Higher Education is a Human Right
the honor of taking this stage
represents a culmination of events that
i will always reflect on
as a capstone to the first half of my
life because when i graduated last may
the previous three years that it took to
reach that point were all part of a
rebuilding process
in which i worked a series of hard
manual labor jobs
while starting a family
so unlike most of the graduates in the
class of 2020 who i
imagine were disappointed by the news
that in-person graduations would need to
be canceled due to the pandemic
when i got my degree in the mail held it
in my hands
and posted a picture of it to social
media all i felt was a tremendous shower
of relief
see i was born into a family of
educators and knew by the time i started
school
that i was expected to earn a college
degree my grandfather was the principal
at elementary school that i attended
my favorite aunt had a long career as
principal and my sister
is currently carrying on this family
tradition so
after graduating high school i followed
in the footsteps of several family
members
and was accepted at fisk university in
nashville tennessee
where i completed two years of
enrollment but
ultimately my goal of obtaining a
college degree was derailed
and before i became a college graduate i
survived a total of 12 years
nine months and six days of time in
prison which is exactly 85 percent
of a 15-year census that i got from my
participation in the robbery in 2003
fortunately no one was physically hurt
during the commission of the crimes that
i was convicted and sentenced for
but the psychological trauma that i
caused to the victims in my case
and to myself cannot be quantified
but in the last 18 months of my sentence
i got lucky
when the state shackled me and changed
my wrists to my ankles
and around my waist and shipped me to
the missouri eastern correctional center
initially i only considered the transfer
to mbcc a stroke of luck
because it’s close to st louis because
to that point
i had mostly been caged in places that
were a minimum of two hours away from
home
this made it harder for me to get visits
from the few people who were willing to
make the drive
at any rate after i got there i found
out that you had recently established a
prison education project
pep is a higher education and prison
program
that offers credit bearing courses and a
degree program to both the staff
and the people who are locked up
obtaining access to such a high quality
higher education opportunity
prior to and immediately after my
release not only saved my life
but also made it possible for me to
rebuild it
in the first decade in my sentence i
accumulated over a dozen certificates
for taking classes offered by the state
but i knew that pep would be completely
different because
those classes aren’t likely to be
leveraged for anything after release
and even the missouri parole board knows
it in some instances
they could be bought on the yard for
cigarettes or stamps i know this because
they suggested that i might have gotten
some of mine like that during my first
parole here
in any case because i grew up in saint
louis right off the bat
i was profoundly aware of the value of
an education from ysu
but i had no idea how few programs like
pep exist throughout the country
in fact it is a major understatement to
say
that i was lucky to have access to such
an opportunity
although a lot of people know that the
american criminal legal system
cages far more people than anywhere else
in the world
or at any other point in human history
most people don’t know that
severely limited access to higher
education for people in prison
reinforces mass incarceration according
to the department of justice
at least 95 of people in state prisons
will be released at some point and more
than 80 percent
get out with time left to serve on
parole
but most people go back to prison within
the first three years after release
i completed 18 months of parole and
recently celebrated four years of
release without being re-arrested for
anything
i’m a taxpayer citizen who’s lived
experiences
empowered me to offer informed
perspectives on the issue of why so many
people go back to prison
and to be clear perspectives informed by
lived experience
are the most credible source of research
data on this topic
that said it is important for me to
explain
that the language i use and encourage
others to use and refer to people who
have been to prison
is an effort intended to humanize us so
the reason why i say formally caged
instead of formally incarcerated is
because i want to visually and
graphically contextualize
for those who are fortunate not to have
this experience the act of putting
people in cages
as the default response to society’s
social problems
so i never use words like inmate
offender
prisoner or convict because i know that
those labels have harmful consequences
that punish people long after their time
has been served
there are 2.3 million people in america
who are
held in more than 7 000 prisons jails or
so-called
correctional facilities in stark
contrast
there are only 300 higher education and
prison programs
a higher education and prison program is
defined as one that provides
post-secondary education
is formally affiliated with a college or
university
and stipulates a high school diploma or
ged as a requirement for admission
now of the 300 programs in existence
there are approximately
25 081 students enrolled
