On a fine June morning, 16 of my prison mates clear a metal detector and enter a dark corridor, heads held high. Clank, clank. A corrections officer with long and colorful nails turns a key and opens the gate. “Congrats, y’all!” I follow behind them, about to witness the graduation of the longest-running master’s program in an American prison.
In Sing Sing Correctional Facility, 30 miles up the river from New York City, the New York Theological Seminary (NYTS), offers a graduate program in professional studies with a concentration in urban ministry. In the 1970s, the Rev. Edwin M. Muller began advocating for the expansion of the prison system’s undergraduate education programs. The first graduate classes started in Sing Sing in 1982.
On a hill among the cellblocks, a brick structure holds an auditorium and two chapels. Deep in the basement, through a narrow corridor, sits the North Campus of NYTS. One room holds 17 computers that have Bible and encyclopedia programs, but no internet. In another, dungeonlike doors open to the best view in the joint. It overlooks the yard and an old death house where 614 people were executed. Behind it, the Hudson River runs for miles through rock-faced mountains.
For the past year, the 16 men who make up the 36th NYTS graduating class have lived in these cramped rooms. In addition to taking courses on leadership, systematic theology, and foundation of ministry, they have written papers, debated the necessity of war, and written capstones, which lay out proposals known as “ministries” aiming to improve society.
Most of these men came to prison uneducated, as I did, and earned undergraduate degrees through Hudson Link or the Bard Prison Initiative, which operate in several New York prisons. Men transfer here for NYTS when their applications are approved. The criteria: no sex crime, a clean disciplinary record, and limits on visitation privileges. Since I share a cellblock with the NYTS students, I was able to interview them. Here are three of their stories.
Elon Molina, 41, serving 18 years for robbery
“Not all kids who get molested come to prison,” Elon, a buff and brown-skinned 41-year-old, told me. We sat a metal picnic table in a humid basement, the cellblock rec area. “But I was holding it in for so long that it turned into something else.” He became a Harlem stick-up kid, robbed drug dealers, robbed establishments. In 2005, when Elon started his 18-year sentence, he was drowning in regrets. He was thrown a life vest when he transferred to Eastern Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, which is Bard College’s main prison campus. In 2017, Elon earned a bachelor’s in political science. “Education allowed me to see myself more clearly in relation to the world,” he said.
Matthew Svanberg, 45, serving 25 to life for felony murder
When Matt was 17, part of his face was ripped off in a car accident. With no right eyelid, he lived on the surgery table, and doctors only partially succeeded in reconstructing his face. At 19, bingeing on drugs, he held up a convenience store and killed the young clerk. Early in his sentence, a prisoner broke off an ice pick in Matt’s eye — the good one. On another surgery table, doctors managed to save it. It took Matt a while to see that there was a life worth living in prison.
Taking Bard classes at Eastern, Matt came upon Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which showed him empathy and helped him see trauma in his own story. In an NYTS class, Matt wrote about his journey in a Tolstoy-style story, which helped him discover that even in his darkest moments, God was in his life. Matt practices Siddha yoga, a meditation-based spiritual practice, and in his capstone he created a drug-rehab program that attempts to realign the mind, body, and soul. But shame still trumps the pride of his recent accomplishments. “I mean, I killed an innocent guy who had his whole life ahead of him,” he told me, shaking his head.
Demetrius James, 42, serving five to 15 for manslaughter on top of 15 years for gun possession
Demetrius goes by the prison nickname “Buddha,” and he resembles the famous statue — big and bald, kind and calm. One night in 2002, the Star of David medallion dangling from his necklace caught the eyes of teenagers hanging around his Bronx apartment. They mistook it for a gang symbol: Bloods rep the five-point star, Crips rep the six-point. When they confronted Buddha in an elevator, a shot was fired, and a young black man died.
Prison, at first, seemed like a pointless life to Buddha. Blowing bud in the yard, fistfights, pissing dirty for pot, trips to solitary. Then came opportunity. At Eastern he earned a bachelor’s and followed the guys to NYTS, where he learned how to apply his vision. “Ministry, I don’t see it as a religious thing,” he told me, smiling at a passing man who seemed to suffer from mental illness. “It’s a human thing. We’re all obligated to one another as human beings.”
Back at graduation, a C.O. frisks me and snatches my pen and pad before I enter the visiting room. Men greet proud families and friends and sit at tables decorated with flowers and portraits of the graduates. “Education is the purest form of rehabilitation,” says Anthony J. Annucci, a lawyer and politician with a cop’s mustache who serves as acting commissioner of the New York prison system. “It helps them discover their own humanity, so they’ll then be able to appreciate the humanity in others.”
I know what it’s like to discover my own humanity. Back in Brooklyn, in 2001, with a ninth-grade education, I shot a man to death to defend my turf and bolster my image. In Attica, I learned the art of storytelling in a creative-writing workshop, and I took to journalism, weaving memoir into many of my stories. I’ll graduate from Mercy College, Hudson Link’s Sing Sing program, with a bachelor’s next year.
Elon Molina is the elected class speaker. I stand to one side with the food servers, smelling the aroma of lasagna and chicken cordon bleu, as a walkie-talkie crackles from a C.O.’s hip. About 175 people have turned up. There are tears and smiles all around. “I love you, Mommy,” Elon says. “To my little brother, Khalid — I love you, you knucklehead.” He talks with disbelief about the legacy that George Webber, the NYTS president who began the program, left behind. “How could a man I would never have the opportunity to meet have me in mind?”
Finally, Elon mentions the men who have died at Sing Sing, and I think of the 500 NYTS men who have educated themselves, paying it forward as a sort of healing. “Just think about it,” Elon says. “It is only through the grace and loving mercy of God that we can hold graduations today, where they used to hold executions.”
