Current Affairs

SAN QUENTIN, Calif. (AP) — Behind a fortress wall and razor wire and a few feet away from California’s death row, students at one of the country’s most unique colleges discuss the 9/11 attacks and issues of morality, identity and nationalism.

Dressed in matching blue uniforms, the students only break from their discussion when a guard enters the classroom, calling out each man’s last name and waiting for them to reply with the last two digits of their inmate number.

They are students at Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin State Prison, the first accredited junior college in the country based behind bars. Inmates can take classes in literature, astronomy, American government, precalculus and others to earn an Associate of Arts degree.

Named for a mountain near the prison, the college was accredited in January after a 19-member commission from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges determined the extension program based at San Quentin for more than two decades was providing high-quality education.

This is a profound step forward in prison education,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, the umbrella organization for all U.S. higher education institutions.

Mitchell said Mount Tamalpais College is “an extraordinary model” that will give it autonomy not seen in prison programs attached to outside schools.

The new designation will force the school to maintain the high standards set by the college association and hopefully catch the attention of donors to help the college expand, said President Jody Lewen. While it can accommodate 300 students per semester, another 200 are on a waiting list.

The college is one of dozens of educational, job training and self-help programs available to the 3,100 inmates in the medium-security portion of San Quentin, making it a desired destination for inmates statewide who lobby to be transferred there.

“I wish I had learned this way coming up; instead I was in special ed my whole life,” said 49-year-old Derry Brown, whose English 101 class “Cosmopolitan Fictions,” was discussing “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a novel by Mohsin Hamid.

Brown, who is serving a 20-year sentence for burglary and assault, earned his GED in prison and takes pride in now being a college student. He said he may pursue a career in music in his hometown of Los Angeles once he’s released next year.

“There is joy in learning — that’s why I want to continue,” he said. “Even when I get out, I’m going back to college.”

The college’s $5 million annual budget is fully funded by private donations, with a paid staff and volunteer faculty, many of them graduate students from top universities, including Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

The previous program started in 1996 and was later known as the Prison University Project and it also offered associate’s degrees but Lewen, who started as a volunteer instructor in 1999, said she began the process to have an autonomous college three years ago when the university they partnered with closed.

“Very often in the field of higher ed, people will look at educational programs in prisons and they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s a program or project. It’s not a school.’ Our hope is that by being an independent, accredited, liberal arts college that operates in a prison we make it more difficult for people to overlook those inside and we help them imagine our students differently,” Lewen said.

Any general population San Quentin inmate with a high school diploma or GED certificate is eligible to attend. The prison’s 539 death row inmates are excluded.

Guards check the IDs of students coming to classes held in trailers set up on one edge of the prison’s exercise yard, where students stop to discuss their assignments — corrections officers watching from four towers above.

Overhearing those yard conversations made a big impression on Richard “Bonaru” Richardson after he was transferred to San Quentin in 2007 to finish serving a 47 years-to-life sentence for a home invasion robbery. Former Gov. Jerry Brown commuted Richardson’s sentence, and he was released last year after serving 23 years.

“In other institutions, we were used to talking about gang activity, violence, knives, drugs, the next riot,” he said.

In San Quentin, the conversations were often about what classes they were taking, how to write a thesis or how to defend an argument.

“I was taken aback. It was kind of like, ‘Hold on, isn’t this supposed to be a prison?’” he added.

He decided to sign up after seeing a group of female volunteers walk across the prison yard.

“I got into the classroom for all the wrong reasons, but I realized that I was actually learning something and that there were people who believed in you more than you believe in yourself. When you see that, you start believing in yourself,” he said.

In his 14 years at San Quentin, Richardson, 47, rose to become executive editor of the inmate-led San Quentin News, a monthly newspaper distributed to California’s 35 prisons that has highlighted the prison programs and often publishes inspirational stories of men who pursued higher education while incarcerated.

He now works as an advancement associate helping the college’s communications and fundraising departments.

“Like me, some of them might be the only person in their family to ever have a college degree and that inspires your children to continue their education. For some of them, it’s the greatest achievement of their lives,” Richardson said.

Doug Arwine, a high school humanities teacher, began volunteering this year and teaches English 101, which focuses on developing critical thinking skills.