although student enrollment has likely
declined considerably
since the publication of these finders
in 2020
as the number of people who are dying in
prison from covet increases daily
what this data tells us though is that
only about one percent of the 2.3
million people who are caged in america
have access to higher education these
statistics are even more severe in
missouri
where 859 out of every 100 000 people
are locked up
this rate of incarceration is well above
the national average of 698
out of every 100 000 people in missouri
where there are more than 52 000 people
in custody or unsupervised release
there are only 55 students enrolled in
two programs
which means that the percentage of
access here is roughly 0.1 percent
given this percentage i bet that it
doesn’t come as a surprise that without
my participation in pep
i wouldn’t be here today because instead
of access
to high quality higher education or
platforms like this
people returning to society typically
become entangled in a web of legal
and institutional barriers that we are
ill-prepared to navigate
in missouri alone there are 684
collateral consequences laws that
restrict people with criminal
convictions
from participating fully in society and
cast us
often permanently to just exist in the
margins
the right to vote access to education
employment and housing
are just a few of the challenges that
people face after release from prison
according to the prison policy
initiative formerly caged people are
five times more likely to be without
work than the general public
ten times more likely to experience
homelessness and five times more likely
to be without a high school diploma
these factors help to explain
increasingly high rates of recidivism
which is people going back to prison
after being released
and contrary to popular belief cajun
people doesn’t deter
crime or improve public safety in fact
the punishment system in our country is
clearly ineffective at improving public
safety
and we must try something different i
believe strongly that restorative
alternatives to the current model of
caging as many people as possible
are critical to building a more just and
equitable society
a recent study by the rand corporation
found that
obtaining a higher education reduced
recidivism by 43
and it’s four to five times less costly
than reincarcerating people
as such an expansion of higher education
and prison programs
specifically ones that prioritize
re-entry pathways
that lead students to the traditional
campuses that sponsor them
will alleviate taxpayers to some of the
cost burdens of just
shipping people back to prison
additionally
it will provide folks who are in prison
with the necessary tools and networks of
support
to make positive contributions to
society when they get out
because the hard reality is that time
served is
insufficient compensation for the deaths
we are told we must pay back to society
years of unproductive time in isolation
in a diet that includes food that is
literally labeled not fit for human
consumption
are all largely unimportant after
release which is when the process of
rehabilitation really begins
it is not possible for people who have
been to prison to make amends
to anyone in society impacted by their
offense until they are released
and the idea that prison actually
rehabilitates anyone
is frankly ridiculous from my vantage
point
cajun people is intended to break the
human spirit
chiefly by ignoring the root causes of
what leads people to prison to begin
with
and by cutting off all community and
familial connections
none of this positions people who have
caused harm to make amends
or those who have been harmed to be
healed
with this in mind although the
acceptance of formerly caged people into
campus communities has the capacity
to elevate and to transform lives it
must be reinforced with community
buy-in collective efforts to establish
new social standards that are centered
in principles of restorative justice
and harm reduction can bring about real
and lasting social change
but as the events of the past year in
the global fight for racial and social
justice
has made crystal clear efforts to affect
real change will be met with violent
resistance
even so we must remain steadfast in all
movements to do away with systems that
foster harm
rather than healing and that compound
the challenges that people face after
being released from prison
now to this point i have only talked
about
some of the barriers that returning
citizens face after release
and have yet to disclose any of the
personal challenges
that i confronted in my own reentry
the reason that i took this approach is
that my goal has been to convince you
that
greater access to higher education for
all is vastly more important than one
formerly caged person
or the one percent of the entire prison
population currently being granted
access
so now that you know my message is much
broader than how i’ve been personally
impacted
i want to explain what i mean when i say
that access to high quality higher
education
saved my life
nine months before i was released from
prison on march 23 2017
my younger brother was arrested and
charged with accessory to murder
we have an older brother who was already
doing a life sentence
so when my younger brother got sentenced
to life without in prison
plus 100 years
our family was even more devastated than
when i got locked up
my mother has suffered two debilitating
