Week 3: Understanding a Convict’s Experience & Reimagining Reentry Solutions

Hello all! I hope you’ve had a meaningful and restful spring break. I am pleased to inform you that I’ve spent these past two weeks making immense headway with my senior project—more particularly, within the purview of underresourced prisons, as I refined the focus of my carceral pursuits to institutions afflicted by poor staffing conditions and limited federal funding. 

My literature review has played an integral role in this redirected endeavor, specifically Holly Wetzel’s meta-analysis on rehabilitative prison education programs. Her research elucidated the statistical impact and pragmatic implications of re-education initiatives, respectively, within underresourced prisons: they have shown to reduce recidivism by a staggering 14.8% and improve both employment outcomes (+6.9%) and quarterly wages (+$131) post-release. Moreover, Wetzel contends that these re-education programs provide a consistently positive “return on investment,” with college education yielding the most prodigious individual benefits and vocational training offering the highest taxpayer return. Ultimately, Wetzel’s findings have proven instrumental in pursuing my narrowed topic, as her insightful observations have revealed the latent potential of education programs, within underfunded facilities, as a means to rehabilitation and societal reintegration; I look forward to citing her work as a key reference in my ongoing exploration, as I continue to develop my understanding of penology and preexisting targeted reforms.

In more exciting news, I was privileged to have been afforded the opportunity to interview Audrey Wilson, a formerly incarcerated prisoner who has been sentenced to an aggregate term of life in the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women. Wilson pleaded guilty to Conspiracy to Murder on December 3, 1990, and, following her mandatory minimum term of thirty years, took on the role as the Division Manager at the Petey Greene Program in New Jersey. Throughout our interview, she spoke of the systemic challenges faced by those within the system, particularly the lack of resources and the societal stigma that follows the incarcerated after release. Wilson recalled that “education was deemed a privilege” by the Department of Corrections, as only select students had access to typewriters, while the majority had no choice but to hand-write an eight-page term paper for one of the re-education programs she had enrolled in. To receive college credit for this re-education program, she explained, students were mandated to complete this term paper. But the sources and materials the professor had handed out, both of which were necessary for the paper’s completion, drastically differed from what they had been learning over the past few months, since the prison was unable to provide them with the pertinent documents. Regardless, Wilson and others were given no other choice but to complete the term paper before them, using documents the professor had brought in from a college class he taught outside of prison—sources that were entirely unrelated to the assignment and offered little to no guidance for writing the paper. That was the reality: a lack of resources that made something as simple as completing an assignment incredibly challenging. WIlson also spoke about the psychological ramifications of incarceration, saying that “the system is designed to keep people in and continue to bring them back… It becomes a battle against bitterness.” These internal struggles, Wilson said, were coalescent with the external challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals. Such external struggles are exemplified by the societal biases she addressed, which portray former inmates as morally defective, broken, and irredeemable: “It is intellectual laziness to put any individual in a box… The system doesn’t prepare people for success on the outside, and society doesn’t give them a fair chance to succeed once they’re out. It’s a harsh judgment that doesn’t take into account the structural inequalities that lead people into the system in the first place.”

My networking efforts also yielded promising connections this week! During an admitted students’ day at Brandeis University, I met Mr. Breen, a legal studies professor and leader within Brandeis’s Petey Greene Program—a program I had initially planned to volunteer with at Princeton. Upon introducing myself and my academic interests, we instantly bonded over our shared passion for criminal reform and rehabilitative penology, and he even offered his email for further collaboration in the field; I look forward to arranging a brief Zoom conference with him shortly. Additionally, Shanequa Gore—a reentry specialist dually employed at Riker’s Island and the Fortune Society—has responded to my inquiry and invited me to visit her office at the Fortune Society to discuss reentry strategies with penal experts. She also offered to connect me with several of her colleagues who specialize in transitional housing and employment services for formerly incarcerated individuals, providing me with an invaluable opportunity to better inform my research and gain deeper insights into the challenges of reentry/reintegration.

As I continue my research and interview process, I am eager to uncover actionable strategies for improving prison conditions alongside Ms. Gore, advancing theoretical approaches to reentry programs through my continued literature review, and platforming the voices of those immediately impacted by systemic inequities in the carceral system. I’ll be sure to keep you all thoroughly informed!