He said he cherishes helping his students “share experiences and share their humanity with one another.”

“There’s also moments of success when a student realizes that they’ve crafted a really elegant paragraph in their essay, and they’ve made some interesting points. As with any student, regardless of where you are, you can see how that helps them build confidence,” Arwine said.

Teaching at San Quentin is also a unique experience. The process of going through layers of security, teaching the two-hour class, then clearing security again at the end of the day takes about five hours, Arwine said. He invests many more hours grading papers and preparing for his twice-a-week lessons.

Many of his students dropped out of school at an early age or went to dangerous public schools, Arwine said.

“I really believe in the values that Mount Tamalpais College espouses, in terms of offering free educational opportunities for incarcerated people because as we know from social science research, the best way to reduce recidivism rates is through offering educational programming while they’re incarcerated. It’s arguably the best form of rehabilitation,” said Arwine, whose father spent time in prison.

A 2013 Rand study found that inmates who participate in correctional education programs had 43% lower odds of re-offending than those who did not and were 13% more likely to obtain employment.

Jesse Vasquez, 39, said he was serving multiple life terms for attempted murder, a drive-by shooting and assault with a deadly weapon at a maximum-security facility when he read about the program in the San Quentin News and decided he would transfer there one day.

Vasquez had taken correspondence college programs at other prisons but studying in a classroom at San Quentin helped him see his potential and he realized he was at a “hub of rehabilitation.”

The courses challenged him to question what he was learning and helped him build up critical thinking skills, which he called “a pivotal moment.”

Vasquez’s sentence was commuted by the governor in 2018 after he had served more than 19 years. He was released in 2019 and now works for Friends of San Quentin News, a nonprofit that supports the newspaper.

He said having the students be enrolled at an actual community college will be an even greater incentive for them to pursue higher education and hopefully encourage other prisons to have their own colleges.

“All of a sudden, more people might be more open to the idea of, ‘Hey, what if we try this revolutionary idea somewhere else?’” he said.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in AP on April 19, 2022.  AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Mount Tamalpais College, a program for inmates at San Quentin State Prison, has been granted accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

The designation came from the association’s Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, a 19-member board that reviews whether schools meet educational standards.

“Because our processes are based on thorough and recognized best practices, our determination that an institution is in fact providing a quality educational experience for its students is respected by multiple stakeholders,” the commission website says.

Mount Tamalpais College — formerly known as the Prison University Project and Patten University — has provided free education to San Quentin inmates for 25 years. Its offerings include an associate’s degree program and a college preparatory program.

Jody Lewen, president of the college, said accreditation means the school is “independent and autonomous” and that students are not defined as prisoners.

“It advances the goal of helping the general public understand that people in prison are fully human,” she said.

“We are also committed to providing support to other practitioners in the field of higher education in prison, and to sharing knowledge to advance the cause of equity and excellence in higher education nationally,” Lewen said. “Some schools are interested in becoming involved in operating programs inside correctional facilities because they want to serve incarcerated people, because they want to make sure they have access to education.”

Lewen said the college helps students prepare to transfer to other colleges.

““We have many students who are now on California State and UC campuses pursuing bachelor’s degrees and even master’s degrees as well,” Lewen said. “We are really interested in creating that pipeline to further degrees.”

Amy Jamgochian, the chief academic officer, said, ”Becoming accredited as a junior college located solely inside a prison feels like an important turning point in a society that seldom sees education as a human right or incarcerated people as humans.”

Jamgochian said the staff is developing a computer lab and strengthening science, technology, engineering and math offerings.

Ronald Bloomfield, the prison warden, said the college’s accreditation “represents years of dedicated service in helping an underserved segment of our society.”

”The students of Mt. Tam experience an amazing high-quality education,” Bloomfield said. “Graduates leave the college with knowledge and skills essential to becoming productive citizens.”

Corey McNeil, a graduate now on staff at the college, said its accreditation makes him feel like the school is “growing and evolving along with me.” 

”This is our own college now, all of the people who built this together,” McNeil said. “Now we can say that this is ours.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Marin Independent Journal on March 30, 2022.

An AGB member institution just made history. 

When Mount Tamalpais College (MTC) received notice of its initial accreditation in January 2022, it very likely became the first accredited liberal arts college based inside a correctional facility and designed solely for incarcerated students.  

