With just 5% of the world’s people but more than 20% of its prison and jail inmates, the United States clearly has an incarceration problem—and experts say it will take far more than federal legislation to truly fix it.

“Mass incarceration is not just a huge policy failure. It’s a humanity failure,” says John Pfaff, Ph.D., a professor at Fordham Law School and author of Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (Basic Books, 2017).

Pfaff has shifted the debate about criminal justice reform by challenging the standard story about the runaway growth of the U.S. prison population since the early 1970s. The primary cause, he argues, is not the war on drugs and the proliferation of nonviolent offenders in prison but the unchecked power of local prosecutors and how we respond to violent crime.

Part of the solution is to give prosecutors incentives and tools to take a less punitive approach, Pfaff says. He has also called for more public consideration of the prison system’s impact on people and communities. “We spend $50 billion a year on running the prison system,” he says. “But we can’t tell you what we’re really spending in terms of the actual human costs.”

In prison, people contract diseases like HIV and tuberculosis at a rate 10 to 100 times higher than outside the prison system, he says. They suffer physical and sexual abuse, develop mental health problems, and have a hard time earning enough money when they’re released. Their families earn less and suffer from mental health trauma as well, and their children face a greater risk of going to prison. “And despite doing this for 40 years,” he says, “we’ve just never estimated those costs, and I think we haven’t measured them, because at a very real level, we don’t care.”

A change in attitudes is needed, he says. “How do you get people who aren’t in the prison system to care about those who are? Until we make that move, we’re going to really struggle to not be the world’s largest jailer.”

Prevention Before Incarceration

Like Pfaff, Anthony Bradley, Ph.D., GSAS ’13, decries overly punitive approaches to criminal justice, and points to a host of additional causes of mass incarceration: class, poverty, race, family breakdown, and mental illness.

In his book Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration: Hope from Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 2018), he argues for taking a comprehensive, long-term approach to safeguarding the well-being of people who are at a higher risk of getting in trouble with the law. Everyone can help in this effort, he says. “This is largely an issue about who we decide has human dignity and who does not.”

During a lecture at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus last November, he explained that the book had its beginnings in a class he took while earning a master’s degree in ethics and society at Fordham. He was “blown away,” he said, after learning about the links between young children developing post-traumatic stress disorder and ending up in the juvenile justice system later on.

“I realized that we’re not just locking up bad kids, we’re locking up hurt kids. It completely changed the course of my career,” said Bradley, a professor of religious studies and director of the Center for the Study of Human Flourishing at The King’s College in Manhattan.

The federal government’s war on drugs since the early 1970s can’t be the main cause of mass incarceration, he said, because 90% of all inmates are in state prisons, and of those, only 17% are drug offenders. In part because of a focus on federal prison data, “we get the story wrong,” he said. “If we don’t get the story right, we’ll get the solutions and interventions wrong.”

Part of that story, he said, is society’s views toward the poor. “Here’s a tough social fact in this country: We resent poor people in America regardless of their race,” he said. “We’ve used the criminal justice system to remove them, the poor, from civil society.”

And those who enter the criminal justice system are “overwhelmingly poor,” he added. With no money to pay legal bills, they have to rely on overburdened public defenders, and their poverty is compounded when their prison records create a barrier to employment, he said.

Caring for the Whole Person

Last December, the federal government enacted the First Step Act to reform criminal justice and reduce prison crowding, following on many state governments’ legislative efforts over the past decade.

While the new law is commendable, deep and meaningful change can only come from convincing the nation’s local prosecutors and police chiefs to do things differently, Pfaff says. “We tend to focus on the federal government as what is going to fix the problem,” but solutions must come on a “city-by-city, county-by-county level.”

In his talk at Rose Hill, Bradley also called for grassroots, “upstream” efforts to provide emotional, social, psychological, and moral support to children before they wind up in trouble with police.

“As long as we have hurting children, we’re going to have violent children,” he said. “We need to invite more players to the table. Yes, we need lawyers; yes, we need judges. … We also need coaches and teachers and business owners and cousins and aunts and uncles and community nonprofit leaders to offer the sorts of interventions that address the whole person.”

