A university prison programme creating hope and purpose

“Incarceration is dehumanising. It’s designed to keep you feeling like garbage. This programme put into our minds and made us believe that if we wanted to, if we were willing to do the work, that we had something to offer the world and that it might be something worthwhile.” – David Delvalle, student and former incarcerated individual.

In the spring of 2018, Nathan Miksch and David Delvalle saw the same flyer. Like hundreds of thousands placed on tables in high school gyms and cafeterias on Open House nights, these flyers detailed information about a college programme.

Soon, both adult learners, aged 43 and 25, respectively, were among the most ‘non-traditional’ of America’s college students. Each was a resident of the carceral state, serving multi-year sentences for second-degree and attempted murder, respectively, at MCI-Concord, a medium security correctional institution in Concord, Massachusetts.

They were among the first 25 students enrolled in the college programme offered by Tufts University that would lead first to a two-year Associate of Art (AA) degree from Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC, Boston, Massachusetts) and then to a BA from Tufts, an elite university five miles from downtown Boston.

At 16, having realised that “North Carolina in the ’90s was not a good place to be for a young gay man”, Miksch dropped out of school and ran away from home. A year later, while living in Ohio, he got his GED (high school equivalency), after which he tutored in the programme for two years.

“I’d never even thought about college as a viable option for me. That would have been ridiculous for me,” said the man whose earliest memories are of his father, a marine, beating him and his mother.

After his mother left his father, taking young Miksch with her, she became a violent alcoholic and regularly left him and his siblings with caregivers “who did not have our best interests at heart”. One of them violently raped him, he told University World News.

Speaking of the correctional institution built in 1878 to hold 750 people, Delvalle, who grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts and dropped out of school at 18 to get a job to support his daughter, says of his time in prison: “I felt that I had no hope in that place. I had to give myself some type of hope.

“On top of that I felt like I had failed my family, my mother. I felt like I was a failure to my daughter, and I knew that college was the great equaliser. That could be my way to kind of make up for the failure I’ve caused in my life.”

Like Miksch, Delvalle has a GED.

Hilary Binda, the founder and executive director of the Tufts University Prison Initiative (TUPIT), which is housed in Tufts’ Jonathan M Tisch College of Civic Life, began our discussion by setting TUPIT in the context of America’s extraordinarily high level of incarceration.

“We now have about 4% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s incarcerated population,” she said.

“One of the primary reasons we began TUPIT was to try to bring those numbers down, to help people leave prison and stay out of prison. We are utilising the one thing we know through research that absolutely and radically impacts recidivism, which is education.

“Further, in America, imprisonment impacts communities of colour, Black and Latino communities, and in Massachusetts, indigenous and Cambodian communities, disproportionately. TUPIT is fundamentally driven by a desire to work towards racial justice,” she added.

Courses on ‘the inside’

TUPIT is one of 38 programmes nationwide that lead to a BA and one of the most elite universities in the field of higher education in correctional institutions. In total, 396 programmes lead to the AA degree. There are presently eight higher education programmes being run in correctional institutions that lead to an MA.

Since 2016, when President Barack Obama restored the ability of incarcerated individuals to receive Pell Grants (federal grants available to the nation’s poorest students) to pay for their post-secondary education, more than 40,000 incarcerated individuals have taken college and university courses on ‘the inside’ – with more than 12,000 receiving credentials.

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the nation’s oldest such programmes, began as a pilot project in 2001 by undergraduates at Bard College, a liberal arts college 100 miles north of New York City. The BPI has issued more than 50,000 credits and 760 degrees and presently enrols more than 400 students and offers 160 courses per year that are taught by Bard’s regular faculty.

Binda, who had been a volunteer running a book discussion group at a correctional institution in Shirley, Massachusetts (an hour west of Boston), and who had a friend in prison in Rhode Island whom she regularly visited, founded TUPIT in 2016.

In the beginning, TUPIT was an ‘inside out’ programme, meaning that Tufts students from the Medford campus went into the prison and studied in the same classroom as their incarcerated classmates, each learning from the other, Binda explained.

“In our first year, 2017, we offered one course, but within a year, we received a grant to develop a partnership with our local community college and started offering more classes, all taught by Tufts’ faculty. We signed an articulation agreement so that the students hit the degree requirements of BHCC. Two years later, we added a bachelor’s degree through Tufts,” said Binda.

