Life Beyond Bars: One Man’s Journey From Prison to College
By Kyle Spencer - NY Times - November 1, 2016
Around midnight on June 30, 1998, Juan Echevarria, a 23-year-old principal in a drug crew, ran into a crack dealer on a Harlem street corner. What ensued, he later told the police, was an argument over money. In those days, Mr. Echevarria would case New York City in a bulletproof vest, often armed with a handgun and sometimes cocaine and cash, overseeing dealers who sold on the streets and in the lobbies of Harlem and Brooklyn apartment buildings.
On this night, Mr. Echevarria was cruising for trouble. Hours before, he’d found out his girlfriend had dumped him. He’d just been across the river at Rikers Island on a drug possession conviction. He was feeling hopeless and angry. Pumped with alcohol and mounting rage, he slipped a small revolver out from under his waistband. As the argument heated up, he fired at the dealer, who staggered to his death. Looking back, he can’t quite explain what happened. “It went bad real fast,” he recalled.
Mr. Echevarria pleaded guilty to manslaughter and spent 14 years in prison.
Today, at 41, he is desperate to remake himself. Now a sleep-deprived college student, he lugs a textbook-filled backpack around the Midtown Manhattan campus of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York, pulling all-nighters, struggling with five-page papers and keeping close tabs on his 3.47 grade-point average.
Part of the Prison-to-College Pipeline, a re-entry program that helps incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men in New York City pursue college degrees, Mr. Echevarria dreams of one day graduating. But his challenges have been numerous. He grappled with remedial algebra, required of matriculating CUNY students who can’t pass the basic math competency exam. He had to take it four times. Five years in, he is just a sophomore, still 84 credits away from a bachelor’s degree, and has accrued $18,000 in student loans.
Money has been a constant source of anxiety. Sometimes he had to rely on friends and family to feed him, and he worried about where he would lay his head at night. He has stayed in seven apartments since his release, in 2012. A day job — as a case manager helping mentally ill prisoners re-enter society — has relieved some of the financial pressure, but it has taken its toll emotionally.
Exhausted, he tosses and turns on the couch in his mother’s public housing unit in East Harlem, where he stays when not at his new girlfriend’s apartment, and he wonders: “Why am I doing this?”
On other evenings, Mr. Echevarria sits in class scribbling copious notes and raising his hand frequently to answer questions, confident he has made the right choice.
For a recent anthropology class, he arrived early and positioned himself in the center of the room. Raymond Ruggiero, an adjunct professor, offered up an energetic lecture on the rise and fall of democracy in Latin America, touching on the spread of the Enlightenment, the power structure of banana republics, and the Guatemalan peace activist Rigoberta Menchu. Pausing on the escapades of the Venezuelan leader Simón Bolívar, Dr. Ruggiero grew animated. “Bolívar’s whole idea was about equality, was about freedom, freedom of the mind,” he told the class.
Mr. Echevarria, one of Dr. Ruggiero’s favorites, nodded enthusiastically. Later, when the discussion led to how nation states began to regulate themselves once Spanish rulers had left, Dr. Ruggiero asked, “What did they learn about governance?”
“To do the same thing the king was doing,” Mr. Echevarria called out.
“Yes,” Dr. Ruggiero confirmed.
That night, Mr. Echevarria learned that he had earned an A+ on a paper about the paradoxical nature of violence in the modern world, borrowing from the ideas of the political theorist Hannah Arendt and referencing Karl Marx, the civil rights movement and the Cold War.
Mr. Echevarria, who started classes in an Otisville prison and is now a sophomore at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, plans to major in culture and deviance studies. Ángel Franco/The New York Times
“Juan, excellent work!” Dr. Ruggiero had scrawled at the bottom of the paper. That put him in good spirits.
Much is at stake. With his degree, Mr. Echevarria hopes one day to become a director at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, the nonprofit organization where he works. It’s one of the rare places that appreciates an applicant’s time behind bars. He plans to major in culture and deviance studies, an academic field heavy on ethnographic perspectives and popular with undergraduates interested in social work, law or the social sciences.