Bringing Ignatian Spirituality to the Incarcerated

Public defender John Booth, GRE ’14, has taken an interdisciplinary approach to the problem. After a decade representing people charged with serious crimes in Hudson County, New Jersey, he felt he was burning out, tired of watching clients repeat the cycle of incarceration.

“Why do I find myself representing the children of former clients?” he wondered. “When will all of this hurt end? Most importantly, where is God in all of this and why am I a witness to such horror?” He examined his own motives for becoming a public defender. “I knew I cared for them and was always fighting for them,” he says, “but I didn’t realize just how deeply they had touched me.”

Booth recognized there was a spiritual element to addressing the problems of criminality, mass incarceration, and recidivism. But there were limits to what he could do as a lawyer, ethically and practically. He knew it was inappropriate to discuss matters of faith with his clients, that “melding the roles of attorney and minister can add another injustice upon the accused person,” as he put it, but he also had no plans to give up his day job.

So in 2009, after he and his wife lost a child to stillbirth, Booth began further exploring his Catholic faith. He took “the Ignatian retreat in daily life,” a way to complete the 500-year-old Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola over a period of eight months instead of during an intensive 30- day retreat in solitude. Afterward, he felt that undertaking the Spiritual Exercises—a mix of meditations, prayers, and contemplative practices—could prove as valuable a healing process to incarcerated people as it was to him.

That thinking led him to Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, where he completed a master’s degree in religious education in 2014. His thesis explored how the exercises could provide emotional support and spiritual freedom to inmates and help them transition to society after release.

“A lot of [inmates]will say that they can’t do this on their own,” he says.

Bringing Guidance Behind Prison Walls

After completing his master’s degree, Booth met Zach Presutti, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic and a psychotherapist with an interest in prison ministry. Presutti read Booth’s thesis and realized it contained the kind of spiritual guidance he wanted his new nonprofit, Thrive for Life Prison Project, to provide for the incarcerated.

Booth created a brochure for Thrive for Life volunteers providing Ignatian spiritual direction to inmates—and he began volunteering with the group as a spiritual director. Several times a month, he visits with inmates in New York—at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, the State Correctional Institution in Otisville, and the Manhattan Detention Complex, also known as the Tombs—and leads them through an abridged version of the Spiritual Exercises, providing a safe environment that fosters self-expression.

“They can just kind of let go and be themselves,” he says. “And as time goes on, you see them expressing more and more and more, individually and collectively.”

Breaking the Cycle, Building Relationships

Thrive for Life’s spiritual directors stay in touch with the group’s participants. One former inmate now works full time with the group. Many other former inmates gather once a month with volunteers, friends, and family at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, where the organization is based. And Thrive for Life recently opened Ignacio House, a Bronx residence for people recently released from prison.

Meanwhile, Booth says his workload as a public defender was made more manageable by bail reforms New Jersey instituted two years ago, which include new standards for deciding whether an inmate poses a danger to society. His time at Fordham gave him new perspective on his day job—and on practicing his faith in service of others. “Courses were geared toward trying to live out your faith in the modern world, with constant interaction with the real world,” Booth says. “Fordham made me into the best spiritual director that I could be.”

College in a Maximum Security Prison

Since 2015, Steve Romagnoli, FCRH ’82, a playwright, novelist, and adjunct professor of English at Fordham, has been helping to bring the transformative power of education to women in prison. On a Thursday evening near the end of the spring semester, he led his students through the moral ambiguities of Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the wages of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The scene in the classroom was reminiscent of an undergraduate seminar on any college campus, with one exception: Students wore the green uniform of inmates at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the only maximum security women’s prison in New York state.

Like all guests at the prison, Romagnoli enters the compound through a trailer-like structure that separates the visitors’ parking lot from the prison buildings, which are ringed by metal gates topped with razor-wire coils. He passes through a security checkpoint carrying only his car keys, driver’s license, and notes for class.

“It’s like going in and out of a concentration camp, with the walls and the wires,” he says. “But sitting in the room and watching them talk and laugh and banter, you could be anywhere.”

Romagnoli’s students range in age and experience. For one woman, the course—Social Issues in Literature—is her first taste of college; for another, it’s the next-to-last class needed for her bachelor’s degree in sociology.

