Students incarcerated in federal or state penal institutions were ineligible for Pell Grants, the primary federal aid program for low-income students, for nearly 30 years. That ban can be traced to the 1994 crime bill, which caused most prison higher-ed programs to shutter.
On Saturday, more than 760,000 incarcerated students became eligible for Pell Grants, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and applications began to be accepted on Monday.
Jason Bell, director of San Francisco State University’s Project Rebound, a program focused on supporting formerly incarcerated students across the California State University system, called the restoration of Pell eligibility “beautiful.”
Bell, who was a student in Project Rebound after he was released from incarceration, said the prior ban on eligibility had made it much harder to pursue a degree. “It was really difficult to get any higher education behind the wall,” Bell said. “It was a much rougher time for folks living in the incarceration system during that period.”
In recent years, a pilot program called Second Chance Pell has tested the reinstatement of eligibility for the grants. Programs like the Transforming Outcomes Project, a four-year-degree program administered through California’s Folsom State Prison and Mule Creek State Prison, worked with incarcerated people who received the grants.
David Zuckerman, interim director of the project, which is operated by California State University at Sacramento, said getting the initial group of incarcerated students into the financial-aid system required adaptation. (More than 40,000 students now benefit from Second Chance Pell, according to federal officials.)
“Pell was not designed for incarcerated students,” he said. “When it works, it’s phenomenal because it allows an indigent, incarcerated person to get a university education, and that’s fantastic.”
As Pell eligibility opens up more opportunities for incarcerated students, The Chronicle spoke with several experts about three key questions facing colleges as they try to move into prison education.
How will the students get advising and other academic support?
Attending college comes with a fair share of bureaucratic snafus. While students on campus can pop into an adviser’s office, incarcerated students don’t have that option. They have little to no internet access and little money.
Zuckerman said employing counselors just for incarcerated students, available either online or inside a prison, can make the difference.
“You need someone in financial aid who’s dedicated to these programs and educated in the ins and outs of prison education,” Zuckerman said. “And not just in terms of policy, but in terms of day-to-day practice that you’re going to run up against.”
Incarcerated students often don’t have access to documents or to means of payment that staff members might need to remove a financial-aid hold, for example. So having people on staff who can help navigate course schedules, order transcripts, or inquire about financial-aid holds can be key.
Margaret diZerega, managing director of initiatives at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on decriminalization, agreed.
“It’s important,” she said, “that colleges think about the prison program like they would any other satellite campus.”
How will students complete their work with limited internet access?
At Sacramento State, students in Zuckerman’s program, which is known as Topss, can take upper-division communication-studies classes. They’re identical to the ones taught on campus, he said, but the incarcerated students have only a narrow window of time for academics.
The students attend class for three hours after their daily work shifts, but while in their cells, they have no Wi-Fi. They are given laptops and can use Canvas, a course-management program for students to submit assignments online. But because of their curfew, they have to “cram everything into a few hours.”
In spite of those limitations, the instructor in the class last fall saw his incarcerated students score an average of 20 points higher than the on-campus students, Zuckerman said.
“They’re blowing everybody aside,” he said. “They’re zooming past everybody, and it’s not because they’re in prison and all they do is sit around and study. That’s not the case. Most of the Topss students work 40 hours a week inside the prisons.”
How will more such partnerships start?
Effectively educating incarcerated students requires more staff time, and colleges might look for the most efficient way to provide it.
One important idea, Zuckerman said, was designating a staff member to help those students in the registrar’s office.
DiZerega added that college staff members should also tour a prison in advance to talk to prospective students to lay a foundation for a program. That includes conversations about how a course is to be taught, online or in person; the type of technology offered to students; and their access to library resources and academic journals.
“Having those kinds of upfront conversations can be helpful to set those expectations and figure out where the areas are that [we] need to work through as a corrections department and college as they enter a partnership,” diZerega said.
And while access to Pell Grants will provide more opportunities to create prison-education programs, Bell said colleges and universities need to have good intentions.
“Some of these folks are chasing dollars, and they have no intention of welcoming folks to their campuses,” Bell said. “That bothers me.” If that’s a college’s intention, he continued, “I think we’re failing in that sense.”
