Day four - A tale of two worlds

Sam, Chris, Mary and I drove down to McCormick today. McCormick is juvenile prison situated on the outskirts of Ithaca. I knew we were going to head there to run a debating workshop yesterday and was intrigued to see what this experience would be like.

The first thing to note was how intimidating the building looked from the outside (it transpired that the facility had spent $3million dollars reinforcing the security perimeter. The second thing we had found out was the young inmates in this facility had committed some seriously violent crimes.

This facility only has 22 inmates and since certain groups of inmates are not allowed to be near each other for security reasons we had 3 students in our group. The inmates were paired up with a debater and we debated the motion “this house supports harsh punishments for drugs cheats in sport”. The young people we were paired with were initially quite unresponsive but (I have to admit) to my surprise were not only really enthused by the debate but were offering lots of POI’s and giving good speeches. We were only at the facility for an hour but I felt that this was a specific experience in debating that I would not easily forget. On our way out we were shown the claustrophobic cell that the young people sleep in every night. Being locked away in that facility during your childhood must be incredibly depressing and bleak and I can’t help feeling that this activity gave some of these young people a glimmer of hope.

Later on in the day we were taken on a tour of Cornell University which was a real eye opener. After 3 years of involvement in student politics at Oxford I gained some insight into the funding pressures that higher education institutions had faced but it was quite apparent that Cornell had the resources to provide a world class University. The main University gym was bigger than a lot of schools in the UK. It was also equipped with a 2000 seater American Football stadium along with a host of other sporting arenas. Perhaps the most impressive part of the University we saw today was the Hotel Management building (Cornell is renowned for its hospitality courses) which was centred near the centre of the campus. This is actually a hotel run by students and serves incredibly good food.

Finally we left to go to the weekly Cornell debate meeting. Over 70 people attended to review the tournament that Cornell had been involved in over the past weekend. We were really impressed with the solidarity of the squad and how proud people were with the performance and successes of their peers. All in all an action packed day which saw us admire the amazing resources and wealth that Cornell possessed and contrast to the intimidating and quite depressing atmosphere of the prison that we were earlier in.