time focusing on education and obtaining their GED.

The youths, most of whom have prior juvenile offenses and a history with the Department of Youth Services, sit in a classroom similar to one at any local high school. Janis Nichols, who has taught youths at the facility for eight years, educates the boys on reading, writing, keyboarding, social studies, science and math every weekday.

The small classroom environment is a sharp contrast to the boys' schools on the other side of the fence, as well as the classrooms available for adult prisoners just a few hundred feet away.

The majority of juveniles who come to Bowling Green are about 15 years old, and most do not have education skills beyond the second grade, Nichols said.

Because public schools have larger classes, the youths did not receive individual attention they needed to improve, so they fell behind. As there are only seven boys in Bowling Green, Nichols can afford to individualize assignments and provide more attention and tutoring to each inmate.

"This is almost the last resort for them," Moore said.

On the adult side of the prison there are more students in each of the eight classrooms. With about 310 inmates working to complete their GED, classes are each filled with about 20 adults each, offering less opportunity for individual treatment. And, unlike the juveniles, the adults do not have class every weekday and do not study every subject every day, Moore said.

The boys are given tests, projects and homework, all of which are graded by Nichols. The goal, she said, is to build the inmate's confidence and teach them how to become resourceful and self-sufficient.

"In order to be responsible, they have to have the opportunity to be responsible," Nichols said.

Despite being only on the same grounds as the adult prisoners, the two have little contact, Moore said. The only time the two groups might pass one another is in the prison's visiting lounge. Even there, though, the youths are kept on another side of the room.

"You don't want to have a 15-year-old doing a whole lot of mingling ... with a 40-year-old," Moore said.

When the prison first opened in 1998, the youths were kept in one of two wings inside one of the nine general population houses. But there were never nearly enough juveniles to fill the wing, which can hold 50 inmates. To free up more space for a growing adult population, the youth were placed in a building originally designed to be a programs facility.

Beside the classroom in the youth's home is a library packed wall to wall with books. Down the hall is a gymnasium, complete with basketball nets, a ping-pong table and workout equipment.

Inside the library, two prison youths can be seen filing away newly received books, stopping at one point to play a little hangman on the chalkboard.

Through a door window looking into the classroom, one student can been seen sitting at a computer working on a project. There is no Internet available.

The other three in the classroom sit at their desks practicing their typing skills. Occasionally a student raises his hand, and Nichols walks over to answer his question and provide encouragement.

The hope is the juvenile will obtain his GED and become a productive part of society once released. But for some youth who are facing upward of 30 years, another goal is on focusing the youth on becoming acclimated to what adult prison life will be like.

"We tell them to do their own time," Moore said. The youth are warned to stay away from gangs, not to blindly follow others and to focus on their education.

During the week, school runs for six hours broken up in the middle by lunch. After school, the youths have a designated quiet hour, Moore said. The community television is turned off, the basketball court closed. They can study, do homework, read or write letters.

At night, it's lights out. The boys are locked in their common dorm room, having to knock of the glass window to get the guard's attention if they need to use the bathroom across the hall.

Then morning comes, and the education begins again.

"You're looking at some pretty young lives," Moore said. "If we could do something ... that helps them to redirect and make appropriate decisions and not revisit a place like this, then we're ahead."

kmorrison@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 127