“Steve is always in demand,” says Aileen Baumgartner, FCRH ’88, GSAS ’90, the director of the Bedford Hills College Program. Overseen by Marymount Manhattan College, it offers courses leading to an associate’s degree in social sciences and a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

“Students really get a lot from his classes. I don’t know how he does it—I’ve said, ‘Really, Steve? You think they’re going to get through all this in a semester?’ Somehow or other they do.”

‘Students Have to Feel There Is Love’

At Fordham, Romagnoli teaches a similar course on ethics and literature, albeit with a more sensational title: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. In both settings, students focus on “moral dilemmas and ethical questions that confront us throughout our lives,” he says.

“The Fordham students have great things to say, but they’re initially a bit shy,” he says. “At the prison, sometimes you’ve got to pull them together, but they’re totally engaged, and they say what they’ve got to say.”

Romagnoli began his career as an educator at P.S. 26 in the South Bronx during the mid-1980s, not long after earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Fordham. He later earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at the City College of New York.

For 15 years, he was an itinerant teacher for the New York City Department of Education, working with students in their late teens to early 20s at drug rehabilitation facilities, homeless shelters, and halfway houses, among other locations. “I would go in and teach a lesson and go out,” he says. “Engage them, that was the whole thing. You’ve got to engage them.”

No matter where he teaches, his approach is essentially the same. “Students have to feel there is love there—not love love, but a deep respect. And if they come to the conclusion, consciously or unconsciously, that you have that deep respect, then it allows you to be as demanding as you want to be.”

Baumgartner notes that all of the students at Bedford Hills are required to work during the day—as porters or clerks or sweeping floors, for example. And they complete their coursework in the evening and early morning hours without the benefit of internet access.

Like Romagnoli, Baumgartner went to Fordham, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. She started teaching at Bedford Hills in 2001, when she was a professor at Mercy College, and became the director of the college program in 2002.

“I had never given any thought to prison education programs,” she says. She recalled that on her first day of class, “all the students were looking at me, sizing me up, and they asked, ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I was asked to teach, and so here I am.’”

Baumgartner’s straightforward answer satisfied the students, who, she realized, didn’t want to “hear someone come in and talk to them about high-minded ideals.”

She notes that prison education programs reduce recidivism and create better employment opportunities for former inmates. “Whether you’re a prisoner or not, you have many more options in life if you have a college education. And if you are a prisoner and you have a felony conviction on your record, when you return to the outside, it’s very nice to have a college degree on your record too.”

Students also benefit in ways that are less tangible. “They gain a deeper understanding of the forces that shape communities, that shape themselves, that shape their children,” she says. “They learn that they have the power to act in positive ways in their communities that perhaps they didn’t feel they had before.

“And then there’s that ripple effect,” she adds. “They’re concerned with their children going to college. Now it matters to them.”

Regarding costs, she says “the college program is not as expensive as keeping people imprisoned.”

Approximately 150 women—or roughly 25% of Bedford Hills’ standing inmate population—are enrolled in the college program, Baumgartner says. And every spring, the program hosts a graduation ceremony. This year, she says, six women earned a bachelor’s degree and 14 received an associate’s degree.

‘A Fairer, More Effective Criminal Justice System’

Inmates at Bedford Hills have benefited from college education programs for decades. “Mercy College had a college program there until the tough-on-crime bill was passed,” Baumgartner says, referring to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which eliminated Pell Grants for inmates.

“Across the country, a lot of colleges, including Mercy, closed their prison programs in the mid-1990s because they just couldn’t afford it” without federal funding, Baumgartner says. The number of U.S. prison college programs dropped from about 300 to just a handful.

At Bedford Hills, a coalition of community members designed the college program, which is funded by private donors and grants. Since it began in spring 1997, more than 200 women have earned college degrees there.

And since 2016, it has also received support through the Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Pilot program, a three-year experiment that aims to “create a fairer, more effective criminal justice system, reduce recidivism, and combat the impact of mass incarceration on communities.”

Inmates who take part in prison education programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison in three years, compared to those who don’t take part, according to a federally funded RAND Corporation study from 2013, the education department noted in announcing the program.

