How Many Criminals Have Been Given a Second Chance and Did the Same Crime Again
A 'Second Hazard' After 27 Years in Prison house: How Criminal Justice Helped an Ex-Inmate Graduate
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With a Diploma in Manus, a Quondam Inmate Tries to 'Rewrite' His Life Story
A federal program with bipartisan back up in Congress has helped Maurice Smith, who served 27 years in prison, earn a four-twelvemonth degree while he was incarcerated. Now that he's been released, he told u.s. he wanted to "rewrite my life story."
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"Maurice Smith, magna cum laude." [auspicious] For Maurice Smith, this moment has been a long time in the making. Later on serving 27 years in prison, he's graduating from college. "This is like, big. It hasn't sunk in yet. Information technology'due south been many years since I walked across the stage and had people applauding my proper noun — information technology's really like a new journeying. I'm granted the opportunity, right at present, to effort to rewrite my life story." Maurice was just released from prison viii weeks ago and he's 1 of the kickoff students to complete a iv-year college degree from inside a Maryland prison in more than 25 years. He did that thanks in part to a federal grant that aims to requite inmates a 2nd chance. "I experience that I still have and then much to prove — when you accept a criminal history, people look at you different. And I want people to encounter what I always knew I was." Maurice grew upwardly in Harlem during the height of the crack epidemic. As a teenager, he started selling drugs and getting in trouble with the law. "Every corner, there was crevice or cocaine being sold on the corner. So, yous know, you hang out in that location Mon through Friday, Saturday and Dominicus, you're going to wind up beingness a role of that lifestyle." At 19, he shot and killed a man who was trying to rob a friend's home in Baltimore. He took a plea deal: first-degree murder and a life sentence. "Everybody involved was young and doing things that nosotros shouldn't accept been doing at that time. And I regret information technology to this day. Most individuals, you know, we come into the system considering there was an inequality in education to start with. I think reading a book and it was talking about the purpose of incarceration equally revenge, retribution and rehabilitation. So, we have the revenge and retribution part downwards pat." The U.S. has the highest-known incarceration charge per unit in the world, and the 2nd Chance Pell plan is one of the few federal initiatives that puts the focus on rehabilitation through education. "Eighty-5 to 90 pct of individuals incarcerated will be returning back home. The 2nd Take a chance Pell grant is a tool to change the mode these individuals return back home to. Everybody is entitled to a second run a risk." The program started in 2022 and it'southward 1 of the few Obama-era reforms championed by the Trump administration. It's an initiative with rare bipartisan support. And information technology'south what immune Maurice to end off his caste from Goucher College in Maryland. Now he and his wife, Kima, are seeing the campus for the get-go time and reconnecting with one-time classmates. "Good to see you." "Yeah, how have you been?" "All right, I'thousand free." "He said free — free." [laughter] Singing: "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." "Congratulations, you made it! Nicely done." Maurice is at present looking to get his master'south degree. But he notwithstanding faces mutual hurdles to re-entering lodge like finding a job with a criminal record. "Goucher is the only D.C.-Maryland college that's been able to practise this." At this ceremony for the Goucher Prison Education Partnership, Maurice reflected on his journey. "As I now await into the eyes of my family and friends, I can see nothing only pride. I am proud to say that at present, I am a sociology fanatic — and I am a Goucher College graduate in American Studies. [adulation] It'due south a slice of paper, but information technology makes people look at you a picayune dissimilar."
BALTIMORE — Maurice Smith stood anxious and alone, as the crowd of graduates around him hugged and chatted a few anxiety away. He was cloaked in the same black gown and donned the same blackness cap, just that was near all that he and the balance of Goucher College'south Class of 2022 had in common.
When they were 19, they were starting college. When he was 19, he was starting a prison sentence for murder that would last 27 years, one month and seven days — longer than his boyfriend graduates had been live.
"At that place are many roads to this moment," said Mr. Smith, 47, as he held up the cellphone he had recently learned to use and snapped a picture of himself confronting a backdrop of squares and tassels. "They took theirs. I took mine. Merely we're all here."
