“I was an English major a hundred years ago, and I think there is a tradition of teaching fiction and teasing out ethical issues and issues that are tangentially related to the law,” Birckhead said.
Birckhead taught her Introduction to Fiction class through the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education’s Correctional Education Program, which brings UNC classes to some North Carolina prisons. The class ended March 14.
Birckhead has worked as a defense attorney since she graduated from law school and said she felt teaching a class at a prison would provide her with perspective.
“After years of practicing in criminal court rooms, at times I feel like I’m a cog in a broken machine, and I’ve wondered how much or whether I’m really helping inmates in a long-term sustained way,” Birckhead said.
Raphael Ginsberg, UNC’s associate director of correctional education, said the UNC program started as a reading group where now-retired professor Brick Oettinger discussed sociological texts with inmates.
“It was just a small reading group, and then (Oettinger) got a little bit of money, then he got more money, then the legislature gave him money, so it just grew over the years into what it is today,” Ginsberg said.
Birckhead said she noticed the women wrote about similar experiences in their essays.
“A number of the women in the class were teen mothers and ended up dropping out of high school. A number of them have written about being victims of abuse ... none of those things are surprising to find in a prison population,” she said.