To enter the programme, which now has close to 100 students, prospective students need either a high school diploma or a GED, and they have to write multiple essays, including one explaining why they want to be in the programme.

“We expect that not all applicants have the writing skills many on Tufts’ campus do when they apply, not having had the privilege to attend the same college preparatory schools, among other reasons.

“But we often recognise a personal voice far sharper and more distinctive and effective than that of most 18-year-old Tufts’ students. TUPIT students’ writing and scholarly abilities always improve quickly through an unmatched dedication to learn that, as most faculty agree, makes them our very best students,” Binda said.

Unlike some similar programmes, Tufts does not charge incarcerated students’ tuition. TUPIT’s costs are covered by donations, grants and the university’s contribution. “We are not at this point using taxpayers’ money,” said Binda, “which is the basis of many people’s objections to the programme, though we hear this less and less.”

Reduced recidivism rates

In the US, in 2024, the recidivism rate one year out from being released from incarceration is 43%, often, Binda explained, because people return to economically under-resourced communities where survival entails criminal activities.

“To succeed, people need resources and often a different community. It’s difficult and sometimes requires cutting oneself off from their families,” said Binda.

“To give people coming home a different option, in partnership with our students we developed the Tufts’ Education and Re-entry Network that runs an accredited re-entry programme called MyTERN.

“Our students who come home before they finish their degree and also those who are released already having earned their degree join us in this on-campus programme. They practise storytelling and even contribute to a podcast on re-entry called MyTERN Conversations. Some of these courses follow the inside out model, which means they include traditional Tufts’ students who are eager to participate and learn from people with very different backgrounds.

“The MyTERN programme lasts one year and provides 14 transferrable credits and a certificate in civic studies from Tufts. The formerly incarcerated students are not charged tuition, are given a computer and a monthly stipend and are provided with help finding employment.

“They also take part in restorative justice circles in which they reflect on both the harm they may have committed to others and the harm they themselves have experienced in their lives, often starting with childhood,” said Binda.

The MyTERN project has a 100% record of finding students jobs – and an almost zero rate of recidivism.

An opportunity to live with purpose

Fifteen years before seeing the flyer for the TUPIT programme, Miksch, then living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a town on the end of Cape Cod long known as a gay mecca, spent four days strung out on methamphetamine and alcohol.

He collapsed at the house of another meth addict with whom his relationship was “toxic and co-dependent”, said Miksch. After a fight stemming from a sexual assault, Miksch took the life of his rapist and spent the next 20 years in prison. For the first four years of his incarceration, he continued on the path of addiction and unhealthy sexual practices.

One day in 2017, a man came to his cell and threatened Miksch with sexual assault. But, as he explained, after several years of therapy: “I was able to refuse him, even knowing this would likely mean getting beaten up again, though in this case the threat of being beaten turned out to be an empty one. In part because of my therapy, I had started to think about my future and started taking courses like carpentry.”

Miksch told University World News: “So when I saw the flyer for the inside-outside class from Tufts University – the class was the Literature of Confinement – I saw an opportunity. Although I had previously wrapped my head around the idea that I was never going to leave prison, starting the college programme helped me to understand that I had a chance at getting out and living a life with purpose.”

Delvalle arrived at MCI-Concord in 2015, after shooting a relative on his father’s side of his family who had robbed him a number of times.

“He was in a gang. I worked a good job. I was just economically and emotionally vulnerable. He broke into my apartment and it led to an escalation. I wish I would have been emotionally intelligent enough to handle and navigate it differently. But at the time, I wasn’t, I was young and impulsive. I was given nine-and-a-half to ten-and-a-half,” Delvalle said.

For the first three years in MCI-Concord, “I was pretty much just playing basketball, hanging out with my friends. But I felt I was wasting my time. I wasn’t gaining anything out of any of this. The Tufts programme changed everything for me,” Delvalle told University World News.

Connecting through language-learning

Lizzie Freidman graduated from Tufts in 2020 and is now Binda’s executive assistant. Freidman (pronoun: they) grew up in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe, Illinois, and was conscious that while their high school was well-funded, not far away, the public schools that served mainly racialised communities were severely underfunded.

