Twelve Lynchburg College students recently returned from a 10-day trip to England and Scotland that included rare tours of prisons and the Scottish Police Academy.
Access to foreign prisons is rare, said Dr. Kimberly McCabe, dean of the school of humanities and social sciences at LC and leader of this study abroad program. "We were told that no other student groups from the U.S. have entered these two prisons or the Scottish Police Academy," she said.
The access is thanks to contacts McCabe, a sociology professor specializing in criminology, made in the United Kingdom while working on books on child abuse and human trafficking.
This is the second trip McCabe has taken to the U.K. with Lynchburg College students in tow, but the most recent trip was substantially different from the 2005 excursion so Amber Huffman, a senior from Danville, Va., took advantage of both. "Nothing can replace firsthand experience," she said. It was Huffman that gave McCabe the idea that she should let her students see the inside of a U.S. prison before exposing them to prisons in the U.K., something she didn’t do on the first trip. "The systems are very different, even between England and Scotland," Huffman said. The students visited a prison in Rustburg, Va., and even got tours at the FBI headquarters in Quantico and Drug Enforcement Agency headquarters in Alexandria on their way to England. Those visits resonated with Huffman, who said she didn’t realize how many different jobs are available in the field of criminology, which snagged her interest early on. "I’ve always been curious about why people do what they do," she said.
Students learned that the accused and convicted reside in the same gaol and prison space in the United Kingdom, unlike the U.S., in which jails are reserved for those not yet convicted or serving only short terms for less serious crimes. While 50 percent of the inmates in London’s Wormwood Scrubs Prison were minorities, the Scotland’s Saughton Prison was virtually homogenous, like Scotland itself. The students also sat in on British courts, where the local magistrate hears all cases before they are handed up to the parliamentary court.
No criminology trip to England would be complete without a visit to the Tower of London or a Jack the Ripper walking tour, and the students enjoyed both. Huffman said her favorite part of the trip was the Scottish Police Academy, which is housed in a castle about 30 minutes from Edinburgh and is the only police academy in the country. Huffman, one of 11 female students on the trip, said she was glad to learn that a full 50 percent of the police officers in Scotland are women, though they were told that it’s still difficult for women to climb the ranks in the traditionally male-dominated field.
Chuck Shull, professor of sociology, was co-leader of the trip, which was the culmination of a three-credit-hour, semester-long course in criminal justice. For more information, contact Shannon Brennan at 434/544-8609.