How Wharton MBAs Teach Negotiations At A Local Prison

“When Resilience Education and Wharton associated…
Education of this level for inmates was negotiated…
For all of you who negotiated time to try and reach us…
Thank you for all your guidance and for what you teach us….”
– SCI Chester Inmate Final Project

The first time I ever arrived at the State Correctional Institution in Chester, Pennsylvania, I was taken aback at how casual the whole thing was. There were no gates and there were no guards stationed at encoded doors. Instead, my Lyft drove right up to the expansive, grey brick building located along the busy Pennsylvania road, with only barbed wire and a large, embossed sign to alert me that I’d arrived at a prison.

I was there to lead a pilot initiative to teach Wharton professor Gus Cooney’s popular Negotiations course to 14 incarcerated men. It was an effort borne from a broader partnership between the Wharton School and Resilience Education – a nonprofit that reduces recidivism by equipping incarcerated individuals with high-quality business and life skills. This particular collaboration was championed by Professor Cooney and Professor Damon Phillips, who also teaches a unique MBA course on Mass Incarceration. Their joint leadership builds on Professor Phillips’ years of leadership in marrying two unlikely fields: academia and justice reform.

A TWO-WAY EXCHANGE OF LEARNING

For six sessions during a semester, I would present my ID to an officer at the front desk before tossing all of my belongings – save the clothes I was wearing – into a locker. After a wait that stretched anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes, the same guard would usher me through metal detectors, where I’d be banded with a bright wristband indicating my visitor status. A new guard would soon arrive to escort me and my teaching assistant, a fellow classmate, through four sets of doors and a set of stairs before arriving in a white-walled classroom. Here, I’d be greeted by 14 men from the Charlie Alpha unit, or as they called it, “Little Scandinavia.”

For the next three months, these men – inmates of various ages, identities, and physicalities at SCI Chester – would become my students. I’d teach them negotiations based on the class I’d taken just a year prior. In reality, they would teach me a lot more than I would teach them.

It’s no secret that the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world – with over 2 million people in prison. The state of Pennsylvania alone imprisons a higher percentage of its people than almost any democratic country – at 589 people per 100,000 residents. We live in a society that either glamorizes incarceration or stigmatizes it – often in equally unforgiving measures.

Most of my friends and family were worried, if not puzzled, by my decision to lead this Negotiations pilot at a prison. It didn’t help that I was a petite, Indian-American woman and MBA student from a prestigious business school known on Wall Street for its “cutthroat culture.”

THE WHARTON WORKS PROGRAM

The Little Scandinavia Prison Unit is a special experiment, modeled after prisons in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, countries where recidivism rates are marginal. SCI Chester sent correctional officers abroad to study this system of these Scandinavian countries, and the unit was opened in May 2022 to implement this new model – one that prioritized community and rehabilitation. Today, the unit houses 64 men, all selected via lottery from the larger prison population. A few designated “lifers” – men serving life sentences – serve as mentors, leading and mediating conflicts within the unit. Correctional officers are dubbed Contact Officers – playing dual roles as counselors and helping with education, employment, and reintegration planning while fostering a supportive community.

The unit is closely monitored by researchers at Drexel University and the University of Oslo. Their goal: empirically ascertain whether humane detention focused on rehabilitation better serves individuals and our society. At the core of Little Scandinavia is the campaign to reform American incarceration. The provision of meaningful educational opportunity is one of the core tenets of that campaign.

My pilot was part of a broader collaboration between Little Scandinavia, the Wharton WORKS Program, and Resilience Education. Wharton WORKS is an arm of Wharton’s curriculum that uniquely trains MBA students to teach these workshops, fostering both personal growth and understanding of the justice system’s impact. The objective of our particular workshop is twofold: teach core negotiation theory and practice in a way that is rigorous, practical, and empowering – and contribute meaningfully to a growing movement that reimagines the role of education within carceral systems. Behind this effort is an extraordinary army of passionate students, administrators, faculty, and nonprofit leaders – all committed to extending the boundaries of traditional business education.

Wharton, in collaboration with Resilience Education, has offered workshops in Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurship to the members of this unit. It comes with an important caveat: at the end of each workshop, students receive a certificate issued jointly by the Wharton School and Resilience Education to acknowledge participation. But Resilience Education has seen success in this dimension over its decade of existence. The non-profit was born out of UVA’s Darden School when an inmate emailed a professor to review his business plan. That professor was Greg Fairchild, who went on to co-found Resilience Education with his wife, Tierney Fairchild. Last year, alongside Professors Cooney and Phillips, the organization agreed negotiations could make for an exciting, differentiated, and important academic experience. On a quest to step outside the comforts of Penn’s campus, I volunteered to steer the pilot.

MASTERING THE FUNDAMENTALS…AND THEN SOME

On the first day of workshops, I could see the skepticism on the faces of my students. My own nerves reflected that skepticism – more than any other type of fear. It was the same anxiety I remember feeling before piano recitals as a kid. Would I be good enough? Could I really do this? Would they respect me? Would they come back?

14 men did. And we had a lot of fun doing it.

Each week, I’d host lectures that carefully constructed the building blocks of negotiation. And then, we’d practice. I’d pair the men off to assume roles based on the very same mock cases I’d practiced a year earlier in Professor Cooney’s Wharton classroom. As time went on, I’d watch these men demonstrate negotiation acumen that would take my classmates and me a lifetime to learn. We walked through fundamental concepts like BATNA, ZOPA, anchoring, and integrative bargaining. More than terminology, the goal was to give these men tools to navigate power dynamics, resolve everyday conflicts, and advocate for themselves – skills essential not just on the prison block, but in business and in life beyond the prison walls.

