Campuses Behind Bars: A new, virtual college partnership in New England aims to reach more people in prison
TEJI student MacKenzie Kelley shares her thoughts on the impact of higher education for incarcerated people during a Zoom interview. Photo courtesy of GBH News.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Mackenzie Kelley’s journey through life has been waylaid by drugs and hard time. Her years behind bars have given her a chance to reconsider her choices and unravel the nature of her addiction.
“I’d been incarcerated for so long and into drugs for so long that it’s like I’ve had to learn who I am all over again,” says Kelley, a 38-year-old prisoner at Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center, a minimum-security prison in Windham, Me. “I didn’t know where in the world I belonged, except when it came to drugs. I’ve tended toward self-sabotage.”
But doing time has also given Kelley a rare opportunity afforded to female prisoners, and one that offers the potential to turn her life around: college education. Completing college coursework “gave me a whole new level of confidence,” she says. “It’s like learning a whole new language.”