By KEVIN EARL
BYU Law School students are serving and teaching people in similar situations to those whom they may defend and prosecute when they graduate.
A jail outreach program offers students at the J. Reuben Clark Law School an opportunity to serve those in local detention centers and jails.
“I feel like there is a need for more compassion toward people in the criminal justice system,” said Audrey Lambert, a third-year law student who helped create the BYU Jail Outreach program in 2006.
“People don’t always see the other side of the difficulties these people have in jail,” she said.
This is one of the benefits for inmates, said Jane Wilson, a law student at Columbia University and one of the founders of the outreach program.
“It’s great for them to realize there is someone on their team, someone who cares about them,” she said.
Wilson, who also headed up the creation of a nationwide inmate outreach program, said there is a prevalent and wrong attitude in society that inmates are a different breed of human.
“We are all humans — just at different places,” she said.
This is a difficult thing to face everyday, she said. The program helps them feel empowered and receive hope.
Many inmate outreach programs, including BYU’s program, focus on education through one-on-one tutoring with inmates.
The tutoring and education programs help the inmates expand their opportunities, Lambert said in an e-mail.
“The ones I have tutored have been bright and become more motivated to learn throughout the tutoring,” she said. “Many of them use the program as an opportunity to prepare themselves for the GED, which, if they pass, gives them more job opportunities in life.”
She said she has also seen the program give inmates hope when it comes to fighting addictions.
“It was great to see the inmates realizing that they could change their lives,” she said, “and make it into something they wanted instead of just reacting to negative things around them or turning to drugs to try to solve their problems.”
The program at BYU began in 2006 when Lambert and Wilson came to BYU together and decided there were not a lot of service opportunities through the law school.
“Neither of us were impressed with the service opportunities so we started our own,” Wilson said.
They both wanted to serve a group that needed their help, and, since they had participated in a similar program at Stanford University, they chose to serve inmates in the Utah County Jail.
“It is a population that doesn’t get that much attention,” Wilson said.
The program not only benefits inmates but the students who serve as well, said Amy Worthington, a law student involved with BYU’s program. Students gain a new perspective on those who live behind bars.
Copyright Brigham Young University 3 May 2009
