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Criminology Students Meet San Quentin TRUST
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Criminology students and USF San Quentin TRUST Alliance volunteers share a holiday dinner with San Quentin inmates.
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While many University of San Francisco students take the summer to travel or enjoy time with their families, Janice Jentz '06 will spend time in state prison.
She won't be doing hard time, however. She'll be working for the USF San Quentin TRUST Alliance, a USF-based student volunteer group, to educate undergraduate and graduate students on inmate and social justice issues.
Jentz, one of about 15 USF volunteers in the Alliance, leads fellow School of Law students on tours of the prison that once hosted country music star Johnny Cash, performing in his customary black suit as a reminder of the poor, the downtrodden, and the incarcerated so frequently forgotten. And while she has no intention of swapping her usual summer favorites for Cash's somber attire, she plans to continue educating students on the profit motives that drive prison construction, the political gaming aimed at rallying voters to "tough-on-crime" candidates, and data showing that unemployment contributes to inmate recidivism and prison overcrowding.
"Basically, I think students are unaware of the problems of the criminal justice system or how they can help, so the Alliance provides an educational element to the campus community-at-large," said Jentz, now a third-year law student.
Jentz helped found the Alliance in 2005 as a junior, majoring in politics, sociology, and communications, with minors in legal studies and criminal justice, after taking assistant professor of sociology Kimberly Richman's criminology class. The Alliance works hand-in-hand with a group of about 30 prisoners who are committed to personal and community transformation by promoting positive values, life skills, and public service. Calling themselves the San Quentin TRUST (Teaching Responsibility Utilizing Sociological Training) for the Development of Incarcerated Men, the group holds workshops for other San Quentin inmates.
"The primary role of the student volunteers is to provide research materials and co-facilitate the weekly life skills workshops taught by the TRUST for the rest of the prison population," Richman said. Students provide information on human development, financial management, conflict resolution, and preventive health. They also maintain a database of employers who hire ex-felons, and provide access to external employment, housing, and health care resources.
The Alliance's work helps to provide inmates with much-needed rehabilitation skills, an area of criminal justice that many advocates, experts, and politicians want expanded to slow the revolving door that plagues prisons across California and the country, said senior sociology major Margaret Mullen, the Alliance's president. "Just as USF teaches (students) that all people should be treated with dignity and respect, we believe that prisoners must be seen as our fellow human beings who deserve support from their communities and can contribute to society," said Mullens, who also intends to continue her volunteer work during the summer.
Richman, who serves as executive adviser to the TRUST, first visited San Quentin in 2003. It didn't take long before she was introducing interested students to what it was like on the inside through her criminology class. "The students tell me that the experience opens their eyes to the realities of the prison system in ways that no class or other experience possibly could," she said. "For some, it spurs a career interest in law or criminal justice or social work with incarcerated populations."
She sees the Alliance serving one of USF's most important missions of instilling in students the values, knowledge, and experience that will allow them to fashion a more humane and just world, Richman said. "The USF San Quentin TRUST Alliance works to make sure this vision of humanity and justice extends to both sides of the prison walls," she said.
Through growing student involvement, the Alliance helps to combat, little by little, the stereotypes and misinformation portrayed in the media that stigmatizes inmates, Jentz said. "At the end of the day, these guys will be paroled back into your community," she said. "Would you rather have a neighbor who has devoted his time in prison to learning the skills (needed) to survive outside of prison or the tools necessary to survive inside prison?"
To that end, she's taken the first steps toward forming a committee of law school students to undertake case law research for the TRUST, produce information packets on how to obtain a divorce, get married, or pay child support while imprisoned, and compile data on parole issues, Jentz said. 
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