Freidman’s sense of wanting to do something about the social injustice it represented led them to choose Tufts after they became aware of the TUPIT programme.

Friedman, who was a teaching assistant for a prison Spanish course, told me about how they soon realised that several of the students were, in fact, fluent in Spanish. Two things stood out in their memory. First, how the students who were fluent in Spanish took on a leadership role and helped other students learn Spanish.

“Secondly, I heard from other people inside the prison that weren’t in the Tufts programme that they were able to speak in another language and connect with people who speak Spanish primarily. So this language building opportunity allowed people to break down barriers outside the classroom.”

Working through the ‘stigma’

The reading list for the first course Miksch and Delvalle took, “Literature of Confinement”, puts the lie to the canard that America’s undergraduates refuse to grapple with difficult works and produce Tik Tok videos in place of writing assignments.

Among the 14 works Binda taught in this course were the play A Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry), essays by leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, part of (the escaped slave) Frederick Douglass’ autobiography, and short stories by Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce and James Baldwin. Writing assignments included two reading journal entries per week, two short essays, and a final 3,000-word essay.

Both Miksch and Delvalle described the first classes with students from the ‘outside’ in similar language. “It was scary,” Delvalle told University World News. “I was nervous. I felt like people would be judging me based on the worst thing I had ever done.” He remembered thinking that the other students could be looking only at his “stigma”.

Miksch likened the experience of the first week to being “under glass, being examined and poked” because he, too, could imagine the “preconceived notions of what we were going to be like,” and admitted, “we had some preconceived notions of what they were going to be like as well”.

Both men credit Binda with breaking down these barriers. “Hilary has a gift,” said Miksch, “for creating dialogue in the classroom that allows many of those feelings to go away and for us to build some trust with each other.”

This “trust”, which extended far beyond the course materials and turned the classroom time into something “akin to therapy”, according to Delvalle, stood in stark contrast to the ethos of “the prison”, as Miksch called it in this part of our discussion.

In words that could have appeared in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Miksch explained: “Prison is designed to breed distrust. We’re not supposed to trust or open up to each other. We’re designed to be kept at odds all the time, so that they can maintain control over us. If we’re able to work together towards goals, well, then, there’s a lot more of us than them. That [would] give us power. They don’t want us to have power.”

Lessons from literature

Since I had been an English professor for more than 30 years, I asked Binda about the insights her inside students brought to the table. She pointed to what inside students said during discussions of Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which tells the story of a woman who is confined to her house by her husband, purportedly because he is concerned about his wife’s mental health.

As a result of the confinement, the woman focuses on the yellowing, torn wallpaper, finally seeing the figure of another woman, whom, at the end, she imagines she has become.

“My incarcerated students often bring to the discussion the perspective of surviving in solitary confinement and understand the mental health challenges that wife and narrator are facing as portrayed through the metaphor of the wallpaper.

“They talked about the way you see things in the walls when you are in solitary confinement and they understand the need for true human connection and intellectual stimulation,” said Binda.

Miksch, who had always liked writing, and turned his first four-page assignment into a 17-page story about death, rebirth and getting through moments in your life that changed you and making peace with them, said that from the writers they studied he learned: “Whatever hardships you faced, the good and the bad in your life, there’s nothing new. Countless people in time that we can’t measure … have been going through similar stuff as what we are dealing with today.”

Although a white person, he found a kindred spirit in the Black gay writer James Baldwin who died in 1987.

“I’d never heard of James Baldwin,” he told University World News. “A story I go back to is called ‘Sonny’s Blues’. It’s about being around somebody all your life that just can’t see you. And then being able to expose yourself to them in a way that is so beautiful and pure, and really allows them to maybe understand you for the first time. [Sonny, a heroin-addicted jazz musician, at least momentarily, reconciles with his brother.]

“I mean, that’s my experience with my family, as a gay man who they just couldn’t understand. I’m now able to have a relationship with them today, after decades of us being apart, because I’ve been able to expose myself to them in a way that makes them see me in a new way. The parallels with the story are beautiful.”

The TUPIT programme changed the way Miksch read.