As an AGB consultant to the college, I see how students change their lives forever with MTC’s mission to provide “an intellectually rigorous, inclusive Associate of Arts degree program and College Preparatory program, free of charge, to people incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison….” The college aims to “foster the values of equity, civic engagement, independence of thought, and freedom of expression.” 

Signifying how well the college delivers on its liberal arts mission, former President Barack Obama awarded the National Humanities Medal to the Prison University Project in 2016. 

The College Program at San Quentin State Prison was founded in 1996 as an extension site of Patten College (later Patten University). In 2003, the Prison University Project (PUP) was created to provide material and financial support to that program. After a series of significant changes at Patten, the leadership of PUP began to explore forging a new institutional partnership or becoming an independent institution. In 2018, they decided on the latter, and MTC came into being. 

The founding of MTC comes at a time of significant change in the field of higher education in prison. When the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994 prohibited incarcerated people from receiving Pell grants, the number of prison higher education programs across the United States dropped from over 300 to fewer than 10. Only in the past several years have efforts at the state and federal level to reinstate support seen a resurgence of the field. In summer 2021, Congress voted to restore Pell eligibility for incarcerated people (effective 2023) as part of the stimulus package.   

While Pell funds make it more financially feasible for other institutions to serve incarcerated students, MTC leaders note the lack of binding quality standards or accountability systems to protect incarcerated students from substandard, or even exploitative, practices. Responsible academic institutions and their governing boards will be attentive to such concerns. MTC has demonstrated that maintaining high standards in a liberal arts education in prison is not only possible, but a moral imperative. It also presents a unique opportunity to advance the cause of equity while fostering a healthy civil society.  

Patten’s sponsorship had allowed the program to develop without its own governing board or independent accreditation. After its first review, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) recommended that before applying for initial accreditation, the college should formalize decision-making roles and ensure that all constituents had opportunities to participate. The program-oriented board of directors needed to become a fiduciary governing board, and the college needed to establish shared governance. That’s when MTC turned to AGB for assistance. 

In late 2020, I began working remotely with MTC due to the pandemic. We started with five two-hour seminars over the course of four months, covering board roles and responsibilities, trusteeship, board-president relationships, and board operations. Each session had a syllabus with recommended readings and other AGB resources that remain in the board’s online folder for future reference. I also met with the executive team to help them understand how they can support the board’s transition.  

Starting with their existing bylaws and policies, I drafted revisions and wrote new material for the Governance Committee to develop further and recommend to the board for adoption. The documents remain works in progress, slowed primarily by the demands of the pandemic. Now I sit in on board and committee meetings and advise the president and board chair. I provide just-in-time information about best practices, suggest adaptations if best practices don’t fit MTC, and offer feedback on their efforts to implement their new learnings.  

Our discussions frequently run into unique dilemmas. Why should we change from being directors to trustees—what’s the difference? How do you achieve faculty governance when the faculty consists of over 300 part-time, unpaid volunteers with varying availability from one semester to another? Is it appropriate for a faculty volunteer to serve on the board of trustees? (Several already do.) Is it appropriate to have alumni on the board? (Emphatically, the answer is yes.) The president is a founder of the organization and the core sustaining element of its success. Given the board’s new governing responsibilities, do the president and the board need to reconstruct their relationship? 

Working through questions like these brings me a fresh perspective on the work we all do. We know in our heads that we change lives and society for the better. We can imagine in our hearts what MTC means to its students, alumni, and their families and communities. Though every story is different, is higher education’s impact less true for any student anywhere? Are we doing enough to build support? 

Every governing board I’ve worked with impresses me; every institution is uniquely inspiring. By definition, each one devotes time and resources to governing better. There is always more to learn. It helps to have a coach.  

Ellen-Earle Chaffee is a senior fellow and senior consultant at AGB.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in AGB on February 16, 2022.

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Students walk to and from classes with books in hand. Some stand around the yard, discussing philosophical concepts from their latest assigned readings. The scene looks similar to that found on any campus quad—except the students are gathered in a prison yard, and the college is located in San Quentin State Prison.