Baumgartner credits the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision for supporting higher education programs in prisons, including the one at Bedford Hills. “These programs sometimes tax their resources,” but the department understands their importance, she says.

Romagnoli talks with his Fordham students about his work at Bedford Hills, and about mass incarceration and criminal justice reform. “It resonates strongly with them,” he says. “And it’s something that’s really come into the public consciousness [in recent years]; the ball’s rolling a little quicker.”

‘Knowledge Is Power’

Back in the classroom at Bedford Hills, after a heavy but lively discussion about Ruined, Romagnoli gives the students a brief break before moving on to Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Asked to reflect on the course, which also includes discussion of philosophers from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir, students say they’ve learned that “knowledge is power.” They say that “perception plays a big role in how people judge people,” that the readings have helped them “gain different perspectives,” and yet the class “brings a unity, even if we agree to disagree.”

“You learn more about yourself, about your ethical system, and you question the things you do,” says one student. “I am one class away from a B.A. When I leave here, I will always question the morality of a situation.”

—By Chris Gosier, Adam Kaufman, and Ryan Stellabotte

At the heart of the drama is a brutal irony: When rape is used as a weapon of genocide, a ramshackle brothel can be a haven.

The establishment in question is run by Mama Nadi, who profits from the women she protects—and from the war. She runs a business, she says, not a mission. She provides food and shelter, and in exchange, the women prostitute themselves to government and rebel soldiers alike, all of whom must check their ammunition at the bar.

“How many of you give her a pass?” Romagnoli asks his students, a group of 11 women. Opinions are split.

“I hated her at first, but by the end, I understood why she was the way she was, and why she did what she did,” one student says.

“Which of the philosophies we’ve discussed could you use to support defending her?” Romagnoli asks.

“Utilitarianism,” suggests one student. Romagnoli nods. “And what would Kant say? Is there a redeeming element in her behavior?”

“It’s wrong to use people the way she did,” one woman says emphatically; several others agree. “OK,” Romagnoli smiles, “we have some Kantians here too.”

A College Class Like Any Other

To an outside observer, the discussion could have been part of an undergraduate seminar on any college campus—with one exception: Each student wore a green uniform that marked her as an inmate of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the only maximum security women’s prison in New York state.

Romagnoli, a playwright, novelist, and short story writer, has been teaching at Bedford Hills since 2015. Like all guests at the prison, he enters the compound through a trailer-like structure that separates the visitors’ parking lot from the prison buildings, which are ringed by metal gates topped with razor-wire coils. He passes through a security checkpoint carrying only his car keys, driver’s license, and notes for class.

“It’s like going in and out of a concentration camp, with the walls and the wires,” he says. “But sitting in the room and watching them talk and laugh and banter, you could be anywhere.”

Romagnoli’s students range in age and experience. For one woman, the course—Social Issues in Literature—is her first taste of college; for another, it’s the next-to-last class on the path to earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

In addition to studying Ruined, they read and discuss a broad range of books, including Night, Elie Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust, and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. They also screen several films, including Do the Right Thing, and Romagnoli introduces them to philosophers from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir.

“Steve is always in demand,” says Aileen Baumgartner, FCRH ’88, GSAS ’90, the director of the Bedford Hills College Program, which is overseen by Marymount Manhattan College and offers courses leading to an associate’s degree in social sciences and a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

“Students really get a lot from his classes. I don’t know how he does it—I’ve said, ‘Really, Steve? You think they’re going to get through all this in a semester?’ Somehow or other they do.”

‘Students Have to Feel There Is Love’

For the past several years, Romagnoli has also been an adjunct professor at Fordham, where he teaches a similar course on ethics and literature, he says, albeit with a more sensational title: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness.

In both settings, students focus on “moral dilemmas and ethical questions that confront us throughout our lives,” he says.

“The Fordham students have great things to say, but they’re initially a bit shy. At the prison, sometimes you’ve got to pull them together, but they’re totally engaged, and they say what they’ve got to say.”

Romagnoli began his career as an educator at P.S. 26 in the South Bronx during the mid-1980s, not long after earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Fordham. He later earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at the City College of New York.