Mr. Echevarria’s employer has promised a promotion and a big raise if he gets his degree. With the extra income, he would like to settle into a two-bedroom apartment in the Inwood section of Manhattan, removed from the crime-infested neighborhood where he grew up and the drug dealers who remind him of his former life. Without a degree, he worries, opportunities will “disappear.”
“You want to do this, but it adds a lot of stress,” he said. “I’ve had my ups and downs because of school.”
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According to the Department of Justice, there were 1.5 million Americans in state and federal prisons in 2014; 636,000 were released. But the number who are likely to stay out — fewer than a quarter by the five-year marker — is dispiriting. With widespread consensus that the system is failing both offenders and their victims, state and federal governments are reinvesting in rehabilitative programs. Access to college is one of the most popular. From California to New York, states have announced plans to increase funding. New York is committing $7.5 million to offer classes to 1,000 inmates over the next five years.
The White House has been particularly engaged in the second-chance movement. In May, President Obama urged colleges to eliminate a question on applications about would-be students’ criminal history. The question has been found to have a chill effect on applicants with felony convictions. He has also sought ways around a law that bars prisoners from accessing Pell grants.
Advocates estimate that there were at least 350 college degree programs for prisoners and the recently released in the early 1980s. But as crime rates skyrocketed and the national mood toward violent offenders turned unforgiving, many of the programs shuttered. Both Democrats and Republicans questioned the spending of higher education dollars on lawbreakers while law-abiding young people struggled with the relatively small sums that federal financial aid offered them. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, prevents anyone in a state or federal prison from accessing Pell grants. Inmates also can’t take out low-interest federal student loans.
Last year, President Obama announced an experimental educational program (exempted from regulatory requirements) known as the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program. It is expected to award grants to 12,000 inmates, many of whom began classes this fall; 67 colleges and universities have been chosen to participate, and more than a quarter of them are starting new programs. Higher education behind bars is not free. Some colleges charge inmates regular tuition, or scale it to their prison wages. Others, including John Jay and Bard College, offer them full scholarships.
The Bard Prison Initiative plans to expand its well-regarded program, which offers credit-bearing classes to nearly 300 prisoners. The Prison-to-College Pipeline at John Jay, one of the nation’s premier criminal justice colleges, currently sends professors to teach for credit classes at Otisville, a medium-security men’s prison in Orange County, N.Y. It hopes that with the Pell program, it can add 120 new in-prison students, give inmates the opportunity to get an associate degree while still incarcerated and start a program at the Queensboro Correctional Facility in Long Island City.
Baz Dreisinger, a popular English professor and spirited voice in the prison reform movement, founded the Prison-to-College Pipeline in 2011. The program is administered by the Prisoner Reentry Institute, an arm of John Jay dedicated to finding best practices for re-entering inmates. The Pipeline, for male inmates five years or less before their release date, is noteworthy for providing its students with a community both on the inside and on the outside. On release, students are encouraged to transfer to a city campus. So far, 10 have.
Once out, the men are offered a host of services by the institute’s College Initiative program. The small, tight-knit staff, made up of mostly young prison advocates, advises them — through workshops, office visits and anxious phone calls — on financial aid matters, what classes to take, ways to perfect term papers, and how to deal with ornery professors and manage girlfriends, parents and children while trying to hold down jobs.
Katie Schaffer, program coordinator of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College, discusses college opportunities with inmates at Queensboro Correctional Facility. Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Proponents of college programs for prisoners contend that if getting a degree is a life-changer for students who haven’t been to prison, it is even more curative for those who have.
“Our people have a whole lot more to lose if they don’t graduate and a whole lot more to gain by graduating,” said Vivian Nixon, executive director of the College and Community Fellowship, a nonprofit that funnels dozens of former female prisoners onto college campuses in and around New York City every year. “It’s a natural time of transition and reinvention.”
Ruth Delaney, a senior program associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, which oversees its own prison-to-college initiative in New Jersey, Michigan and North Carolina, says that when it comes to factors proven to prevent recidivism, clocking time with other students “checks all the boxes.” College surrounds people with peers who are motivated and focused. It leaves them little time to fall back into old patterns and helps them build their résumés. And because campuses are ripe with resources — mental health services, financial counselors, food pantries— recently released prisoners who arrive on them are near the kind of assistance they desperately need.