Colleges should minimize bureaucratic obstacles, Bell said, and hiring formerly incarcerated people into programs can help do that.
“When we have these discussions, having formerly incarcerated folks with that experience and hiring between the wall as well as on these college campuses — invite them to those discussions,” he said. “That is the key of learning from the pitfalls, as well as the successes, and that’s how we make it happen correctly.”
In April, a critic of transgender rights spoke at San Francisco State University, and as one might expect, students protested. They filled the hallway outside the room, shouting “Trans women are women!” and stomping their feet. After the event, as protests continued, police officers escorted the speaker to another room, where she was barricaded inside for more than three hours.
The speaker, Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer who campaigns against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, claimed while in lockdown that she had been assaulted by a “man dressed as a woman” after her speech. The Golden Gate Xpress, San Francisco State’s student newspaper,reported that none of their journalists had seen such an incident.
Gaines’s allegation of physical assault became a right-wing talking point; she even got a shout-out from U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California. But for transgender students at San Francisco State, Gaines’s appearance was its own kind of harm, a reminder that they weren’t safe, not even on campus.
“Trans students don’t feel supported by the university right now, they don’t feel safe,” Jeremy Lark, a graduate student and assistant director of the Queer & Trans Resource Center at SFSU, told the Golden Gate Xpress. “This is the first case where I as a student leader have felt like I don’t have the institutional support to make these students feel safe.”
A series of recent campus-speaker flare-ups has highlighted how college students are redefining “harm” as something that threatens not only their physical safety, but also their emotional safety. While that’s not a new idea, experts say, today’s students are more attuned to potential impacts of harm.
With this expanded definition comes a greater expectation that colleges protect their students from threats to their psychological well-being, including by condemning certain speakers and canceling their appearances.
Not everyone is embracing this rhetoric. Leaning on the First Amendment or, in the case of private colleges, stated commitments to open expression, some college administrators are choosing to err on the side of free speech. To some students, that choice feels like a betrayal.
Without a breakthrough in the lines of communication between students and college leaders, tensions over harm — namely, what should qualify as harm and how campuses should respond — will persist.
‘Enraged, Upset, and Angry’
In demanding their campuses cancel or condemn visits by right-wing speakers, student activists often describe the physical and psychological dangers that they believe a speaker’s rhetoric could present to a marginalized group.
This spring, many clashes between students and speakers have involved activists who espouse anti-transgender beliefs. They’re visiting at a time when transgender rights are under near-constant debate: State legislatures are passing bills to restrict the kind of health care transgender kids can access and the sports teams they can play on. The Biden administration is expected to enshrine protections for transgender students in the regulation interpreting Title IX, the federal gender-equity law.
Research has repeatedly shown that transgender college students have much higher risks of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation than cisgender students.
What’s more, transgender students’ concerns about violence are real, said Lawrence L. Mullen, an English Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system.
In March, Buffalo officials refused to cancel a speech by Michael Knowles, a conservative commentator who said recently that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” The campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom had invited Knowles to give a speech on “radical feminism.”
We know from previous displays of hateful violence that people will travel states, they will travel miles, to be able to harm others.
The university’s graduate-student union issued a statement lamenting the decision, tweeting, “Permitting such a speaker to be on campus presents a clear and deliberate workplace safety concern to trans graduate workers.”
If someone wanted to hurt a transgender student, it would be pretty easy to find their information in a campus directory, said Mullen, who is president of the union. “We know from previous displays of hateful violence that people will travel states, they will travel miles, to be able to harm others,” Mullen, who identifies as nonbinary and transgender, said. “And so because this was open, we knew that anyone could show up.”
Students and community members peacefully protested Knowles’s appearance outside the venue before his speech began. No one was physically hurt at the event, but transgender students struggled to get back to their normal lives, Mullen said.
“I am one of those people, who presumably should be eliminated from public life,” Mullen said, referring to Knowles’s “transgenderism” comment. “I know I’m not alone in this. It’s such a difficult complex emotion to be able to articulate that is enraged, upset, and angry.”
College students are also using claims of harm to push back against certain campus policies and curricula, urging professors and administrators to factor student well-being into their decisions.