For 15 years, he was an itinerant teacher for the New York City Department of Education, working with students in their late teens to early 20s at drug rehabilitation facilities, homeless shelters, and halfway houses, among other locations.

“I would go in and teach a lesson and go out,” he says. “Engage them, that was the whole thing. You’ve got to engage them.”

He says that no matter where he’s taught, his approach is essentially the same. “Students have to feel there is love there—not love love, but a deep respect. And if they come to the conclusion, consciously or unconsciously, that you have that deep respect, then it allows you to be as demanding as you want to be.”

It’s a lesson Romagnoli learned decades ago, particularly at Wadleigh High School in Harlem. He taught English there starting in 1993, later served as dean of students, and, although he had no prior coaching experience, was appointed head coach of the school’s fledgling boys’ basketball team. In 1998, he led the team to an undefeated season, capped by a victory in the Public Schools Athletic League B Division championship game at Madison Square Garden.

“He became a coach by chance, but turned players into students by design,” the Daily News reported at the time, adding that Romagnoli “took on the kids as he took on their problems: truancy, drugs, death, violence, poverty, fatherlessness, the entire roster of urban ills that puts teenagers ‘at risk.’”

He’s still in touch with his former players, who now joke about how strict he was at the time. “I felt that to succeed they needed a certain amount of rigor and discipline that they really didn’t have,” he says. “But they saw that I was in the gym with them after school and that I lived in the neighborhood. That definitely makes a difference.”

‘When They Get to Class, They’re Motivated’

At Bedford Hills, Romagnoli is helping to turn inmates into students, although he insists that the women in the college program don’t need much coaxing.

“They just live for this,” he says. “They know it’s not something that’s guaranteed. Some of them have had to get their GED” before they could even apply to the college program. “When they get to class, they’re motivated, they’re good to go.”

Baumgartner notes that all of the students at Bedford Hills are required to work during the day—as porters or clerks or sweeping floors, for example. And they complete their coursework in the evening and early morning hours without the benefit of internet access.

Like Romagnoli, Baumgartner is a Fordham graduate. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University. In 2001, she was a professor at Mercy College when she started teaching at Bedford Hills.

“I had never given any thought to prison education programs at the time,” she says, recalling that on her first day of class, “all the students were looking at me, sizing me up, and they asked, ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I was asked to teach, and so here I am.’”

Baumgartner, who has been the director of the college program since late 2002, says that her straightforward answer satisfied the students, who, she realized, didn’t want to “hear someone come in and talk to them about high-minded ideals.”

Still, she is quick to extol the benefits of prison education programs, citing data about lower recidivism rates and better employment opportunities for former inmates who have a college education.

“Whether you’re a prisoner or not, you have many more options in life if you have a college education. And if you are a prisoner and you have a felony conviction on your record, when you return to the outside, it’s very nice to have a college degree on your record too. You have a better chance of earning a decent living.

“And, practically speaking, keeping people in jail is extremely expensive,” she adds. “The college program is not as expensive as keeping people imprisoned.”

Baumgartner also speaks of individual and communal benefits of prison education that are less tangible, noting that students in the college program learn that “the world is wider.”

“They gain a deeper understanding of the forces that shape communities, that shape themselves, that shape their children,” she says. “They learn that they have the power to act in positive ways in their communities that perhaps they didn’t feel they had before.

“And then there’s that ripple effect: They’re concerned with their children going to college. Now it matters to them.”

Approximately 150 women are currently enrolled in the college program, which Baumgartner says constitutes about 25% of the standing inmate population at Bedford Hills.

Every spring, the program hosts a graduation ceremony. “It’s a big one for us this year,” she says, noting that six women will be getting a bachelor’s degree and 14 will receive an associate’s degree in June.

‘A Fairer, More Effective Criminal Justice System’

Inmates at Bedford Hills have benefited from college education programs for decades. “Mercy College had a college program there until the tough-on-crime bill was passed,” Baumgartner says, referring to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which eliminated Pell Grants for inmates.

“Across the country, a lot of colleges, including Mercy, closed their prison programs in the mid-1990s because they just couldn’t afford it” without federal funding, Baumgartner says, noting that the total number of prison college programs in the U.S. dropped from about 300 to just a handful at that time.

