To Be Called a Criminal and a College Graduate in the Same Breath

As surely as June brings a gush of stories about college graduations, July brings a whole new cohort of job-seekers into the job market. This year, reports of triumph and uncertainty included a spate of narratives about the unique experiences of people returning from incarceration to our communities.?

The facts reveal the remarkable potential for success: When offered the opportunity to learn, broaden our vistas, and acquire the credentials needed to survive in a world where 70% of work will require a college degree, those who attend college classes while incarcerated have a better chance of finding a job and an enhanced trajectory to thrive over a lifetime. Not only is investing in education programs a step toward decarceration, it is also in the interest of taxpayers, with the potential to free up nearly $400 million dollars across the country for things like health care, housing or education BEFORE someone gets trapped in the criminal legal system.??

It has certainly been true for me. More than a decade ago, I was sitting in a New Jersey prison, serving a six-year sentence with the odds of succeeding stacked against me with a felony conviction. But thanks to an in-prison education program, critical mentors along the way and a growing vision of a different life trajectory, I was able to earn my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Rutgers University. Today, I am honored to lead the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network (FICGN), bringing those chances to thousands of others.

But the factual indicators of success aren’t the whole story: How we define, approach and welcome returning citizens–many of whom are facing their first real opportunity to find a healthy societal home–are also central to positive outcomes. As the stories about prison education programs and in-prison graduation ceremonies have emerged over the last few months, the media coverage has been both supportive and maddening.?

Back in May, I read an article that I just can’t unsee. It suggested that some California prisons should be kept open because they provide some future returning citizens with a path to education. The reporter writing for CalMatters implied that keeping the prisons open would be a win-win-win: The prisons would continue to provide local jobs and revenue; the community colleges would stay afloat with their budgets; and, oh yes, the people in carceral care would get to continue their in-prison degree programs.

As someone with both personal and professional expertise dealing with the US penal system, the convoluted reasoning behind that premise is a bit unsettling. Yes, prison education programs are a boon. However, the insinuation that unnecessary carceral facilities should remain open so that for-profit prison corporations can continue to rake in (or government agencies can continue to misuse) public dollars, or so that struggling community colleges can meet their strained budgets through enrollment is a missed opportunity to envision a different future for all of us.?

The language we use, whether as journalists and pundits or as fellow citizens, can also play a significant role in how we see our individual and societal options. In June, six students became the first to graduate from Yale while incarcerated, generating stories that highlighted the profound impact of the experience on professors and students alike.? However, many of the reports were topped by clickbait headlines referring to the students as “convicts” or “felons” rather than humanizing options like “incarcerated students.” Like the nuanced distinction between “slave” and “enslaved person,” the term “incarcerated student” expands a person’s humanity and possibility beyond their one worst moment or institutional label; the Black Enterprise choice , referring to the new Yale graduates as “incarcerated men” is much more heartening. These journalistic choices shape how people with power over our future see us. We walk into every interview with that cloud hanging over our heads, hoping that the person with whom we sit down will be the one to recognize us for who we are now, and treat us with the dignity that every human deserves.

In my years of service to building a strong community of graduates and professionals who’ve also been to prison, I’ve learned a few lessons that were not in the textbooks, and are seldom part of the public narrative:

• Incarceration in the U.S. is a punitive and all too often a for-profit business enterprise structured in ways that exacerbate systemic racial and economic inequities. More often than not, the welfare and rehabilitation of imprisoned people languishes at the low end of the philosophical and funding priorities and this includes in prison education programs.
• The language of “second chances,” while better than nothing, obscures the fact that, for most incarcerated people, a second chance is really a first chance; especially when it comes to receiving a college education.? Many of the Black and Brown youth who populate our prisons were systematically deterred from gaining access to even a college track in high school, much less the mentorship needed to reach a college campus. As noted by Evan Mandery, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who writes about the intersection where race and economics meet higher education, fewer than 3% of the graduating class at his own alma mater, Harvard, came from the lowest quintile of the income scale; and more than 60% of the lowest quintile don’t attend college at all. Of course, those figures are disproportionately worse for young Black and Brown students.
• The language we use to talk about incarcerated people, whether by branding them as “felons” or “ex-cons,” reinforces the dehumanization of imprisoned people and mocks their chances to achieve a self-definition that rises above and beyond their crime. Those labels have also proven themselves very sticky, dogging people into their new community lives with little chance of achieving parole in the minds of others.

Rather than look for the easy answers that perpetuate the status quo, we need to close our prisons, and open our colleges and above all, our minds to the human potential we can share with one another. A good first step is leading with person-first language , in media, within our organizations and with each other. It begins there and nowhere else.