At Cornell University, the undergraduate-student government unanimously passed a resolution in March “imploring” instructors to put warnings on syllabi for traumatic content that could be discussed in class, such as sexual violence, racial hate crimes, and homophobic harassment.
The motivation was to support students with post-traumatic stress disorder, the resolution stated.
“A lot of older generations and much of the media has characterized content warnings as something for oversensitive students and snowflakes who refuse to interact with the real world,” said Claire Ting, a student leader who drafted the resolution.
But reading scenes of rape and violence can cause traumatized students to shut off while they’re trying to learn, Ting said.
“I don’t think it’s egregious to ask for a little bit more compassion in the classroom,” Ting said.
Defining Harm Claims
When students say they feel “harmed” by words or actions, or that words or actions “harm” others, it may come off as uncouth to question them, said Cass Sever, a visiting sociology professor at Mount Holyoke College. Sever studies harm claims, which she defined as allegations of emotional trauma made by one person against another.
Part of what makes the language of harm so compelling, Sever said, is that it is hard to disprove threats to emotional safety, especially at a time of increased attention to young people’s mental health.
“If I say I was emotionally abused, if you were to stand up and say, ‘No, you weren’t,’ that sounds absolutely absurd, if not malevolent,” Sever said. “So there’s no real viable response to someone claiming an emotional response or emotional harm beyond listening and supporting them.”
As some students see it, Sever said, psychic harm is a form of inequality that needs to be resolved before anyone can speak. Many administrators, meanwhile, don’t see harm the same way and are instead focused on guaranteeing free speech.
At Cornell, after the student government approved the resolution on trigger warnings, it was swiftly vetoed by Martha E. Pollack, Cornell’s president. In a letter, Pollack cited concerns about academic freedom, which grants faculty the right to determine what and how to teach. (Pollack elaborated on that view in a recent interview with The Chronicle.)
Brian Hamluk, vice president for student life at the University at Buffalo, acknowledged hearing from students who wanted Buffalo to cancel Knowles’s speech. In communications with students, the public university explained it had a responsibility to uphold the First Amendment. If there was a credible safety threat, “that would be a different matter,” Hamluk told The Chronicle.
“We never look down the path of canceling the speaker,” he said.
To some students, the free-speech argument is used in bad faith. How can trans and queer students meaningfully engage in civil discourse, they ask, if the opposing viewpoint does not believe in their right to exist?
“I see what’s happening in Florida, with censorship and removing the ability to teach and speak freely,” Mullen, at Buffalo, said, referring to legislative efforts to restrict how public colleges teach about race and fund diversity initiatives. “So I highly value freedom of speech. But I think that there are ways that you can still do that without allowing someone to come to your campus and say that an entire group of people should be erased from public life.”
Sure, Mullen said, Buffalo likely would have been sued by Young Americans for Freedom, the sponsor of Knowles’s speech. But a possible consequence, Mullen added, is that “you irreparably damage the culture that exists on your campus.”
Sever said she felt sympathy for both sides of the debate. She couldn’t think of any examples where students and campus leaders had managed to bridge the divide. (If you have, let us know).
Instead, there’s a lot of yelling and not a lot of listening, Sever said.
“There’s a lot of public intellectuals who are saying in public spaces, ‘we need to remember free speech,’” Sever said. “That’s not going to work. Because the folks who are claiming psychic harm do believe in free speech, they think they do. So that message is kind of going to fall on deaf ears.”
Madelyn Wessel, a former general counsel at Cornell and Virginia Commonwealth universities, noted that laws and campus policies do include protections against forms of emotional harm — but there’s a high standard to meet. When speech does rise to the level of targeted harassment, for example, it’s no longer protected under the First Amendment. Wessel now works as senior counsel at Hogan Lovells, a law firm, but was speaking in her personal capacity.
“Some advocates are pushing beyond these kinds of traditional ways of thinking about harmful interpersonal abuse or harassment towards a broader attempt to veto speakers altogether on a campus,” Wessel said, “because they’re saying things that an individual finds harmful or oppressive or horribly inaccurate.”
A Balancing Act
The challenge of balancing free speech and harm reduction is something Lynn Mahoney, the president of San Francisco State University, has been thinking about for many years.