Mr. Smith's journey from inmate to higher graduate has been cheered on by a bipartisan and ideologically diverse coalition that has pressed the case for criminal justice. The path he took was quietly extended in the last year to thousands of other prisoners beyond the land. Mr. Smith was able to complete his bachelor'south degree through the Goucher Prison house Education Partnership while serving at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, using federal Pell grants offered through a pilot plan called 2d Take chances Pell.
Started in 2016, the program doled out $35.6 million to educate 8,800 incarcerated students at 40 institutions in its outset two years, and is one of the but Obama-era education initiatives that has survived the Trump assistants.
The White House has embraced the programme equally part of its criminal justice agenda, which aims to stymie mass incarceration and reduce recidivism. The Trump administration has pledged $28 1000000 to extend the Second Run a risk Pell program through next year. Last month, in a commencement accost to 70 incarcerated students at the Dick Conner Correctional Eye in Oklahoma, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that she was pushing for the initiative to be made permanent.
"President Donald Trump and I have faith in the power of redemption," Ms. DeVos said.
The administration was brought to its embrace by a remarkable coalition of policy advocates — including far-right conservatives, religious groups and social justice advocates — that rarely detect common cause. The libertarian billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch, the liberal Middle for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Taxation Reform and the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks have been working toward a broad overhaul of the criminal justice system for years.
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With the contempo passage of the First Step Act, a bipartisan sentencing bill that volition lead to the release of thousands of depression-level offenders, advocates see increasing prisoners' access to higher education as the next logical step.
Under a ban tucked into the 1994 crime bill, prisoners were ineligible for Pell grants, the largest postsecondary federal aid program for low-income undergraduates, only the Second Chance initiative partly lifted that. The 1994 bill, signed by President Bill Clinton and championed past heavyweight Democrats like Joseph R. Biden Jr., a senator at the time, is roiling politics anew. It has thrown Mr. Biden on the defensive as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination and given Mr. Trump an unlikely appeal to black voters.
But it was a Republican, Kay Bailey Hutchison, so a senator of Texas, who proposed broadening an existing restriction on Pell grants for prisoners serving life sentences or on death row to all prisoners, no matter their offenses. Subsequently the police was signed, a robust prison education system collapsed nearly overnight.
Lawmakers are seeking ways to restore Pell eligibility for prisoners, including reversing the ban in a reauthorization of the College Education Act.
"This issue is ripe in American politics for two reasons," said Gerard Robinson, the executive director of the Center for Advancing Opportunity, who has studied prison house instruction. "The millennials see this every bit a civil rights issue for their generation," he said, and older generations see it equally recompense for "the office they played in the war on drugs dating back to the 1970s up through the crime neb."
The Obama assistants used its experimental say-so to innovate 2d Hazard Pell in 2022 as a pilot that unlocked Pell grants for Mr. Smith and 12,000 other eligible inmates, assuasive them to pursue college coursework. The Goucher Prison house Pedagogy Partnership, which had operated since 2012 with private donations, was amongst 67 colleges called to participate. The program is yet 75 percent privately funded.
"Earning a bachelor's degree while incarcerated can be life-changing," said Amy Roza, managing director of the Goucher prison partnership. "At that place is something remarkable about having an consequence, in 2019, where people in the current White Firm, Congress, advocates with a variety of perspectives all believe in the value of this."
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Not everyone in Congress is on board.
"I'g not really sure where this push button for Pell is coming from," Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the Business firm Education Committee, grumbled at a recent hearing.
Where it is coming from is self-evident to a spectrum of advocates and politicians. About 90 percent of the country's ii million prisoners will be released back into society. A report published in January by the Vera Institute of Justice found that expanding Pell grants to prisoners would result in college earnings when they are released, and save states $365.8 million each yr in incarceration costs.
An oftentimes-cited 2013 RAND Corporation report, commissioned by the Justice Department, institute that prisoners who had admission to education were 43 percent less probable to return to prison house inside 3 years than those who did not.
In fact, they might testify an appreciation of the world of work that few others would find.
"I sit in blitz hour traffic and say, Wow, I'm a part of this," said Donte Pocket-sized, the Goucher program's starting time graduate to earn a bachelor's degree from the college and who is working at a software evolution company. "I'one thousand just loving the grind — everybody in their cars, everybody's going home. You realize you're a office of a community."