Let me illustrate it for you. In one workshop, our best negotiator, Gomez, convinced his partner to buy his company’s defunct manufacturing plant for $31 million, where the average MBA student nets around $16.2 million. I asked Gomez how and why he aspired for such a high price, given most people typically anchored around $8 million. He cited “the strategic value to the right buyer,” rather than the paper value he was given. In doing so, he modeled an advanced negotiation mindset that often takes years of careful and intentional practice to cultivate. This is but one example in a treasure trove.

LESSONS LEARNED AND EXPERIENCES SHARED

Week-after-week, these men would come back, sharing stories of how they practiced their new negotiation skills on the block – their colloquial name for their community at SCI Chester. Kevin would outline how he leveraged a cellmate’s vanity to convince him to trade for a T-shirt he wanted. In contrast, Raul would highlight how they bartered over food by ascertaining the strength of each other’s preferences.

The whole time, these men showed me an immeasurable level of respect. Still, we never took ourselves too seriously. We’d laugh when Nico announced that he had a different name for the concept I called “sandbagging,” – lying – or when someone managed to pull off a tactic that left their partners second-guessing alliances in the weeks that followed. Occasionally, someone would spend money they didn’t have or emerge with an outlier result, and the room would burst with excitement and dialogue – the kind no facilitator wants to temper.

The learners were sharp. They demonstrated a level of self-awareness that wasn’t to be underestimated. There was Mr. West, a former union boss of 30 years, who self-identified as a “hardliner,” often regaling us with tales of his times negotiating collective bargaining agreements. Arnie would chime in with his observations from real estate shows where people negotiated house prices or anecdotes from Shark Tank. They’d riff off each other’s ideas and real-world examples, often posing questions that conveyed a robust understanding of the teaching at hand. On some days, they’d completely stump me.

Beyond the workshop material, the best part was getting to know these men as people. I’d learn that Jay’s history with his family’s real estate business made him reluctant to bankrupt his partner during one negotiations exercise. I’d hear how Bill imagined becoming a chef upon release or how Arnie dreamed of becoming the next Wall Street Trapper when he is released this month. We’d laugh over our shared favorite TV shows like Billions and they would read me chapters from the books they were writing about their lives.

EDUCATION: THE GREAT EQUALIZER

I know the stereotypes I held the first day I arrived at SCI Chester. They probably resembled yours. With each subsequent week, these men dismantled them. They showed me a level of trust, respect, humility, and acuity I’d never experienced before. The workshop became a community – one I relished learning from. I looked forward to the rush I’d receive from stepping into that classroom every Monday evening – far outside the comfortable cocoon of my life as a student at The Wharton School. Maybe I was changing their lives. I knew they were changing mine.

One of the few things we seem to agree on as a society is that education is an unlock – a mechanism to uplift and empower people from the social troughs into its highest echelons – a slingshot to success. But even when we try to extend its privileges to those most under-resourced, we often pass over the justice system. We’ve been conditioned to believe they are undeserving of a second glance, let alone a second chance.

Maybe in your eyes, they are undeserving…beyond help. But what I walked into every Monday for three months was a room full of bright, curious, respectful human beings – who, like many of us – want to learn, grow, and (re)build their lives. Efficiency theory purports that perhaps the time of the most privileged people in society is best spent doing what we do (working our jobs) and allocating money to organizations (nonprofits) doing the real work. The reasoning being that they are far more equipped, educated, and integrated into the communities we seek to uplift. I hear that argument.

As social poles move further away from each other, I feel compelled to forge uncommon intersections amongst the most privileged parts of our society and those with the least. Today, people balk at this notion. But as an MBA student, I believe it’s the only way my peers and I can possibly succeed. To be properly equipped to run companies serving millions, we have to develop the emotional intelligence to support the many, not the few.

Institutions, like Wharton, can provide us with these avenues – if we persuade them of the merits of doing so. And we have a responsibility to pay forward the education and opportunities we’ve been afforded to uplift those most overlooked in our society. Because the truth is, the traditional MBA classroom pales in comparison to what I learned inside those walls.

SAYING GOODBYE

The last workshop I taught at SCI Chester was emotional. For their final projects, I asked the men to, in any format, share reflections that demonstrated what they’d learned in this class. Gomez, a lifer and mentor (and candidly, a great talent), recited an eloquent poem whose closing lines I shared at the opening of this piece. Then there was Anton, one of our more reserved students, who rendered us all into silence when he left us with these words,

“I was nervous about returning to school. But I’m happy I did it because I realized it’s okay to learn. Leaving this class, I feel confident because I learned that even though we are in prison, we can still make something of our lives.”

In many ways, this experience encapsulates what business education should be about – not just mastering theory for the corner offices that many of us will perhaps occupy someday soon, but applying it in service of connection, dignity, and change with communities who’ve been left on the fringes of consideration. I’m grateful that Wharton gave me the platform to do that.

At the end of the workshops, the learners asked me if I’d return to teach them next year. When I told them I was graduating in May, they burst into applause. I could have never imagined it the first day my car pulled up to SCI Chester, but I know that applause will mean just as much – if not more – than the one I’ll receive on my graduation day.

Editor’s Note: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the incarcerated individuals featured in this piece.

Bio: Simi Shah is currently pursuing her MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. She is also the Founder & CEO of South Asian Trailblazers, an award-winning media platform, community, and agency that elevates leading South Asians. Simi advises high-profile executives and brands. She is also a coveted speaker and writer. She has been invited to the White House, the New York Stock Exchange, and has been recognized in global news outlets like Forbes and Yahoo Finance. This year, she was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.

Previously, Simi served as Chief of Staff to Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo. She also spent time in private equity investing and startups. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Harvard University.