In 2016, Mahoney was provost at California State University at Los Angeles when Donald J. Trump was elected as president. Historically, free speech has been more of a progressive cause, Mahoney told The Chronicle, leaning on her training as a U.S. historian. That changed when Trump was elected, and it became acceptable for “anyone to say anything, no matter how hurtful it was,” Mahoney said.
The campus was in deep pain. And Ben Shapiro had the best day of his life.
That year, a student group invited Ben Shapiro, a right-wing commentator, to speak on campus. Progressive groups demanded the university cancel the event, but it went on. A physical confrontation between Shapiro’s supporters and Cal State L.A. students and faculty members ensued.
“The campus was in deep pain,” Mahoney said. “And Ben Shapiro had the best day of his life. He made CNN. He made all the mainstream news. We had taken a minor player in right-wing media, and we had given him the best day of his life.”
From that, she adopted three principles for speaker events which she carried to the SFSU presidency: protect free speech, address the harm, and “keep these speakers from having the best day of their lives.”
Mahoney feels confident that the presence of Riley Gaines one night for a few hours should not make students feel unsafe on campus. The university rallied around transgender students before and after the event, Mahoney said. On the day of Gaines’s speech, the Queer & Trans Resource Center hosted a mixer to celebrate transgender and queer athletes.
“I can’t undo the emotional harm that a Riley Gaines does to trans women who want to participate in student athletics,” Mahoney said. “But I can at least hope that we provide the support to address that emotional harm.”
Amid strong feelings and sharp divides, Mahoney is trying to find a middle ground. So are students at Cornell.
Ting, the sophomore who wrote the resolution calling for mandatory trigger warnings on syllabi, said she saw some merit in Pollack’s concerns around academic freedom.
Ting and another student leader are now collecting faculty members’ perspectives before they draft another resolution. They’re considering an “ethical standard” instead of a full mandate.
“I can agree that a mandate would create a chilling effect to a degree,” Ting said. “I think the mandate opens up faculty to a lot of liability, and I think it can become a very slippery slope.”
The internet was in its infancy when Carmelo Ortiz went to prison in the 1980s. Personal computers still felt like futuristic marvels, and cell phones were clunky, two-pound “bricks” that took 10 hours to charge and cost $4,000. The pager was king.
When Ortiz maxed out of prison 30 years later, in 2016, he entered a world of smart phones and social media. He had no ID, no birth certificate, and nowhere to go but to his mother’s home in public housing, where he had to remain indoors, away from windows, because his mother worried she’d be evicted for housing a felon. It was, he recalled, “worse than prison.”
Earlier that year, Ortiz had been part of the first cohort at Northern State Prison to earn associate degrees through a collaboration between New Jersey colleges and the state Department of Corrections and Parole Board. He and the other graduates paraded through the prison yard while their fellow inmates applauded.
Now, he hoped to get his bachelor’s on the outside — an achievement that would require him to overcome a host of technological and psychological challenges. But first, he needed stable housing.
Since 2015, more than 22,000 incarcerated people have taken college courses through a federal experiment that has offered Pell Grants to inmates in select programs. Thousands more will become eligible for the grants this summer, when a law lifting a 1994 ban on awarding Pell funds to prisoners takes effect. That expansion is expected to lead to a boom in the number of colleges offering prison-education programs, and the number of students participating in them.
Like Ortiz, many of these students will leave prison with the drive and talent to continue their education on campus, as regular students. For colleges, their arrival will be an opportunity to expand enrollment, diversify their student bodies, and serve their social-justice missions.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Carmelo Ortiz leads a support group for formerly incarcerated students.
There are clear links between education and recidivism, with college graduates far less likely to return to prison than those without degrees. Completing college, post-incarceration, correlates with higher wages and lower unemployment rates.
Yet a majority of prison-ed programs aren’t doing much to support their students when they get out. Of the 374 prison-ed programs surveyed by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison in the 2019-20 academic year, less than one in five offered direct pathways to a campus program, and even fewer — 14 percent — provided re-entry services. Among those that did, the most common supports were admission and financial-aid counseling, a 2021 report by the Alliance showed. Fewer than 20 percent offered technology or housing support.
Some advocates worry that without more robust supports from colleges, many formerly incarcerated students won’t finish their degrees, blunting the impact of the Pell restoration. They argue that colleges’ duty to these students doesn’t end at the prison gate.