Indeed, a 2013 RAND Corporation study found that involvement in a prisoner education program reduced a person’s odds of returning to prison by 43 percent.
Edward J. Latessa, director of the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, has spent years studying programs that work in reducing recidivism. He says most successful programs aren’t lofty and philosophical, and they don’t involve a lot of talk therapy, yoga or tough-love scare tactics. The best programs, he says, are pragmatic.
“You have to do something about people’s difficulties, rather than just talking about them,” he said. “You don’t just tell them what they need to do, you show them and then you let them do it.”
But getting through college is no easy feat. Five years in and only one of the 57 students in the College-to-Prison Pipeline (29 are still in prison) has graduated with an associate degree. No one has obtained a bachelor’s degree. And two who have been released have gone back to jail.
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To survive in prison, Mr. Echevarria put on the tough, protective veneer that prisoners sometimes refer to as “the mask.” He learned how to size up a cafeteria to determine who was a threat and how to make a knife out of a toothbrush and shards of metal to protect himself from gang attacks. He landed in solitary on various occasions — once for talking back to a guard, another time for smoking marijuana. He moved around a lot, from Rikers Island to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility to the Clinton Correctional Facility — a sign, in the prison world, that he was challenging to maintain.
A few years into his sentence, though, while stationed in a maximum-security prison in Ulster County, he made friends with a longtime inmate who was teaching AIDS awareness classes. He signed on, read pharmacology and immunology textbooks, and eventually became an instructor himself. AIDS was still a significant killer, and men flocked to his classes.
While teaching, Mr. Echevarria started thinking about his future. He thought about changing. “I knew I was going to get out. What would I do?”
When he learned about the Prison-to-College Pipeline, he applied immediately. He had a high school equivalency diploma, but had lasted only a few semesters at a community college. Now, though, the idea of pursuing a degree appealed to him. He wrote a three-page essay and sat for the entrance exam. He was transferred to the Otisville prison in 2011 to begin taking classes, some with Dr. Dreisinger. A year later, Mr. Echevarria got the news. It was time for his release — his “homecoming.”
Baz Dreisinger, the founding academic director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline, speaks at an end-of-the-year party for students. The program attempts to build community inside and outside of prison.Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times
He sat on a bench in an International House of Pancakes, eating his first noninstitutional meal in more than a dozen years, and called his mother. Then he called Dr. Dreisinger. He wanted to start school on the outside as soon as possible. He had six credits under his belt.
Mr. Echevarria credits those first in-prison classes for “making me feel human again.”
By that fall, he looked like a model of renewal. He enrolled at Bronx Community College and was reading about Sigmund Freud in Intro to Psychology, dissecting the Constitution in an American government class and learning about linear equations, right angles and signed numbers in algebra.
Out of class, he worked to avoid old friends and “business acquaintances” so he wouldn’t “end up with plans that were not initially mine,” and he started going to church. He was befriending professors and bonding with administrators at the Prisoner Reentry Institute.
But if things looked good on the outside, he was emotionally raw on the inside. “I was a wreck,” he recalled. “Things were a roller coaster.”
He struggled to make emotional connections. He and his teenage daughter (now a single mother of a toddler and an infant) texted and saw each other on occasion, but she was not that interested in bonding with him. The relationship he had developed with a woman while in prison, involving long letters about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, had not translated to the real world, so he moved in with his mother, living blocks from the shooting that had led to his arrest. It was a situational quagmire putting him in contact with all the people recidivism research suggests he should avoid. It was also placing him too close for comfort to old family memories.
Mr. Echevarria, whose father left when he was a tween, harbored resentment about his childhood. His mother had worked. He was often supervised by older siblings, and felt abandoned. He recalls being kicked out into the streets for days, as a teenager, after coming home high. His mother recalls warning him about drugs and drug dealing and being worried that she herself might get kicked out of the apartment building if he was involved with illegal substances.
Twenty years later, tensions still brewed.
