I can graduate college. I never saw that in my future’: NYU prison education program gives incarcerated men chance to earn college degree
Jeffrey Grimes never considered himself much of a “school person."
Sitting in class made him restless. Lectures left him bored.
Getting kicked out of August Martin High School in Jamaica, Queens after a fight felt inevitable, said the now 32-year-old Grimes.
Without a high school diploma, Grimes passed the next 10 years bouncing between jobs and spending time in the streets — until he got arrested in 2017 and cops found a gun on him. Charged with illegal weapons possession, Grimes wound up behind bars.
For someone who found the four walls of a classroom confining, prison should have been a nightmare.
But there was one glimmer of hope. Through a Prison Education Program started in 2015 by New York University, Grimes could knock six months off his sentence if he began coursework toward an associate’s degree.
But Grimes soon discovered something new about himself: he no longer hated learning. In fact, he loved it.
His awakening came in the unlikeliest of places: Walkill Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison about three hours north of New York City.
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The more time he spent in classes, the more his spirits lifted, he realized.
“Once I started going to class,” Grimes told the Daily News, “it was getting me away from the negativity.”
Two courses in particular changed his path. The first, a course on little-known figures who shaped history, taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn, exposed Grimes to ideas and literature he’d never seen in school.
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Working around the sometimes extreme limitations of being a student in prison – no internet access and a scant selection of books in the library – Grimes wrote a term paper on the Jamaican-American writer June Jordan, whose work he discovered in the prison stacks.
Later, a class on the sociology of education helped Grimes understand why he’d always felt so uncomfortable in school.
Schools “don’t let people really express themselves and be themselves, and use their imaginations to take them where they want to be,” Grimes said. “They sit there and make you like a sponge.” He said the course helped him envision the type of school to which he’ll send his own children.
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In October, Grimes and three other incarcerated men graduated from NYU’s Prison Education Program with associate degrees. The program, one of a patchwork of prison education initiatives operated by both private and public colleges across the state, gives more than 50 detainees at the upstate prison access to classes taught by NYU professors.
Nikhil Singh, an NYU professor and the program’s founding faculty adviser, said many pf the program’s students “missed an opportunity to get a good education, and that’s often the prelude to ending up in prison.”
We help provide a pathway to [that] opportunity,” he added.
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Grimes’s road to a degree wasn’t without its bumps.
In July, just weeks before he was scheduled to complete the two-year-degree, Grimes got into an altercation and was sent to solitary confinement for three weeks.
By the time he got out, he had just five days to complete four term papers of eight pages each.
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“I had to grind down,” he said.
He told himself that he "can’t use that as no excuse. I came this far, got to keep pushing.”
In August, Grimes learned he’d completed the 64 credits necessary to graduate. Two weeks later, he found out he was being released early, after his lawyers successfully challenged the warrant-less police search that led to his arrest, and a judge overturned his conviction.
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“I was like, 'Oh my god,’” Grimes recalled of the news of his release. “And I just feel blessed that I was able to get [my degree] done.”
The transition out of prison has been painful at times. Grimes is still looking for a job, and feels guilty he can’t chip in for rent at the apartment he shares with his wife. But because of the Prison Education Program, Grimes has a credential no one can take away – and he plans to continue his studies at NYU next fall in pursuit of a Bachelor’s Degree, with tuition covered through the program.
“I can graduate college,” he said. “I had never seen that in my future.”
That NYU degree is going to open so many doors for him. So proud of this brother.
great.