“Higher education in prison is the start of a lot of people’s academic journey, but it shouldn’t be the end,” said Mary Gould, a former director of the alliance. “There is a real responsibility for colleges and universities to be clear on that.”
Under new rules that take effect July 1, programs seeking to award Pell Grants in prison will need to show that they provide academic and career advising to incarcerated students that are “substantially similar” to those offered to other students, both in the prison, and upon release. They’ll also need to demonstrate that formerly incarcerated students can fully transfer their credits to any campus of the college that offers the program they were enrolled in. But they still won’t be required to provide re-entry services.
Romarilyn Ralston, who runs one of the oldest support programs for formerly incarcerated students, Project Rebound, said she’s been hearing from a growing number colleges seeking to “build that bridge” to on-campus learning. But relatively few have followed through. She thinks they’re worried about “opening the door” to trouble.
Historically, colleges that had programs tried to fly under the radar, worried about the optics of welcoming formerly incarcerated people on campus, Gould said.
“It was, Let’s not draw any attention, let’s not make any noise,” she said. Now, with all the attention being paid to the Pell restoration, “that’s really hard to do.”
Formerly incarcerated people face numerous hurdles when it comes to continuing their college educations, including a lack of resources and competing family demands. Those with debt, or children to support, often feel internal and external pressure to put work over school, Gould said. Some are required to work full time as a condition of parole.
People on parole may also have travel restrictions that prevent them from attending college in another county or too many miles from home.
Other would-be students are priced out of college. In prison, most students pay little or nothing for their courses, which are subsidized by the college or the state. But once they’re released, they’re expected to pay regular tuition.
Still others are derailed by admissions forms that ask applicants to check a box if they have a criminal history. Research shows the question sows fear and confusion among people who were formerly incarcerated, discouraging them from completing an application.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
The program that provided prison courses to Carmelo Ortiz also helped him win a scholarship and a spot in the honors dorm at Rutgers University at Newark.
But the biggest barrier for many students is housing, advocates and students said. Some states won’t admit convicted felons into public housing, and some colleges don’t allow them in dorms. Many landlords are reluctant to rent to them, too. As a group, formerly incarcerated people are 10 times as likely as members of the general public to be homeless.
“It’s easier to get a job than it is to get a residence in your name if you have a felony,” said Brandon Warren, director of re-entry services at Lee College Huntsville Center, in Texas. “I’ve been out 18 years now, and I have a doctoral degree, but none of that matters to an apartment manager. All they see is that 27 years ago, I had a felony.”
Ortiz got lucky. The program that provided his prison courses, New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP), offers wraparound support to students seeking to finish their degrees, or earn new ones, when they get out. In 2017, NJ-STEP’s Mountainview Communities project awarded Ortiz a scholarship and a spot in the honors dorm at Rutgers University at Newark. After a year of bouncing among his mother’s, his sister’s, and his girlfriend’s homes, Ortiz finally had the stability he needed to focus on his studies.
But dorms aren’t always ideal homes for people who’ve been in prison. Students who are out on parole may find visits from parole officers awkward, and older students may feel out of place among younger, traditional ones, said Ralston, the executive director of Project Rebound, a support program that started at San Francisco State University in the 1960s and has spread to 15 California State University campuses.
Living amid young partiers can also be risky: If campus security officers find drugs in a formerly incarcerated student’s room, that student could be cited for a parole violation, even if the drugs belonged to a roommate.
Students living in “halfway houses” confront other challenges, including strict curfews and check-in requirements. If they stay too late working on a group project, or miss a check-in while chatting with a professor, they risk a return to prison.
In New Jersey, many halfway houses lack internet access and prohibit cellphones, so students who live in them have to squeeze all their homework and group projects into however many hours they’re allowed to be on campus.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Regina Diamond-Rodriguez (seated) says it’s important for students who are formerly incarcerated to spend time on campus.
Typically, halfway-house staff members want students to return as soon as their classes end, said Regina Diamond-Rodriguez, director of transitions for NJ-STEP. She tells them it’s crucial that students stay all day, so they can take advantage of everything that happens outside class — things like office hours, career fairs, and community events.