Mount Tamalpais College is the outgrowth of a nearly 25-year-old college program serving students in California’s oldest prison. It was formally accredited as a two-year college last month by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges and became the only accredited, independent liberal arts college in the country that operates its main campus out of a prison, according to college leaders. Mount Tamalpais offers a general education associate degree program and a college preparatory program that teaches students writing and math skills. The faculty members are entirely volunteers, many of them from local colleges and universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University.

The college serves about 300 students at a time, which is a small portion of the 3,049 inmates housed at San Quentin. Enrollment is capped at around 300 because of limited classroom space. At least 3,731 students have taken courses through the program over the years.

Jody Lewen began volunteering as a graduate student at the program in 1999 and is now the college’s president. She said the idea of becoming an independently operated and accredited institution started out as a pipe dream. The program was formerly known as the Prison University Project and began as an extension of Patten University, a private Christian institution in Oakland, which became an online, for-profit university.

Lewen wanted the college to stand on its own, without its success contingent on a partner institution.

“I had fantasized about that for a long time,” she said. “I just thought it would be really extraordinary to be independent, but it never seemed like there would be any way we could pull it off financially. Just the logistics and the infrastructure required seemed so daunting at the time.”

She still worries about finances—Mount Tamalpais is funded by private philanthropy, so classes, textbooks and supplies are provided to students for free—but she got her wish for the program to strike out on its own and provide a level of quality that matched colleges outside the prison.

“Making the decision to become accredited meant that we would be held to the same standards as main campuses typically are, as schools as a whole are,” she said. “We were going to have to answer to all these questions about access to technology, library resources, data collection and analysis, all of the substance of accountability … It just ended up being incredibly productive for us.”

She emphasized that the accreditation will ensure the long-term stability and quality of the program and also will send a larger message.

“What we hope is that our coming into being as a college that happens to be located in the prison has the effect of drawing the attention of the higher education community to those students and causing them specifically to recognize incarcerated students as a part of the higher education community,” she said.

The accreditation comes at a time when lawmakers and higher education leaders are increasingly focused on expanding college opportunities for incarcerated students after Congress in 2020 overturned a 26-year ban that denied incarcerated students access to the Pell Grant, the federal financial aid program for low-income students.

Second-Chance Pell, a pilot program established in 2015, originally allowed 67 select institutions to offer prison education programs with the support of the Pell Grant. The pilot is expected to expand to up to 200 colleges and universities in the 2022–23 award year. The federal funds will be widely available to incarcerated students starting next year.

Incarcerated people tend to have lower levels of education compared to the general population. A 2018 report by the Prison Policy Initiative found that a quarter of formerly incarcerated people never graduated high school. This population is almost twice as likely to lack a high school degree compared to American adults at large. Meanwhile, more than half don’t hold credentials beyond a high school diploma or GED.

Research shows prison college programs have wide-ranging benefits for incarcerated students. Incarcerated people who participate in college programs have a 43 percent lower recidivism rate than their peers, according to research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Only 14 percent of incarcerated people who earn an associate degree and 5.6 percent who earn a bachelor’s degree return to prison.

Shannon Swain, superintendent at the Office of Correctional Education for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said these programs also increase morale among the incarcerated.

“I can’t overemphasize the positive effect that all college programming has on the institutions,” she said. “It’s just really amazing, because all of the sudden, you have incarcerated folks that are more mature, they’re focused on their own recovery, they’re focused on their future, and it influences the people around them.”

The news of Mount Tamalpais’s new status has been widely celebrated by San Quentin staff.

“The accreditation of Mt. Tam as an independent college represents years of dedicated service in helping an underserved segment of our society,” Ronald Bloomfield, warden at San Quentin, said in a press release. “The students of Mt. Tam experience an amazing high-quality education. Graduates leave the college with knowledge and skills essential to becoming productive citizens. With an increased worldview comes increased possibilities and hope for a better future.”

Sam Robinson, public information officer at the prison, said one of the “hallmarks” of the prison is that students can leave with a free associate degree, and the program has led many people to request to transfer to San Quentin.

Corey McNeil, who graduated from the college in 2019, was among those students. He said he came to prison with a middle school education, and when he was first incarcerated, he decided to further his education to show his family he was on a “different trajectory.” He earned his GED at another prison before he requested to transfer to San Quentin to go to Mount Tamalpais because of its reputation for face-to-face learning with instructors and robust classroom discussions. McNeil earned his general education associate degree while simultaneously working as a clerk for the program for four years. He became the college’s alumni affairs assistant after his release last May.

