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| Stanley Andrisse |
By Samuel Smith, CP Reporter
What started as selling drugs as a teenager in Ferguson, Missouri,
led to a pattern of more serious poor decisions for Stanley Andrisse as he grew
up.
By his mid-20s, he
found himself convicted of three felony drug trafficking charges with a
prosecutor calling for 20 years to life in prison. The sharp words said by the
prosecutor that day in 2006 stuck with Andrisse.
As he began a 10-year
prison sentence, he contemplated the label he was given by the attorney. Could
he really be a “career criminal” with little hope of leaving the criminal
lifestyle?
Looking back on his
life choices as a teenager and young adult, he was led at the time to believe
that the prosecutor was right.
“For much of my early
incarceration, I saw myself as a bad person,” Andrisse told The Christian Post
in a recent interview. “I saw myself as this career criminal. I saw myself as
being someone who was hopeless. Once I got out, I thought the only thing that
was really left for me to do was to continue doing what I had been doing.”
But thanks to encouragement from a mentor and his pursuit of
higher education, Andrisse turned his life around.
Today, Andrisse is
living proof of the abundance of talent and intelligence living within people
imprisoned in correctional facilities across the United States. And if given
the opportunity and access to postsecondary education, they are capable of
reaching extraordinary heights many never thought possible.
“What we seek to do is
really change that narrative around what that potential is [for people in
prison],” he said.
Years removed from his
imprisonment, Andrisse is an endocrinologist scientist and assistant professor
at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C., where he is
researching Type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance.
He also holds a
visiting professorship at Georgetown University Medical Center and previously
held an adjunct position at Johns Hopkins Medicine — a far cry from the career
criminal label that had been pressed on him over 13 years ago.
Additionally, Andrisse
serves on the frontlines of the growing bipartisan push to restore access to federal
postsecondary education grants for people serving behind bars. He also mentors
100 formerly and currently incarcerated people each year as the executive
director of a nonprofit called From Prison
Cells to PhD (P2P).
P2P is one of many
organizations advocating on Capitol Hill for a measure to restore incarcerated
students’ eligibility to receive Pell Grants.
Pell Grants are a
federal subsidy provided to low-income students to help them pay for college
and other forms of postsecondary education. The grants are provided to all
eligible students who apply.
But after
tough-on-crime legislation passed in 1994, students in prisons have been barred from
receiving Pell Grants. Since then, most college education programs in prisons
have vanished.
Restoring Pell Grants
to prisons, Andrisse argues, would provide more access to vocational classes as
well as college and university degree programs. In due time, proponents
contend, improving access to education in prisons will only reduce the nation’s
troubling recidivism rate.
“Nationally, 43.3
percent to 51.8 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals will recidivate
within three years of leaving prison,” Andrisse explained. “Education has been
correlated with a drastic reduction in recidivism rates.”
What does the data say?
A research report from the independent national research and policy
organization Vera Institute of Justice, published last January, states that
most people in prison in the U.S. are not receiving postsecondary education
despite the fact that 64 percent are academically eligible.
The report explains
that 58 percent of people who are incarcerated in the U.S. do not complete any
education program at all while in prison. Citing 2014 data, the report suggests
that only 9 percent completed a postsecondary program during their prison time.
Part of the problem is
that access to postsecondary education in prison is extremely limited.
Most existing programs
are funded through the federal Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative, which serves
a maximum of 12,000 incarcerated students nationwide annually through
partnerships with over 60 higher education institutions.
The Vera Institute
report estimates that if the ban on Pell in prisons is lifted, about 463,000
incarcerated people would be eligible to receive Pell Grants.
According to a 2014
RAND Corporation report,
the odds of recidivating are anywhere from 36 percent to 43 percent less likely
for those who take part in correctional education programs than for those who
do not.
The RAND report also
found that the odds of finding post-release employment for those who
participated in a correctional education program was 13 percent to 48 percent
higher than for those who did not.
Source:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/from-prison-cells-to-phd-advocates-push-to-restore-college-access-in-prison.html?uid=*|UNIQID|*
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