“All the networking that happens on campus is especially important for students who don’t have the same social capital as traditional students,” said Diamond-Rodriguez. “Our students want to absorb it all.”
“Their priority is safety and our priority is education. We have to find a way to meet in the middle.”
Students who start their college educations in prison tend to be highly motivated and serious about their schoolwork. Professors often describe them as their most engaged students.
“We’re hungry,” explained Ortiz. “We know not everything is handed to us.”
Ortiz arrived at Rutgers determined not to squander the opportunity he’d earned. Still, he struggled with self-doubt, wondering if, as a 50-year old, he could keep up with the 20-somethings.
“I didn’t have the confidence kids have,” he said. “And I thought they were smarter.”
Technology was another challenge: Learning-management systems, Microsoft Word, and Excel confounded him. Figuring them out took more time than the assignments themselves, he said.
Feelings of “impostor syndrome” are common among formerly incarcerated students, said Ralston, who has to remind her students that they deserve to be at Cal State. While Project Rebound might have eased the way — securing an extension on an application deadline, or persuading a parole officer to permit travel to campus — “they made the grades themselves.”
“This is not a handout,” she tells them. “You have the brains, you earned your spot.”
Coming to a college campus after prison can be a culture shock, said Diamond-Rodriguez. After years of being told to “mind your business” and “keep your head down,” it can be disorienting to hear, “Come join us,” she said.
Along with acculturation, formerly incarcerated students often need help navigating the academic ecosystem. In prison, their course options were limited, and materials were provided by professors. Prison staff or volunteers helped them fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa. Most never had to apply for financial aid on their own, choose from among hundreds of courses, or order textbooks for their classes.
To build their confidence and increase their sense of belonging, college-support programs often hire staff who have served time themselves.
“Inside prison, the messaging you get is that ‘you’ll never amount to anything,’” said Ralston, who spent 23 years in prison and took her first college course there. “It takes someone with similar lived experience to help you get free of all that garbage.”
Diamond-Rodriguez, who was incarcerated for five years, believes that her background gives her some credibility with her students. Even so, “I’m still part of an institution and can be seen as someone in authority.”
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
“I’ve never trusted any institution — it doesn’t matter what name you put behind it,” says Sammy Quiles, now a student at Rutgers U. at Newark.
And convincing students with a deep distrust of authority that the college is there to help them can be difficult, program directors say.
“We explain that there’s this whole group of people who are paid 40 hours a week to help them, and they have a hard time understanding that, because everyone they’ve encountered for the past 30 years has been paid by the state to push them down,” said David Zuckerman, acting director of the Transforming Outcomes Project at Sacramento State University.
At Rutgers Newark, formerly incarcerated students said they know Diamond-Rodriguez and other Mountainview staff care about their success. But they’re not so sure about the institution.
“I’ve never trusted any institution — it doesn’t matter what name you put behind it,” said Sammy Quiles in a recent meeting of the Mountainview seminar, a required three-credit course. “An institution is a cop waiting to whip my ass.”
Mindful of this mistrust, Rutgers’ tries to involve formerly incarcerated students in shaping its services. Students in the weekly seminar study best practices in re-entry and retention and then design a solution — a dorm or a mentorship program, perhaps — for formerly incarcerated students.
“Rather than create an institutional structure and say, ‘Fit into it,’ we’re working with students to generate solutions collectively, said Chris Agans, executive director of NJ-STEP. “The class is a space for them to think about what they need, and tell us what that is.”
In some states, most notably California, formerly incarcerated students have mobilized to call attention to those needs and push for policy changes on campus and in the legislature. For students who feel out of place among traditional undergraduates, the groups provide comfort and community, said Azadeh Zohrabi, executive director of Berkeley Underground Scholars, a support program that grew out of a student-led group that started a decade ago.
“Some blend in, but some are older, with lots of tattoos,” said Zohrabi. “A lot get asked to show their ID cards, to prove they’re students.”
Rutgers doesn’t have a student-run group currently — Agans said they come and go — but its seminar creates a cohort, and a place where students can share their stories of stigma and process the politics of disclosure.
