Pace journalism students in the Digital Storytelling class taught by Dr. Katherine Fink took a trip to Sing Sing Correctional Facility on Mon., Mar. 20 to further investigate the prison system and prison reform.

Sing Sing is a maximum security all male prison with a maximum capacity of 1,803 inmates at a time. Students were given a tour by Officer Mitchell who showed them multiple areas of the prison.

“I really wanted to find out what it actually looks like inside of a prison,” said Christian Gisondi, a student in the class. “Because you see all these reality tv shows and it presents prison in a certain way, and I never actually believed that that is how prison actually was.”

Students visited the commissary—the inmates’ equivalent of a grocery store where they can purchase products such as snacks, hygiene products, televisions, and other miscellaneous items—, toured different cell blocks where inmates are held, and the showers where they learned the rules of hygiene for inmates.

Towards the end of the tour, the class was given the opportunity to sit down with 11 inmates, who were a part of a program called Voices From Within, for an open discussion where students asked the inmates about life in prison.

“I was curious to ask the prisoners these things I have always wanted to know,” Gisondi said. “You know, how to avoid violence? Does prison work? Do they feel they regret what they did? And do they feel that there is anything they would want to change? Because we can say stuff as outsiders, but until you see on the inside you’re not going to be able to come up with decent ideas.”

Gisondi’s biggest takeaway was being able to view prison in a different way and understand what it’s really like, aside from what television portrays it to be. He got to understand who the prisoners really are as people, rather than just unknown faces behind bars.

“It left an impact on me that these people are not inherently bad people, but they are cultivated in an environment that preaches being that way; it is just their culture,” Gisondi said.

Students in the Digital Storytelling class will use their experience at Sing Sing to help with their final projects where they report on various topics regarding the current prison system.