McNeil recalls having lively discussions in the prison yard, ranging from the Reconstruction era in U.S. history to the pros and cons of utilitarianism, with his classmates, whom he now considers “lifelong friends.” He made regular calls to his mother and uncle to tell them about classes and update them on his academic progress.

“Now to see that MTC is growing and achieved accreditation, it feels like not only a celebration of the college’s accomplishments … as an institute of higher learning, but the accreditation also feels like an acknowledgment of all the hard work that the students themselves have done as well,” he said. “It’s like the college’s success is our success, our validation.”

Monique Ositelu, a higher education senior policy analyst at New America, a liberal Washington think tank where she conducts policy research related to prison education, said accreditation may also assuage concerns students have about the value of their degrees.

She noted that the number of higher ed programs in prisons dwindled after congressional lawmakers banned the use of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, and the remaining programs were typically privately funded by organizations or philanthropies. However, not all of these long-standing private programs were accredited, even though degrees from accredited institutions hold “a little bit more weight” with employers and four-year universities where students may hope to transfer, she said.

A student she interviewed at San Quentin once told her he worried future employers wouldn’t respect his degree.

“Will they see it as a degree or a prison degree?” he asked her.

Other students expressed “a lot of faith that this degree will outweigh that they served time in prison,” she said. “We owe it to them as educational providers to ensure that it does, and one of the ways to go and do that is through accreditation.”

She also pointed out that now that the Pell Grant will be widely available to incarcerated students starting in 2023, students can take developmental math and writing courses or earn associate degrees at Mount Tamalpais for free and save their Pell dollars to pursue a bachelor’s degree, which makes a four-year degree more affordable.

College-in-prison experts believe Mount Tamalpais would be a difficult model to replicate at other prisons. Swain, of the Office of Correctional Education, believes the college has flourished in part because of its location. San Quentin is located in Marin County, a short driving distance from many colleges and universities, unlike the majority of prisons, which are located in rural areas.

“Try to find a faculty member that’s qualified and interested in teaching statistics in a prison in Susanville [Calif.]—it’s not an easy thing to do,” Swain said.

She noted that San Quentin offers hundreds of educational and recreational programs, and the prison is such a popular place to volunteer in the surrounding community that it has more volunteers than incarcerated people. The prison is also at a Level II security status, which means most of the prison population can move around freely for most of the day, which she said makes it easier to provide programs.

Even if Mount Tamalpais remains an outlier as an independent, entirely in-prison college, Lewen still believes its accreditation can jump-start a broader discussion about ensuring prison higher ed programs offer value.

“One can do this work well without being an independent college, and there are some very strong in-prison higher ed programs that are extension sites,” she said. “My hope is not necessarily that lots of independent colleges in the field sprout up but that we are able to spur conversations about quality and what’s going on in those programs in a way that benefits the students.”

Ositelu also emphasized that quality prison education programs can have ripple effects on whole families and communities by building up incarcerated students’ confidence before they re-enter society, making it easier for them to secure jobs after release and motivating future generations to pursue higher education.

A degree “signals to the market that they can do the job,” she said. “They have the skill set to do it. They have the content knowledge to do it.” But a college education has “an impact greater than the degree. It has an impact on who they are, on their family, on their children.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed on February 8, 2022.

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Even before I started covering college programs in prisons, one of my favorite podcasts was Ear Hustle, which focuses on life inside San Quentin State Prison in the Bay Area.

When I found out that Nigel Poor, one of the co-producers of Ear Hustle, first got involved with San Quentin as a volunteer professor, I reached out to talk about her experience teaching in prison.

In addition to her work with Ear Hustle, Poor is a visual artist and photography professor at California State University-Sacramento. She started teaching a history of photography class with the Prison University Project, now known as Mount Tamalpais College, at San Quentin in 2011.

Poor says that the stories she heard from the men inside San Quentin inspired her to think about how to do artistic projects inside, and she began to volunteer with the prison’s media lab. All of that eventually led to her collaboration on Ear Hustle. She co-hosts the podcast with Earlonne Woods and Rahsaan “New York” Thomas.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Read the full interview here.

