“These people are freaking out over getting a B,” said Megan, 44. “These people?” shot back Emma, 26. “Me! I’m ‘these people!’”
Megan and Emma are students at Adams State University’s Prison Education Program at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. They preferred not to use their last names in order to protect their identities.
They are each pursuing a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies, with a focus on business and sociology. This semester, their class of 25 students, all incarcerated at Denver Women’s, is taking macroeconomics and philosophy courses twice a week.
To Megan, the bachelor’s program gives her an opportunity to use her smarts for non- “nefarious” activities. “I know I’m smart,” she said. “I know I can do it; I just want to apply that to something legit for once in my life.” Getting a degree is also personal for Megan, who hoped to go to college when she was younger.
“I’m getting a chance to go back in time to when I earned that scholarship and blew it because I decided to go do meth, and I’m getting a chance to redo that,” Megan said. “I mean, not very many people get a redo.”
Emma began using opiates from the street to self-medicate following health complications from an epidural after she gave birth in 2019. Working at Taco Bell, she made too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little to afford private health insurance; she said she had no idea that the painkillers she was taking contained fentanyl.
“I tried to quit three different times—cold turkey—I went to the methadone clinic,” Emma said. “I had never done opiates before, and I was a full-blown fentanyl addict and a single mom.”
In 2023, Emma’s four-year-old daughter Acelynn ingested fentanyl pills Emma left in her bathroom while the 24-year-old mother was sleeping. Her daughter died from fentanyl poisoning.
“She may have lost her life, but if I sat here and lost mine too, what is that going to benefit?” Emma said. “I need to do something, anything I can, to build from that tragedy for her.”
Emma was charged in El Paso County with child abuse causing death and was sentenced to 27 years. Since arriving at Denver Women’s last year, she completed her G.E.D. then started her bachelor’s program this past spring. Emma hopes to use her degree to work in construction or real estate when she gets out. But more importantly, the program has given her hope for a meaningful future.
“It’s not about getting the time off my sentence,” Emma said. “If I was out there, I would be dead. I tried to kill myself a couple of times after my daughter died. I wasn’t a weekend mom; I was a full-time mom, and my daughter was everything to me. I lost her; I lost everything I owned; I lost my career. Being able to progress myself and actually feel like I have a purpose like I can make something positive out of all this tragedy, it’s done things for me that I can’t even explain to you.”
Adams State is the only school to offer a four-year bachelor’s degree in Colorado prisons, and their program at Denver Women’s is the first to offer a bachelor’s for incarcerated women in Colorado. So far, Megan and Emma have enjoyed taking classes. It’s helped to remind them that, even though they’re serving time in prison, they aren’t totally disconnected from the outside world.
“The financial crimes that I committed and everything else like that, when I’m starting to look at some of the ripples that’s creating, thanks to my economics class, it makes me go, ‘What was I doing?’” Megan said. “It does make you more accountable; it does make you realize that you’re part of society as a whole and that the little things do matter.”
Just like students on the outside, Megan and Emma write research papers, listen to lectures and complete assignments. But, while they have access to JSTOR and the prison library, they must do all of this within the confines of prison. That means no access to Google, class disruption for counts and extremely limited communication with their professors, among other challenges.
A shift in prison education
The final point began to shift earlier this year, when Serena Ahmad, who is serving a 14-year sentence at Denver Women’s, began teaching courses on the inside through Adams State University. Adams State began working with the Department of Corrections (DOC) in 2017 and also offers classes at men’s prisons across Colorado; it was at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility that David Carrillo, who was released earlier this year after serving 29 years, became one of the first in the US to teach a college-accredited class while incarcerated.
According to program director Lauren Hughes, who was formerly incarcerated in New York, the DOC allowed Ahmad and Carrillo to begin teaching due to staffing issues facing the organization during COVID.
Although universities have run a variety of degree programs in US prisons for decades, many prisons didn’t allow universities to employ inmates as professors because they would have to be paid the university’s standard wages. In essence, Hughes said, incarcerated professors would have been making too much in the eyes of the DOC.
“There has never been a legal barrier, right? But there is a 13th Amendment,” Hughes said, referring to the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime and involuntary servitude in the United States. “What most prisons and things like that would push against is letting us pay them a living wage.”
According to the ACLU’s 2022 Captive Labor Report, incarcerated people in Colorado made between $0.86 and $2.49 per hour for state-owned correctional industry jobs and $0.33 to $1.61 per hour for non-industry jobs. These rates are higher than the average national ranges, which are $0.30 to $1.30 and $0.13 to $0.52 per hour, respectively. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and Texas, as well as some jobs in Florida, South Carolina and Nevada, do not pay inmates at all for their labor.
That the program is taught in part by Ahmad was also very important to the students. Emma said it was “huge.”
“When you think of a college professor… that’s someone that’s very intelligent, very well-off for themselves; they know what they’re talking about,” Emma said. “So to show the world, like, this person is incarcerated. They made a mistake. They did what they did, but they can be on the same level as you or her. It shows that even while we’re in here, we can beat those odds.”
“It’s incredibly valuable,” said Professor Libby Catchings, who teaches writing at DU and co-founded Unbound Authors in 2021.” One of the things that we value in the work of critical pedagogy and community literacy is making sure that the people closest to the problem or closest to the community have the power to share their authentic knowledge of that scenario.”
Work opportunities on the outside
According to the DOC website, prison educational programming exists “for the purpose of enhancing lives, creating opportunity for personal exploration and development, providing employable skills, promoting personal fulfillment, and laying a foundation for a positive release and full participation in life.” However, many formerly incarcerated people, even those with certifications or degrees, have been met with closed doors in the outside world.
Megan, who has been in and out of prison several times, has done a range of jobs and training, including Cisco computer training, a Computer Automated Drafting and Design program, Offender Care Aid, and working in the print shop. She was able to use her print shop experience to get a job on the outside printing labels, and she used her OCA experience to work in in-home hospice care. But Cisco?
“I absolutely love it, but realistically, not many felons can work in the computer field,” she said. Megan also reflected that, while she had become a store manager at Jack-in-the-Box at one point, she was only making $10 an hour and “had to work 80 hours a week in order to make ends meet.”
“I could go somewhere else with that kind of experience and make a lot better money, but because of [my] background, [I couldn’t]. It is somewhat disheartening.”
Hughes, who was released in 2013 and finished her degree at Rutgers in 2018, noted that initiatives like “ban the box” that remove questions about criminal records on job applications have helped to reduce this stigma. But removing the box doesn’t automatically solve the issues facing formerly incarcerated people once they get out.
“Jobs that would have never had a background check all of a sudden had a background check,” Hughes said. “I think when that law was changed, we always see the shadow side of those laws, right?”
The larger issue of stigma surrounding former felony convictions undoubtedly remains. No one we spoke to—neither Emma, Megan, Catchings nor Hughes—knew exactly how to address this. Megan thought employers should “stop asking” about former convictions; at the institutional level, Catchings reflected that individual organizations can dictate their hiring practices.
Even so, Hughes remained hopeful. “I can tell you almost every single one of [the people I served with] is doing a job where it’s making a difference,” she said. “There’s hundreds of thousands of people getting out and fighting for the same thing within their state. And I think, collectively, we have a really powerful voice.”