At Bedford Hills, a coalition of community members—including Elaine Lord, the superintendent at the time; Regina Peruggi, then president of Marymount Manhattan College; and Judith Clark, an inmate at Bedford Hills—formed a committee that designed the Bedford Hills College Program. It opened in spring 1997, and since then, more than 200 women have earned college degrees there.

Today, the college program is funded by private donors and grants. And since 2016, Bedford Hills has received some additional support through the Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Pilot program, which aims to “create a fairer, more effective criminal justice system, reduce recidivism, and combat the impact of mass incarceration on communities.”

In announcing the three-year experimental program, which is testing the effectiveness of making Pell Grants available to incarcerated people again, the Department of Education cited a 2013 Department of Justice-funded study by the RAND Corporation; it found that “incarcerated individuals who participated in correctional education were 43 percent less likely to return to prison within three years than prisoners who didn’t participate in any correctional education programs.”

Baumgartner credits the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) for supporting higher education programs in prisons, including the program at Bedford Hills. “These programs sometimes tax their resources,” she says, “but DOCCS understands the importance of higher education in reducing recidivism and enriching the lives of inmates while incarcerated and upon their release.”

Romagnoli says he talks with his Fordham students about his work at Bedford Hills, and about mass incarceration and criminal justice reform. “It resonates strongly with them,” he says. “And it’s something that’s really come into the public consciousness [in recent years]; the ball’s rolling a little quicker.”

‘Knowledge Is Power’

Back in the classroom at Bedford Hills, after the heavy but lively discussion about Ruined, Romagnoli gives the students a brief break. Some of them take the opportunity to reflect together, for the benefit of a guest, on the course.

They say they’ve learned that “knowledge is power,” that “perception plays a big role in how people judge people,” that the readings have helped them “gain different perspectives,” and yet the class “brings a unity, even if we agree to disagree.”

“You learn more about yourself through the process, about your ethical system, and you question the things you do,” says one student. “I am one class away from a B.A. When I leave, I will always question the morality of a situation.”

The images in this story are taken from a 2017 video produced by Marymount Manhattan College professor Erin Greenwell in honor of the Bedford Hills College Program’s 20th anniversary.

A research analyst works to improve the criminal justice system

Whether she’s studying incarcerated people or people with disabilities—or both—Navena Chaitoo tries to shed light on the many dimensions and nuances of large systemic problems.

Chaitoo works as a research analyst in the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national nonprofit that seeks to drive change in the justice system. Specifically, she analyzes data and works with prison jurisdictions—at their request—to reduce the use of solitary confinement.

“If you really think about solitary confinement—you’re alone in a cell, you have no access to programming, to other individuals … what does that do to your mental health? When we talk with people who have been through solitary, one of the things that comes out of it is just how deeply traumatic it is,” she says, adding that it does not help rehabilitate prisoners. “What leads to rehabilitation is pro-social behavior.”

That experience led to her work on a research paper that she began at Fordham in which she examined disability and multidimensional poverty in America.

“Currently, poverty is measured by what you have in your pocket—how much income you have … it’s not about your capabilities,” she said. The paper, co-authored with Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., associate professor of economics at Fordham, among others, looked at how a person’s disability might impact their ability to earn a living wage and their access to food, education, and participation in the political process.

While at Fordham, Chaitoo won a highly competitive graduate fellowship award from the National Science Foundation, which fully funded her graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned a master’s degree in public policy and management.

After graduate school, she got a job as a researcher with the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, where she assisted with the research and development of the Manhattan Supervised Release Program—an alternative to pre-trial detention for those who can’t make bail.

“I ended up loving it, and wanting to get more out of the research behind it. So I transferred to Vera,” Chaitoo says. That concept of more—or magis in Jesuit terms—is one she reflected on in college. “When you really think about living the Fordham mission,” she says, “it’s about how can I do this better, how can I serve people better?”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

It’s a surprising statement to make about college, coming from someone who has been through frightening experiences before—namely addiction and incarceration.

Cochrane said that when she went to college in the 1970s, she experienced prejudice as an African-American woman. But on settling in at GSS, one of Fordham’s most diverse schools, she said she found a supportive community.