CHARLOTTE WEST:  You mentioned that your conversation with the Prison University Project director Jody Lewin helped you feel prepared to teach in prison. What do you think are some of the misconceptions that people might have about prison education?

NIGEL POOR: I think people have misconceptions, first of all, that they’re going to go into this really angry space where people aren’t educated. And that you’re going to be a remedial teacher getting people up to speed because they don’t know how to read and they don’t have basic math skills. And at least at San Quentin, that was not the case. I went into a classroom that was full of people that were really excited to learn and eager to learn. I had students that had master’s degrees. And I had students that had gotten GEDs and had very little formal education but were really prepared to dig in and work hard.

I had to be careful to not go back to my students at Sac State and say, “My students in prison work so much harder than you.” I never get an excuse about why they couldn’t do something. I found very hard-working, rigorous students.

I think that there’s more nuanced things like people going into prison thinking they’re going to save people. There are complex relationships, and you’re going in as a professional to do a job, which is to teach. You’re not going in as a therapist or savior.

You bring that respect and expectation to the classroom that you would bring to any other classroom.

WEST: Were there any rules about what class material you could or couldn’t use? We have this idea of academic freedom on college campuses, but I would imagine that there might be some different rules that you as a faculty member have to follow when teaching in prison. 

POOR: This is what I would tell people: You can have the most radical ideas you want. And you can think that you need to tear prisons down. But when you go into work in a prison, you have to respect the rules that are there. Because you can have all the passion to politically change things, but you always walk out the gate. You can leave behind a shitstorm and cause a lot of problems.

You have to figure out for yourself how to work within a system that you may not respect or respond to, but you have to remember that you always walk out the gate. And I think some people can go on without really thinking about how much trouble you can get other people in if you don’t think through your passions and your ideas.

That being said, I went in pretty naive. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m just going to teach the class I teach at Sac State, I’m going to bring in my PowerPoints on my computer. And I’m going to show all the work that I show.’ And then first thing, Jody was like, ‘No, of course not, you’re not bringing a computer in. You’re going to be using a television to show your PowerPoints.’

And then [I was told by] the prison that I couldn’t show any nudes, no pictures of children, no pictures of violence, drug use or emotionally complex imagery. And I was like, ‘What the hell am I going to teach?’ That is what photography is; it’s about looking at complex issues. The only thing that would be left would be landscape imagery.

But then Jody set up an opportunity for me to meet with the assistant warden to show them what I was going to teach. And so we met and had like a three hour meeting. And I went through a lot of the images that I was going to show and we had a great conversation. And they gave me permission to bring in most of the images, except some images of children.

What that taught me was the really deep importance of conversation and understanding the world that you’re walking into. And that even if you disagree with people, they’re not the enemy. You can have conversations, and you can come to an understanding.

The administration at the prison needed to understand what I was going to show and they needed to feel that they had some control over it. At first, I was upset, but I realized having this conversation opened it up.

WEST: Education is a theme that comes up tangentially in many Ear Hustle episodes. I was recently listening to Catch a Kite 6. When you asked about their proudest moments, Sam Lewis talked about earning his degree and Reggie Thorpe shared how he felt when he found out he was the only African American at San Quentin who had taken Calculus II. Why was that such a big deal for them?

POOR: I think because it’s about self-discovery and realizing your own talents and your own power. For people inside or outside prison, when you realize you can do something that you thought you couldn’t do, it is such a great feeling. It’s exhilarating.

And like Reggie talking about doing calculus, that sounds so frightening to me. And I can imagine when he realized he was good at it and he could help other people, it was like he could all of a sudden see himself in a different way as a leader and someone who could teach, not as someone who’s been incarcerated for a long time.

I’m sure he’s gone through a lot of periods where he felt unseen and unworthy. And so I think education tells you are worthy of something. And that’s just an essential human need. I think that just shows you your own self-worth when you can help bring other people along.

 Charlotte West, a John Jay Justice Reporting fellow, is a national reporter with Open Campus. This article was originally published in the second edition of College Inside, a biweekly newsletter about the future of postsecondary education in prisons, and is reproduced with permission. Sign up for the College Inside newsletter here.  

Attribution: This article originally appeared in The Crime Report on December 30, 2021.

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