Sitting in his prison cell, José Bou never imagined himself standing at the front of a classroom, teaching criminal justice.
Bou earned his undergraduate degree in English from Boston University while serving a 12-year sentence at a Massachusetts prison for drug trafficking. After his release, in 2011, Bou got a master’s degree in criminal justice, also at BU. Now, at 42, he’s an instructor at Holyoke Community College, in Holyoke, Mass., where he was born.
Bou considers himself lucky. Degree programs for prisoners aren’t nearly as widespread as they once were. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed a crime bill that made people in state and federal prisons ineligible for Pell Grants. By cutting off the funding, the law quashed many existing college-in-prison programs. Advocates have tried ever since to bring them back, but funding and support are still shaky, despite evidence that education stalls the revolving door of recidivism. In 2017 a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics found that most incarcerated people — 58 percent — had not taken any academic classes behind bars.
Bou spoke with The Chronicle recently about his time in prison, how his life experiences inform his teaching, and why — with adequate resources — he thinks there could be more people like him.
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You moved around a bit as a child — from Holyoke, Mass., to Puerto Rico, then back to western Massachusetts — and you dropped out of high school in the early 1990s. Do you remember why you decided to leave school?
My dad was a single dad. He had two jobs. I was just a very hyper kid and hard to manage. I liked getting in trouble — not bad trouble, but skipping school, smoking weed with friends.
I remember going to school one day for a parent-teacher conference, and they told my dad, “You son has been absent 111 days.” He had no idea. He dragged me to get my GED. High school wasn’t for me at the time, which is ironic for where I’m at.
How did you get into selling drugs?
First, I became addicted to drugs. I see that with a lot of people. It wasn’t a lucrative venture for me. It was a way to get more drugs. Then one of the guys that was in the crew ended up robbing someone for cocaine. Up until then we’d sold marijuana. Suddenly we became cocaine dealers. That brought in a ton of money, and a lot of other things with it.
When I went into jail for the first time, for breaking into unlocked cars, I decided I wasn’t going to be a thief anymore. I consciously decided to sell drugs. It wasn’t like I was leaving crime. I was morphing the criminal behavior into something more lucrative, at least I thought. Around 23 years old is when I sold cocaine to an undercover officer. That was the beginning of the end.
Why did you decide to pursue a degree in prison?
I didn’t want to be the stereotypical person coming out of prison that we see in the movies. You know, with the pack of cigarettes up their sleeve, walking around with a huge chip on their shoulder. I didn’t necessarily want people to even know I’d been to prison. I knew I had done enough to be sentenced, but I didn’t want to just give away my life. I felt like, if I can get educated, I haven’t given the state of Massachusetts my soul.
Once I learned I could do it, it snowballed. It became fun. It was like, “Oh my God, I’m good at this.” I ended up with a 3.98 GPA.
I’m not a genius, I just had a lot of time in the cell. There was a music class where the professor played one movement of some opera, and you had to write everything you knew about it. I ended up writing, like, even the composer’s second cousin’s name, and the teacher was just blown away. She was from Columbia University, and her being blown away blew me away.
Why did you decide to pursue a master’s and become a professor?
When I got out of prison, in 2011, it was really tough to get a job. I had graduated summa cum laude from BU, and I couldn’t get a job at McDonald’s. Ultimately, I ended up getting an opportunity at an organization called Roca.
I started working with really high-risk young people, and doing a lot of court visits. One of my previous professors at the prison was now a director of this criminal-justice master’s program. I applied and got in. I didn’t think about being a professor. I just wanted to have a level of education that was even with other people. Maybe I still carried the stigma of being a convict, but we both have the same education.
I’m curious about your experience in graduate school, learning about criminal justice. Did it make you understand your own life differently?
Yeah, there were times when I was reading about myself in the textbooks. There were other times where I was just learning a lot.
I tell my students this: Studying criminal justice will just piss you off. You’re not ready for that. When you study criminal justice, it’s a given that you’re going to learn about racial inequalities and economic inequalities. I wasn’t ready for that part, for the teaching to be so honest and open.
So was there ever a time when you thought about quitting?
I can clearly remember this one time in prison when I was typing this paper. I wrote it out by hand first. I had it taped to the wall, and I was typing with an old-fashioned typewriter. And I just got fed up. I took the rough draft off the wall, crumpled it up, and threw it in the corner. I think I looked at it for five seconds before I stood up, uncrumpled it, and kept typing.
When I got that degree, I remember being in my bunk, running over the raised lettering and engraving. Just touching it, crying, thinking to myself, “This is the first thing I’ve ever really finished.”
In your classes now, do you talk about personal experiences like that?
Yeah, I do. I reveal that I went to prison halfway through the semester. I don’t want to hide it because there’s just too many benefits that they can get from my stories that they won’t get from any other professor. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back. But I know I’m a weirdo in the world of academia. That’s OK. I want students to ask me questions like, “What is it like to be incarcerated? What is it like to do re-entry? What is it like to be homeless?”
Do you think the general professoriate is too similar, like carbon copies of the same type of people?
We put maybe too much value in the status-quo professor. There’s a lot of learning to be done from folks who haven’t gone through the education system the traditional way. We have to start looking at, What else do you bring to the table besides the fact that you were a bookworm?
Do colleges have a responsibility to educate people at their local prisons?
Yes. I tell my students, “Stand if you would hire somebody out of prison today.” Nobody stands. And I’m saying to them, “You know that there’s a problem with our correction system, that we’re not churning out rehabilitated offenders, and we, as a society, are OK with that.” If we know that solitary confinement is making people more mentally unstable and more violent, if we know a lack of education, a lack of communication skills, is connected to violence and criminal acts, why aren’t we doing everything we can to minimize that?
What I did by getting a degree was very rare, very difficult, very time-consuming, and not typical of the experience of the average person in prison. I would never want anybody to see my story and say, “Wow, he did it. Everybody can do it!”
But I think that with enough resources, more people can do it. So I’m saying two things at the same time. Don’t use me as an example of like, “Oh, everybody can do it because José did it.” The whole story is much longer and much more difficult. It took a lot to get here. I don’t think I could do this again. I like to think that I could.
Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
