After 26 years, the ban on Pell Grants for prisoners has been lifted. About damn time. I mean, I’ve been publishing essays from prison for years calling for this. It finally happened in that omnibus bill, the one with the Covid relief that was 5,000 pages. You know Donald Trump didn’t read that, but he signed it. His January antics made this great news a bit anticlimactic. But it’s where we are.
It’s impossible to understand this opportunity without knowing how much was lost when Pell Grants were taken away. I call those who suffered the consequences the Lost Generation. Except they weren’t jolly and drinking and flirting and taking trains across Europe. This Lost Generation was in prison doing nothing, and idle time in the joint is the devil’s ... well, you know the rest of that cliché.
So when a good opportunity comes along, even the worst of us can spot it. I did. And maybe my story will help persuade you to see a nearby prison as a potential satellite campus.
I know it’s quite the venture in these uncertain times — what with Covid still swirling, enrollment suffering, and national unrest — but it’s worth the investment. Not just because it would help prisoners get jobs, lower recidivism, and save states money on incarceration costs. It’s more than that.
Whenever the president of Hamilton College, who once approved funding for his English professor’s curious venture to bring a creative-writing workshop into Attica state prison, sees my writings, especially in The Chronicle, I hear the guy perks up and sends my old writing mentor a beaming email. It’s an amazing feeling, I’m sure, to see a student you taught succeed, a brimful, humble pride. That’s why you educators do what you do. If that president had passed on the idea, or the professor had been discouraged by the unkind guards who would sometimes turn him away because they fumbled his gate clearance, you would never be reading these words, because I would never be a writer.
In December 2001, I was 24, doing drugs, selling drugs, and I shot and killed a man in Brooklyn. I was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 28 years to life. When I was processed into state prison, I had a ninth-grade education, dumb as they come. About five years into my sentence, I landed in a facility in which the Bard Prison Initiative was interviewing students.
In order to apply for college courses, a prisoner has to have fewer than 15 years left in a sentence before coming before the parole board. With 23 years to go at the time, I was ineligible. I remember being at a table in the mess hall, hearing students talk about Kant and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, discussing their essays on existentialism. Chewing Tater Tots, staring off like I wasn’t listening, I felt envious and invisible. Trouble soon found me in the yard. A familiar face from Brooklyn, a friend of the man I’d killed, greeted me with a dap and a half hug, then shanked me in the chest six times, puncturing my lung. He got away with it. I wouldn’t give the guy up, so I got transferred to Attica, New York’s toughest joint.
It was 2009, and there were no educational programs in Attica. Mom paid for correspondence courses from Ohio University. I took microeconomics, accounting, American government, and women’s literature. I’d study game theory, balance sheets, the Great Compromise, and wrote reflection papers on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I hated the book, and still remember the instructor’s snarky red-ink comments: “Do they give you guys dictionaries in there?” The guy gave me a C. In a recent New York Times essay, the novelist Michael Cunningham wrote, “Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them.”
One afternoon, while I was taking a proctored exam for microeconomics in the deserted Attica school building, the clerk, who used to be a teacher and was in for killing his wife, asked if I would be interested in joining a creative-writing workshop. I was. Doran Larson, a Hamilton College English professor, led a workshop geared toward publishing our work. It was 2010. Michelle Alexander had just published her seminal book, The New Jim Crow. Mass incarceration and criminal-justice reform were growing issues. We read Best American Essays, and I’d take note of where the writings had originally appeared and daydream that my words would one day appear in one of those publications.
When a good opportunity comes along, even the worst of us can spot it.
I was hoping to eventually get a transfer back to a prison with Bard College classes. (Transfers are only approved for a region; you never know the exact prison in which you will land.) When Larson secured funding for Genesee Community College to come in, I landed one of the 23 spots in the pilot program and decided to stay in Attica. I kept attending the workshop. In 2013, after perfecting an essay for months, I sent it off to The Atlantic. They published it.
Today I am a freelance writer with scores of publications, and I’m on the masthead of Esquire.
I got what I needed from those correspondence courses. They prepared me for what came next, which was the writing workshop, then community college, where I learned the layers of our nation’s sins that helped me better understand why things are the way they are in this very moment. By the time I landed in Sing Sing and finished up my bachelor’s through Mercy College, one of the several college programs in New York funded and organized by Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, I was already an experienced writer and journalist.
That writing workshop was my most important educational experience. A part of me feels Doran Larson sacrificed his writerly ambitions so we in that workshop could, if only for a moment, feel like we were something more than inmate, prisoner, murderer, this evil thing. That something more was a published writer. He gave me that. I owe my career to him. With writing, editors don’t look at where you went to college, they look at your work, your bylines — and mine, I’m told, measure up with the best. That has a lot to do with grit. College presidents, I hear, want more college students to have it. Prison is where you can find that trait in abundance.
This essay is from a new Chronicle report on prison education, which was underwritten by the Ascendium Education Group.
