Into the Teeth of Prison : Dental Students Get Training as They Brighten Convicts’ Smiles

The two young women in white had to be escorted through several locked gates to get to their dental chairs.

One of their patients, leaning back in the chair and wearing a T-shirt and khaki pants, cracked a joke. “Why don’t we do this in your office?” he asked the visiting dental hygienists. “Of course, I can’t guarantee that I’ll come back.”

The man in khakis, Steve Green, is a prisoner at the Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island. He is serving a sentence for conspiracy to distribute drugs. The two women are dental hygiene students from Cerritos College. And the place is a prison clinic in which prisoners and students meet each Friday.

“They are receiving the opportunity to practice their craft,” said Ina Zive, director of the college’s dental hygiene program. She sends more than 20 student dental hygienists to the prison each semester. “It’s a time when they (students) have only indirect supervision.”

The college has been sending the students to the prison since 1972, Zive said. They arrive early each Friday morning, enter the prison gate under the watchful eyes of the guards and walk down narrow hallways to the prison’s tidy dental clinic.

Students spend the day cleaning prisoners’ teeth and making their own decisions under the loose supervision of a staff dentist. All of these students are in the final year of a two-year dental hygiene program.

College officials said the program--one of the few in the state that uses prisoners as dental patients--enables students to practice on a population that does not generally get much attention from dental health-care professionals.

Prison Warden Mark Henry said that because of their lifestyle and relatively low socioeconomic status, most prisoners generally place little emphasis on dental hygiene and therefore have more problems with their teeth.

“Inmates don’t traditionally take care of their teeth,” Henry said. “This gives the students an opportunity to practice a wide range of dental skills.”

Inspired by the success of the college program, the prison recently hired its own dental hygienist--a former Cerritos College student--to work three times a week, a move that has reduced the waiting list for prisoners who want their mouths cleaned from 18 to 2 1/2 months.

The student program has two valuable side effects, Henry said. First, it saves money for the prison system and allows prisoners to meet people from the outside. Second, it helps dispel myths about prisoners and their lives behind bars. “The more people know about what goes on here the better it is,” Henry said. “These students become our ambassadors.”

Indeed, the good feeling between the prisoners and the young dental hygienists seemed evident during a recent visit.

While Green sat in one chair cracking jokes between sweeps of the electric tooth polisher, prisoner Antone Curtis sat in the other chair with metal instruments hanging from his mouth.

“I think the service was wonderful,” he said later. “The extra care she showed me was great.”

The students, for their part, say that once they get over the intimidation of being in a prison, the experience is invaluable.

“The patients are some of the best I’ve ever had,” said Julie Rhodes, 25. “They’re real cooperative. They appreciate you a lot more than at an outside clinic.”