strokes since i’ve been home and now has
to live in a nursing facility
additionally i have struggled to repair
more fractured relationships than i can
count
suffice it to say that my social and
emotional development
took a major hit over the course of
nearly 13 years in a concrete box
but since my release i’ve become a
father to two children
who have given my life greater purpose
in retrospect i endured each of the
personal challenges
that i confronted simply because i
recognized the value of the opportunity
that i had
see i knew that my acceptance into this
campus community
was an opportunity that a lot of people
might have thought that i shouldn’t have
and i needed to prove to myself into any
naysayers
that i was worthy of it plus i knew that
if i dropped the ball
others might not get the same
opportunity that i did and this was a
huge motivator
in the journey to graduation because for
me it was legitimately a second chance
as i was enrolled in college when i got
locked up
but most people in prison have never
received a first chance to access higher
education
however i understand that no matter how
convincingly i
present my argument there will still be
some people who cannot be convinced that
mass incarceration
is a humanitarian crisis in the same way
that i do
and there’s no way that i can produce a
valid argument to deny that i am biased
on the issue
but i genuinely appreciate conversations
with naysayers the most because
they give me opportunities to correct
distorted and mostly fear-based
perspectives
see i found that even if people are woke
to the social economic and political
impacts of mass incarceration
many still just aren’t open to equitable
access to higher education
for people in prison as a solution to it
but because my undergraduate education
has armed me with dozens of resources to
reference and waking people up
the conversations that i have with
naysayers are fluid and easy
see i direct them to resources like the
2018 equity indicators report
which was published by the saint louis
city mayor’s office
and says that of the 10 000 vacant
properties
in the city more than 90 percent on the
north side where i grew up
i explained how the crumbling housing
stock is the result of the city’s long
and prominent local history
of racial discrimination in housing
policy in practice
oh i’m i’m quick to name drop a study by
the washington medical school
which highlights several north st louis
zip codes that have some of the highest
rates of childhood asthma
in the country i explained how
communities where poverty and
disadvantage are so deliberately
concentrated like this
inevitably lead people to prison
lately i’ve been especially delighted to
tell folks that
the restriction of pell grants for
people in prison has been lifted
which means that like it or not more
people like me will soon be
granted access to higher education
to folks who seem to bristle at this
news i tried to explain that
more often than not the reasons why kids
who are growing up in the neighborhoods
like the ones that i did
are more likely to end up in prison or
dead
than we are to access higher education
have very little to do with our academic
abilities
look there is no doubt in my mind that
being a part of this campus community
shielded me from many of the barriers
that returning citizens
are held up by and because i am keenly
aware
of the social benefits afforded to me by
my membership
for the past several years on any given
day i can be spotted rocking a washu
t-shirt
i can legit wear a different washu
t-shirt for a week straight
but i have to admit that only a fraction
of this is about school pride
see for me a washu t-shirt is like body
armor
but don’t get it twisted i’m under no
illusions that my t-shirts have the
power to shield me
from the social impacts of being black
and formally caged
i know that they don’t because i grew up
right here in saint louis
where the local police department killed
more people than any other department in
the country between 2013
and 2020 in a recent study reported that
being black in missouri means that i am
at least 15 times more likely
to be gunned down by a cop than a white
person
still i’m convinced that when people see
my black skin in those t-shirts
they convince themselves that i’m not as
much of a threat as their implicit
biases tell them
that i am since september of last year
my educational privilege and the
connections that it has afforded
allowed me to work to end the injustice
of money bail in nashville tennessee
where i’m employed
as a coordinator for the nashville
community bail fund a nonprofit
organization
that works to free people who are
detained pre-trial without convictions
simply because they do not have money to
pay for bail
additionally i am privileged to work
closely with an organization called
choosing
justice initiative that works to
standardize
high quality legal representation for
poor people
and strives to end wealth-based
disparities in the criminal legal system
i am also studying to take the law
school admissions test and plan to apply
for enrollment into law school
in the fall of 2022. considering the
mountain of challenges that formerly
caged people
and counter upon release from prison
determination and commitment alone
would not have been sufficient to reach
this point
i am a formerly caged person i
am a washroom graduate i am an agent
for transformative change i am jameel
spann
thank you for listening