When Maurice Smith was released from prison house in March, he said completing his prison term and his degree were his kickoff major feats.
He grew up in Harlem at the elevation of the crack cocaine era, and quickly racked upwards a juvenile record for drug possession. He was by and large "unmotivated" in his educational activity, he said, but surprised himself in high school by scoring second-highest on a state standardized test. His vice main accused him of cheating off his girlfriend. "That didn't help my attitude," he said.
He earned a high schoolhouse equivalency diploma at 18 while serving a 6-month stint on Rikers Island.
A year later, in 1992, Mr. Smith shot and killed a human who was trying to rob a friend'due south habitation in Eastward Baltimore. At xix, he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
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"It's hard to talk well-nigh second chances when my actions didn't give an individual a 2d run a risk," he said.
In 1993, he enrolled in higher courses and fabricated the dean's list. The next year, the criminal offence neb rescinded his Pell grant. He spent years afterward that bored and angry, in and out of solitary confinement. But then he began to knock years off his judgement through work and good carry credits. Parole became plausible. "I could actually see that door, and I knew I had to make myself employable," he said.
Mr. Smith began pursuing an American Studies degree at Goucher in 2013, taking courses like folklore and precalculus from 2 p.m. to nine p.thou. He would cull between slumber and studying earlier heading to the prison kitchen from midnight to 6 a.one thousand.
I of his favorite pastimes was to read aloud "Of Mice and Men" with a classmate. He wrestled with Immanuel Kant'due south theories on ideals versus John Stuart Factory's utilitarianism. He idea difficult on a lesson on hegemonic masculinity.
Nina Kasniunas, a political scientist at Goucher, said Mr. Smith was the "typical 'A' student" — cognitive and deliberate, quiet merely engaging. For her congressional politics course, she said, he was asked to propose legislation on reparations for the descendants of slaves. While others put forth big and fanciful ideas, Mr. Smith's proposal was politically palatable and constitutionally sound: reparations through educational support.
Ms. Kasniunas said students like Mr. Smith made the pat downs, metal detectors, lack of technology and other constraints of educational activity in the prison worth it.
"They reminded me of the power of what we do," she said. "Nothing is taken for granted."
Mr. Smith graduated with a three.79 grade signal boilerplate, left prison house in April and currently works the graveyard shift at a warehouse at a Johnson & Johnson. A childhood friend, Kima Smith, reconnected with him in 2015, and they married in the Maryland prison in 2017.
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"He'due south the same person now that he's always been," she said. "When he sets his heed to something, he does it."
In the 24 hours earlier graduation, exactly two months after his release, Mr. Smith walked through Goucher's lush green campus and stone buildings for the first time. Until that day, his Goucher College had been a library with orange plastic circular tables and a few computers lining the walls.
"You know you're representing something bigger, merely I never imagined this," he said, equally he walked to selection up his cap and gown.
Mr. Smith was the educatee speaker for a small, intimate precommencement ceremony for Goucher partnership students, attended by President Barack Obama's 2d education secretary, John King, and Mark Holden, a senior vice president at Koch Industries.
Mr. Smith said he went from an underachiever to wanting to pursue a master's degree in sociology, vowing to press for pedagogy in the criminal justice organisation.
"My instruction could never be accurately valued by the pay I receive at my job," he said. "In that location is infinitely more value in the way in which I at present view the world."
Mr. King, who delivered the keynote address, told the story of a correctional officer who had pulled Mr. Smith bated, leaving him wondering what he had done wrong. The officer then handed him a five-page college newspaper to proofread.
The next solar day at Goucher'south grand beginning, students laughed at ane-liners from the speaker, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and inside jokes about a campus trick. Mr. Smith, stoic, candy the pomp and circumstance the manner he had been conditioned every bit Inmate No. 227-777 — taking much in, emitting lilliputian.
It wasn't until he stood in line pending his turn to cross the stage that his shoulders relaxed, a smile broadened across his face, and he finally felt a part of information technology all. He raised both easily above his head giving himself a round of applause and threw a fist, as the journalist called, "Maurice Smith, magna cum laude."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/us/politics/criminal-justice-education.html
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