By Eric Stock

EUREKA – A criminal justice professor at Eureka College wants to give his students a glimpse of real world experience after working 20 years as a police officer.

So he went undercover – as a jail inmate.

Bill Lally told WJBC’s Scott Laughlin and Patti Penn he shaved his head and grew a goatee to create a true disguise before his recent weekend stay behind bars at the Woodford County Jail.

PODCAST: Listen to Scott and Patti’s interview with Lally on WJBC.

“I was teaching a corrections class and I really had to rely mostly on what the textbook had to say, so I felt like I was shorting my students somehow,” Lally said.

Lally says he was surprised by the ‘don’t ask don’t tell culture,’ other inmates don’t want to know why you are there. He said you’ll be treated well if you treat others with respect. He says despite the big screen TVs with 100 channels, the punishment of losing your freedom is real.

“It’s still a punishment absolutely, when your freedom is taken away from you,” Lally said. “I call it a grounding by the state or county, you definitely feel it. You can’t really understand that experience until one would actually have to go through it themselves,”

Eric Stock can be reached at [email protected]m.