Mr. Echevarria moved in with a girlfriend, but that didn’t work out either. Some weeks he had only a few dollars to live on. He worried that if he lost his Metro card, he would be in “crisis mode,” he said. Once, seeing a young man ruffling through garbage, he thought: I am steps away from that.
He was beginning to feel “the temptation to go back to the old life,” and the quick and easy cash. It was fleeting. But there.
At semester’s end, Mr. Echevarria had earned two B’s, but he failed algebra. The graphs baffled him. He had trouble remembering what formulas went with what problems. It was a blow to his self-esteem. But it was the rage he felt when things went wrong, lingering from his days behind bars and during his childhood, that seemed to be his most pressing problem.
“I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to do all of this,” he said. “I got really discouraged.” He didn’t go back to school for an entire year.
Ask Mr. Echevarria how the Prison-to-College Pipeline has helped him, and he is likely to chat a bit about academics but mostly about the frustrating details of everyday life and how staff members have helped him manage his rage when confronted with them.
During the 14 years he was in prison, the world went through a tech revolution. Dealing with CUNY’s online system nearly derailed him.
One afternoon, Lila McDowell, the institute’s development and communications coordinator, met him at John Jay, where he had applied as a transfer student from Bronx Community College. A 31-year-old University of Chicago graduate, she serves as helicopter mom/friend to many of the men in the program.
Mr. Echevarria griped about the bureaucratic holdup. “I kept thinking: I don’t need to go through this. I don’t need to go through this. Old ways of dealing were popping up.”
“Calm down,” Dr. McDowell said.
“This is exactly what everyone has to go through,” she told him, eyeballing the other students who were also waiting in line. “Part of college is learning how to navigate bureaucracies.”
Mr. Echevarria took a deep breath. “I really needed that,” he recalled.
Heady and philosophical, Mr. Echevarria remains interested in the thinking patterns — the self-loathing and propensity for violence — that landed him in prison. As a result, many of the classes he takes delve deeply into the nature of violence, juvenile delinquency and prison life. They are as much a study of himself as a study of others. What does he most want to learn? How to master his emotions.
“I still have a lot to work on,” he told me. “But I’m getting there.”
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At ease in a dress shirt and a pair of leather lace-ups, Mr. Echevarria hobnobbed with professors, administrators and Manhattan artists at the program’s annual dinner at John Jay last spring.
Dr. Dreisinger praised a group of John Jay students who had traveled to Otisville regularly to take classes alongside prisoners, a feature of the program that participants, both in jail and out, praise. Prisoners say it builds their confidence and creates bonds with students they can call on, once out. Traditional college students, particularly ones interested in criminal justice careers, say it offers them a bird’s-eye view into the life of the kind of people they may soon serve.
Dr. Dreisinger acknowledged an inmate who had been released but ended up back inside. She told the diners that the young man was with them in spirit, writing beautiful papers and taking an independent study course with her. “He’s engaged and still very much present in the program,” she said, sidestepping the heartbreaking reality of the situation.
She also paid tribute to Devon Simmons, who landed in jail 16 years ago, convicted of assault and weapon and drug offenses. He was scheduled to graduate a few weeks later with an associate degree, the first to do so. A photo of him in graduation gear was flashed on an oversize screen in the center of the room. This fall, at 35, he is at John Jay pursuing his bachelor’s.
“Devon is just opening the door because we have so many other graduations that are going to be coming up in years to come,” she said.
As for Mr. Echevarria, he said he was proud of how his last few semesters had gone. He had finally passed remedial math. He had earned an A in Dr. Ruggiero’s class and a B in a criminal justice course taught by a former parole officer. Dr. Dreisinger even needles him about seeking a Ph.D. But he continues to oscillate between big academic dreams and the realities of his life. He talks about opening up a community center, or doing something that doesn’t require a degree at all. Then he latches onto the Ph.D. idea.
And what of the man who fired a pistol on an East Harlem street 18 years ago, who was violent and self-loathing?
“I know who he is,” Mr. Echevarria said. “But I hardly recognize him.”
Then one of the last times I spoke to him, he said this: “College itself has changed me. But the finish line still seems far off. ”