Prison Education Unlocks Potential

Lackey has cared about prison populations since she was 12 years old. To fulfill a community service requirement for school, she asked to volunteer at Cook County Jail. Once her request was approved, Lackey spent time visiting with women at the jail and hearing their stories.

“I was raised by a single mother and I recognized — even as a child — just how many people end up incarcerated in this country due to circumstances outside of their control, and how incarceration can upend their entire lives,” says Lackey.

The U.S. has the highest number of incarcerated people — roughly 2.2 million — of any country in the world, with incarceration rates four to eight times higher than other democracies. Additionally, a recent study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that 77% of people released from state prisons return within five years.

Civil rights attorney Sheila Bedi has dedicated her career to ending mass incarceration. “The men at Stateville — and many men and women who are imprisoned in this country — have experienced systemic state disinvestment in their home communities, as well as the realities of mass incarceration and overpolicing,” says Bedi, a clinical professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. At Stateville she teaches Violence Reduction and Transformational Change in Justice Systems to a class made up of 10 incarcerated students and 10 law students.

One of her incarcerated students is William Peeples. At 55, Peeples is among the oldest students enrolled in the course and has spent almost all of his adult life in prison.

“The first time I went to prison was for something I wasn’t guilty of,” says Peeples. “I was 18 and thrown into a predatory environment, surrounded by hardened criminals. It didn’t give me much faith in the judicial system.”

While Peeples is grateful to learn more about the law himself — Stateville inmates are often well-versed in the legal details surrounding their cases — he also sees his involvement in NPEP as an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others navigating the legal system.

“The opportunity to share my perspective with these young lawyers who are going to be defense attorneys, state’s attorneys and judges who might even end up on the U.S. Supreme Court is invaluable and could really make a difference,” says Peeples. (Read his essay, “When You Know Better, You Do Better.”)

The discourse between the two populations was a big reason that Bedi decided on the 50-50 format enrollment for her class at Stateville.

Luke Fernbach, a second-year law student in class with Peeples is interested in civil rights law and prison reform. After graduation he hopes to pursue work that helps shrink the role of policing and reduce the number of people in prison by building up communities and promoting crisis intervention efforts — the types of efforts that might have helped some of his incarcerated classmates avoid prison. “One of the most important and often overlooked things you should learn as a lawyer is that in a lot of cases, the people who have the best solutions to legal questions are those most affected by them,” says Fernbach.

Mary Pattillo didn’t know how a reading about foie gras would go over with her Stateville students. Teaching the same first-year sociology course at Stateville and in Evanston meant that she used the same syllabus for both cohorts, with identical readings and writing assignments. One of the readings was about the 2006 foie gras ban approved by the Chicago City Council after members decided it was inhumane to force-feed the birds.

“Very few students — whether from Evanston or Stateville — knew that foie gras is duck or goose liver,” says Pattillo, the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies. “But we had the most fascinating discussion about the limits of government control, and the Stateville students chimed in about their own lack of control over their meals in prison.”

Professor Mary Pattillo teaches Sociology of Chicago at Stateville. Pattillo, whose research focuses on sociology and African American history, has written about incarceration.

This was not the first or last time that discussion topics produced different responses on both campuses. The class, which examines Chicago using sociological methods, included readings about various neighborhoods known for cultural diversity. While Pattillo’s Evanston students were from all over the country, her Stateville students — many of whom grew up in the Chicago area — knew the city. They were also much older than the Evanston undergraduates. Some had children who were about the same age as their Evanston peers.

“Where Evanston students were green to sociology and to Chicago, the Stateville men knew Chicago and brought their experiences to class,” says Pattillo, who is one of more than 40 Northwestern professors signed up to teach in the program. “What they didn’t have was up-to-date information about the city, and because they were without internet access, I often had to go to the library and pull articles they requested for their research papers.”

Corzell Cole is one of the students who took Pattillo’s course. Cole grew up just a few minutes from Stateville, in neighboring Joliet, and recounts an early exposure to drug deals and shootings. When he was 8, Cole was hit in the arm by a stray bullet that ricocheted through his body, causing his lungs to collapse.

“That injury was a major setback for me — in sports and in school,” says Cole.

He remembers taking care of his brother, while their mother worked two, sometimes three, jobs to support the family. Cole’s father, who had battled addiction after losing a steady job, didn’t play a consistent role in his life.

“Taking Professor Pattillo’s sociology class allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of my own story,” says Cole. “I was able to put my life into the context of systemic issues that happen in impoverished neighborhoods. My father losing his job, my parents separating and my mother raising two boys on her own — those things contributed to how I ended up in this situation.”

Pattillo, whose research bridges sociology and African American history, has written about incarceration and has family and friends who have been incarcerated.

“People who are in prison are probably the absolute last constituency that even the champions of education would champion,” she says. “What I have seen firsthand is just how much talent is locked up for life. I would argue that using your mind, your body and your spirit — which is what learning is to me — is humanity 101.”

While many of the students are enrolled in core subjects including sociology, chemistry and math, there is room for electives as well. Quayshaun Bailey opted to take Writing the Dramatic Television Pilot.

“The assignment said we were supposed to write 15 pages, but I wrote the whole 60 required for a one-hour pilot,” says Bailey, who wrote a script for a crime drama. “If I get some good feedback from that, I’m going to tuck
it away and see if I can pitch it when I’m out.”

Bailey, 27, has five years left in his sentence. He is one of a few students who transferred to Stateville from a medium-security prison after he was admitted to NPEP.

“I’ve been pursuing an education since I was first incarcerated, but when I heard about this opportunity with Northwestern, I saw the chance for my potential to skyrocket,” he says.

Many opportunities that are common on college campuses — like hearing prominent guest speakers, enrolling in workshops or assuming leadership roles in student organizations — can be difficult to replicate in a prison.

That’s where Sophia Ruark comes in. As president of the Undergraduate Prison Education Partnership (UPEP), an army of Northwestern students behind the scenes who support NPEP, Ruark leads a group of students developing extracurricular programming, fundraising for academic supplies and building awareness of NPEP on the Evanston campus.

In 2019 UPEP organized a Buddhist psychology and meditation workshop at Stateville, which included Stateville and Evanston students.

“So many students came up to me after class to tell me how meaningful it was to have that space to share candid, emotional topics and learn how to use meditation,” says Ruark, who is a senior pursuing a psychology major and legal studies minor. “In all the ways we would help Evanston students be successful, we should help the Stateville students too.”

Ruark, who is from Grand Ledge, Mich., stepped into an adult role when key people in her life became incarcerated while she was in high school. At the time, she wasn’t sure if attending college would allow her to support her family. Interested in a future career in the U.S. Air Force, Ruark applied and was accepted to the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, a program that allows students to complete officer training while getting a college degree. Now she says that her decision to support NPEP provided a way to bridge two important parts of her identity — student and servicewoman.

“The Air Force teaches you that you have a responsibility to your unit,” says Ruark. “NPEP — my peers at Stateville and in Evanston, everyone who works so hard to make NPEP work — became my unit at Northwestern.”

This spring Ruark, who received a Purple Pride Award at the 2019 Wildcat Excellence Awards for her work with UPEP, will graduate from Northwestern and become an officer in the Air Force. In the fall she will commission and begin serving as an aviator, becoming the first woman in her detachment in at least five years to do so.