“Some people aren’t ready for the idea of second chances,” says Christopher (Talib) Charriez, the Mountainview counselor for the Newark campus. As a student at Rutgers, he practiced what he calls “strategic disclosure,” telling liberal-minded professors that he’d been in prison but keeping quiet around his younger peers. In class, he hesitated every time he raised his hand, worried not “about giving the wrong answer, but about giving a window into my past.”
Efren Mercado said he shares his history of incarceration on a “need to know basis.” Until recently, when he was in places that called for a cellphone, he’d sometimes lie and say he left his in the office, to avoid explaining that he wasn’t allowed one at the halfway house where he was living. But sometimes, fellow students wanted to do a group chat, or work on a project virtually over the weekend, when he didn’t have internet access. In those cases, he was “forced to disclose,” he said.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Efren Mercado says he doesn’t tell professors he served time, because he doesn’t want to be treated differently from other students.
Mercado said he never tells professors about his past, not wanting to be treated differently from other students.
Discussion in the seminar is animated and lively, the students more vocal than the typical undergraduate. In a recent class, students discussed two texts: an article on redemption in America, and a white paper on how colleges can remove barriers to enrollment for formerly incarcerated people.
Diamond-Rodriguez began by asking the students what they took from the article, titled “The End of Second Acts?”
Sammy Quiles said it bothered him that the authors chose to highlight the plight of a low-level offender who is white. Most of the students in the class are Black or Latino, and several committed violent crimes.
“We’ve seen progress, but there’s still a taboo connected to violent offenders,” he argued.
Dwayne Knight, who admitted at the start of class that he hadn’t done the readings — he’s working two and a half jobs to cover rent and didn’t have time — surmised that the authors picked the white guy because “it’s easier to sell to the larger society.”
“Maybe redemption is reserved for the select few,” said Quiles. “I’m exceptional because of higher education, but before that, I was a high-school dropout.”
“What happens to the unexceptional?” he wondered. “I’m not ok with leaving my comrades behind, because I know what ‘sink or swim’ looks like.”
Diamond-Rodriguez asked them about the white paper, on the role of universities. A student named Base, whose last name is being withheld because he lives in a halfway house and is not authorized to speak to the news media, suggested that colleges help students apply for food stamps before they’re released, noting that “if I can’t put food on the table, the rage will return.”
Formerly incarcerated students “can have the will and the drive, but you need to have resources in place,” said a student named Kabir, who also lives in a halfway house. “A lot of people in prison have changed and don’t want to go back to their old lives.”
Carmelo Ortiz is one of them.
When he was 20, he was the getaway driver in an armed robbery gone wrong and was sentenced to 30 years for felony murder. Today, with the help of Mountainview Communities, he’s a college graduate — magna cum laude — and a leader in Newark’s robust re-entry network. He helps other ex-offenders set a fresh course for their lives, reminding them, as he did at a recent meeting of the Returning Citizens Support Group he started with his brother, that “the prison path doesn’t define you.”
“Once you come home, you need to define yourself,” he said.
Ortiz’s desire to “give back” and “help others avoid my mistakes” is extremely common among formerly incarcerated students, Agans said. By helping them find internships, jobs, and research opportunities in the field, the program is able to retain students “who otherwise drop out to take on these jobs and activities which feel urgent to them.”
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Students who were formerly incarcerated meet up in Newark.
Still, enrolling in college right out of prison isn’t right for everyone, Agans and other program directors said. Some students need time to sort out housing, child care and work — and re-acclimate to freedom — first.
“In prison, decisions are made for you — where to sleep, what to eat — it’s very prescribed,” said Pat Seibert-Love, policy associate for corrections education in Washington State. “It takes time to get your feet under you.”
Agans argues that colleges should pay less attention to traditional measures of academic success, like GPA and on-time graduation, when it comes to formerly incarcerated students. He doesn’t care how quickly they progress, or if their C average brings down the median.
“One of our best students took 10 years to get a degree,” he said. “We didn’t care, but he is a failure in the traditional model. It took him too long, and cost too much. But by our measures, he’s an ultimate success.”
After the support group meeting, two participants who were part of the NJ-STEP program in prison approached Agans to say they were embarrassed to have “fallen off” and wanted to visit campus. He told them they were welcome when they were ready.
Now, with thousands of people with college credit set to leave prison in the coming years, the question is: Will colleges be ready when they are?