Reading “did not take me outside the present [that, his incarcerated state]. In fact, it did the exact opposite: it made me more present, not only within the confines of the prison, but in the greater world as well. Before the programme, I had used books of all kinds to disconnect my mind from the situation I was in, in part because I had grown accustomed to the idea that prison was the reality of my life, and that I would never escape it”, he said.

“The reading I did as a student, however, began to make me chafe at my surroundings, to long for a different kind of existence. And, perhaps more importantly, it began to give life to the idea that I could achieve freedom, and perhaps even a life of fulfilment and purpose,” Miksch wrote in an email.

Delvalle discussed a different story, Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivner”, published in 1856, which I had taught many times and was the subject of my first published article.

It tells the story of an enigmatic scrivener who arrives unbidden in a Wall Street lawyer’s office and, after working diligently for several weeks, announces that he “[w]ould prefer not” to rewrite a document – or, in fact, do anything else. The story ends with Bartleby dying in the New York City prison, which is still popularly known as The Tombs.

Delvalle took the lawyer-narrator, who stands for the normal functioning of society and contract labour, to task. “We can’t all be efficient. Even if Bartleby is a little bit weird and refuses to do the tasks his boss asks him to, that doesn’t make him a bad person. The story taught me that we are all imperfect beings, but we all have a place in this world,” he said.

A few moments later, Delvalle turned to discussing Bartleby and presented an innovative reading I had never heard: “He had no choice but to be himself, whether he had learning disabilities, whether he was on the [autism] spectrum.”

“Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’,” Delvalle explained, “allowed us to dig deep into life concepts like freedom, equality, justice and capitalism.”

In International Law and Genocide, “we learned about all types of global atrocities from the Khmer Rouge to Cambodia [Pol Pot], to El Salvador and the Rwandan genocide. We looked at them through the lens of our own healing and how we move past genocides. We learned about theories of harm and what it takes to define something an atrocity”, he said.

“How many people have to die for it to be considered a genocide? Who measures this pain?

“It made me look at inner city violence and violence in prison differently. It made me consider restorative justice as a way to create an understanding between people who have caused harm and people who have caused harm to them. How do we build bridges across the gaps for healing and how do we bring humanity to a restored state?” he explained.

Noticeable changes

Reaction to the students in TUPIT by other incarcerated varied. At first, Delvalle remembered, some of the others on the inside considered people like him and Miksch to be sellouts. Miksch speaks of a 50-50 split between those who supported the programme and those who thought it was a waste of time, even “a scam”.

Over time, however, as Binda also said, other incarcerated individuals started showing interest in what the TUPIT students were reading and writing.

“We have people who are not in the programme asking our students, ‘What was the assignment? I want to read it. I’m going to write an essay on it. Will you read it?’” she said.

According to Miksch, as the programme moved forward, “many of the men could not help but see the changes in all the participating students. In fact, some of our biggest detractors are now in the programme themselves.”

Both Miksch and Binda told me that it was hard to miss how students in the programme simply carried themselves differently.

Civic education in action

Since leaving prison more than a year ago, as they work towards getting the BAs next May, Delvalle and Miksch have put their studies in civic education to good use.

Delvalle runs two community-based programmes through Haley House in Roxbury, one of Boston’s poorest and most racialised areas.

Take Back the Kitchen provides courses in nutritional cooking to 1,000 people a year, while Lift provides wraparound re-entry services to formerly incarcerated individuals in Nubian Square, the business centre of Roxbury.

Last January, Miksch was promoted to assistant director of StepRox Recovery Center, which is also in Roxbury. StepRox is a peer-to-peer community-run recovery support centre that affords individuals recovering from substance abuse the ability to find their own paths to maintaining their recovery.

Sticking it out

Miksch’s post-secondary education was almost derailed by COVID when the faculty could not come into Concord and classes reverted to the traditional mail-based distance education model.

Recalling these long, lonely months, during which Miksch, like others, was locked in his cell for 23 hours, he wrote in an email: “Sometimes, the urge to give up was so strong that it became a physical sensation – one that felt in many ways like the sensation I used to feel when in withdrawal from drugs.

“But, because I was part of a cohort of students who each depended on the other to keep going, to keep the programme alive, I stuck it out at each turn.

“Some of the best work I did was under that pressure, and with each stride forward, I became more determined to see it through.”