“We get a lot of different perspectives, from Asia to Africa. There’s so much information within a classroom because of the diversity,” she said.

Cochrane’s ultimate goal is to start a nonprofit that will help formerly incarcerated women like herself. She said that as a full-time social worker, she’s already benefited from her education by learning to open herself up to different cultures and ethnicities.

“It’s a wonderful feeling to learn to understand someone’s culture, and work with them regardless of race.”

For her part, Cochrane said that by simply showing up to class, she feels she’s helped change a lot of her fellow students’ perceptions about incarcerated women.

“My classmates never thought that a woman who was in prison would be in [graduate]school,” she said.

Many of the women she met in prison hadn’t finished high school, said Cochrane. She and some others had college degrees—there were even a few women with doctorates.

“I believe that everything happens for a reason, and the reason I, as an educated woman, went to prison was to get to know former offenders and their paths,” she said. “So many of them have talents, like writing poetry, sewing, and cosmetology. But someone has to bring it out of them. Who can do it better than a peer?”

“I’ll always be their peer,” she said.

She said she’s grateful that TV shows, like Orange is the New Black, have brought attention to the ever increasing numbers of women in prison.

“The show helps people know that women in prison are being abused, separated from their loved ones—especially their children, and [that we]live in a judicial system that isn’t fair,” she said.

She said that Fordham has prepared her to help the diverse population of women getting out of prison. She credits her classmates with opening her eyes.

“I draw my inspiration, my aspiration, and purpose from them,” she said. “You have to care for all human life to be in this profession.”

]]> 68084 https://now.fordham.edu/education-and-social-services/coming-out-of-prison-new-social-work-study-looks-at-lgbt-elders/ Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:58:39 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=52066 The United States currently has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and a considerable segment of the estimated 2.3 million people in prison is over the age of 50.

Tina Maschi, PhD, associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service, studies both aging and criminal justice, and she found that a subsection of this graying prison population has long been overlooked: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender elders.

To better understand the distinct experiences and needs of this population, Maschi conducted a qualitative study that allowed formerly incarcerated LGBT elders to tell their own stories. Through focus groups and one-on-one interviews with 10 volunteer participants, both male and female, Maschi gathered data from the narratives they told about their lives before, during, and after prison.

What she learned is that violence, often sexual violence, is a tragic fact of life for LGBT inmates, and that many times it is witnessed, overlooked, or perpetuated by both inmates and correctional officers.

“A lot of times, they couldn’t walk from place to place because of the fear of getting attacked, even going from their cell to an education class, or to go to the shower. So they are always on high alert,” Maschi said.

She also reported that sometimes LGBT inmates are put in solitary confinement, not due to their own behavior but for their own safety.

Troubles often continue for LGBT people returning to their communities after prison. Many face service providers who are not sensitive to their unique needs as well as difficulties finding housing where they feel safe revealing their sexual orientation.

Maschi found that a core theme of the participants’ stories was “self and the social mirror.” That is, the participants often managed multiple stigmatized identities, such as being LGBT, elderly, a racial or ethnic minority, being HIV positive, or having a mental illness or substance dependency.

At the same time, however, Maschi saw resilience in the participants that enabled them to continue a coming out process of “learning to accept themselves despite the fact that other people did not.”

“Despite everything that could knock them down, they stood tall and strong and sensitive,” she said.

For Maschi, factors that played a role in this self-acceptance were being accountable for the crimes they had committed, helping others, and finding social support.

Her study also drew upon the participants’ own recommendations for helping LGBT people in the criminal justice system. From these, Maschi concluded that a holistic approach was needed in providing vocational, educational, and clinical services to formerly incarcerated LGBT elders.

“We’re more than the sum of our parts,” she said.

Though an individual may be LGBT, elderly, a racial or ethnic minority, HIV positive, formerly incarcerated, “it’s just a piece of who they are,” she said.

“I think the common denominator is that we’re all human and we all deserve love.”

Maschi’s article on her study findings, “‘Coming Out’ of Prison: An Exploratory Study of LGBT Elders in the Criminal Justice System,” was published in May in the Journal of Homosexuality.

—Nina Heidig