Leaving Prison Doors Behind, Some Find New Doors Open

Leaving Prison Doors Behind, Some Find New Doors Open - New York Times

Paroled after 11 years in prison for manslaughter, Sharon White was determined to earn the bachelor's degree she had begun working toward while serving her term. Her goal was to become a social worker; she wanted to counsel former prisoners as well as young people "at risk of going astray," just as she had, she said, when she became a drug-selling high school dropout who ended up stabbing a man to death.

When Marcelino Guillen was released on parole after serving five years for selling cocaine, he was bent on restarting his pursuit of a college education. The first time around, he had dropped out after failing all the courses in his first semester. "I realized that if I had gotten a degree, I probably wouldn’t have sold drugs," he said recently.

Mr. Guillen, 39, and Ms. White, 38, are students at Lehman College in the Bronx, part of the City University of New York, pursuing bachelor’s degrees in social work with the aid of a program devoted to giving people with criminal histories "the know-how and support" they usually need to apply for and succeed in college, said the initiative's founder and director, Benay Rubenstein.

Ms. Rubenstein started the program, the College Initiative, in 2002 at Episcopal Social Services, an arm of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. This past May, she moved it to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, another branch of the City University. Jeremy Travis, the college's president, is a specialist in the problems released prisoners face in returning to society.

At the college, Mr. Travis formed the Prisoner Re-entry Institute, which fosters research and programs on this issue. The College Initiative program is part of the institute.

The initiative not only helps former prisoners with academic, financial-aid and admissions counseling, but also assists with job and housing problems. In addition, it offers a course in computer skills and in preparing for the math and English sections of the City University entrance exams, said Debbie A. Mukamal, the institute’s director.

Post-prison programs like the College Initiative - and like College and Community Fellowship, a similar effort that is part of CUNY’s Graduate Center - were developed in response to a drastic reduction a decade ago in college programs in the nation's federal and state prisons, specialists in prisoner rehabilitation say. At that time, with crime rates having climbed, many elected officials worked to make sentences and prison conditions tougher.

In 1994, Congress removed prison inmates from eligibility for Pell Grants, a major federal program of aid to low-income students that was the financial backbone of most in-prison college programs. Many states, including New York, followed the federal lead and removed prison inmates from their own college aid programs.

As a result, about 25,000 inmates taking part in such programs with Pell Grants had their "education abruptly ended," according to a study by Kenneth Mentor, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. By 1997, only 8 college prison programs remained active nationwide, compared with as many as 350 in previous years, Mr. Mentor said.