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ABSTRACT:

We are in a state of mass incarceration in the United States, the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Roughly 70 million Americans — almost one-third of the working population — have a criminal record. Around 25% of formerly incarcerated people do not have a high-school diploma or equivalent graduation certificate. Knowing how transformational education can be, I started From Prison Cells to PhD, a non-profit organization that currently works with 100 formerly incarcerated people each year. We provide resources, tools, support, mentoring and internships to help them to pursue their academic goals. We also continue to push academic institutions to ‘ban the box’. Our efforts helped to remove the criminal-history section from the Common Application, which is used by most US universities. In September, From Prisons to PhD was one of a five-member alliance — dubbed STEM Opportunities in Prison Settings (STEM-OPS) — to receive a 5-year, $5.2-million grant from the US National Science Foundation to develop accessible pathways for men and women into careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) who are, or were, incarcerated. 

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