IT’S EARLY JUNE — graduation season.
All around Puget Sound, as the roses and peonies bloom, so do students in their caps and gowns: traveling in cheerful packs, filling stadiums to sit through ceremonies, eating sandwiches and sheet cake at celebratory backyard barbecues.
On the southwest corner of the Sound, just a couple miles up the road from Gig Harbor High School, past the discouraging fences and security pat-downs of the state women’s prison, 10 college students — from their 30s to their 50s — buzz around a classroom, straightening their own caps and gowns.
Some seem a little giddy, others more grounded. But they all look, in their own way, vitalized.
In a few minutes, those 10 will take a short walk beneath razor wire to the gym, where maybe 200 people — some incarcerated, some from the outside — are waiting to watch them become the first University of Puget Sound students to earn their four-year baccalaureate degrees in prison.
GETTING TO THIS POINT has taken nearly 15 years. It hasn’t been an easy road — full of institutional bottlenecks and laborious negotiations with the Department of Corrections. Not to mention the coursework: biology, mathematics, thinkers from Plato to Marcuse to Claudia Rankine, all drafts of all papers written longhand.
A few of these students were there in the beginning, when a group of incarcerated people put the word out, asking college professors to come and teach volunteer, unaccredited courses at the Washington Corrections Center for Women: a prison of all security levels, minimum to maximum, with capacity for 738 and a fluctuating population of around 600.
A couple did. More came. The students and their professors, many from the University of Puget Sound, formalized the budding program, calling it FEPPS: Freedom Education Project Puget Sound.
In 2012, FEPPS became a nonprofit, sustained by independent fundraising (which pays for the students’ tuition, among other things) and largely led by UPS instructor Tanya Erzen — with strong input from the students’ advisory council. In 2014, it began offering a two-year associate degree.
In 2019, the Mellon Foundation awarded FEPPS a $1 million grant. Soon after, the UPS board of trustees voted to accredit a bachelor’s degree — of the same rigor and weight nonincarcerated students earn on campus. Aspiring FEPPS students apply to UPS, like everybody else, with essays, letters and sometimes interviews.
“This was not a program that would be virtue signaling,” UPS trustee Ken Willman says, explaining the 2019 vote. “This is serious, rigorous higher education.”
Or, as FEPPS student Tatiana Baker puts it in that enthusiastic room on graduation day: “We demanded it: ‘Please don’t dumb this down.’ ”
NEARBY, A STUDENT named Carrah sits for a few quiet moments before the ceremony. (Some last names are withheld at the request of the DOC Victim Services Program.)
“In this place, it’s easy to forget about the good side of humanity,” she says. “It’s transformative to hear people say: ‘You’re capable. You’re worthwhile.’ This program has been a guiding light during my incarceration, a foundation for my hope and purpose. You need that to function healthily in here. Which can be hard.”
“FEPPS has changed the culture,” adds Annousheh, a FEPPS co-founder. “The dayroom wasn’t only about cards and dominoes anymore, but about ideas. Even for girls not in the program.”
Carrah and Annousheh, like some of the other graduates bustling around them, are wearing fresh fingernail polish — normally prohibited, it’s a special allowance in honor of the day from WCCW Superintendent Charlotte Headley, so long as each bottle is counted going into and out of the facility, and supervised by staff during its application.
Headley also allowed graduates to invite their children and grandchildren. Heavy-hitting guest speakers are participating: Kelly Lytle Hernández, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow who studies immigration and mass incarceration, flew up from Los Angeles. Cultural critic and New York Times bestseller Roxanne Gay pretaped a video address. (Arranging a live feed proved tricky.)
In the gym, the crowd is sitting, talking quietly, while corrections officers watch carefully from the periphery. The cavernous room has been lightly decorated for the occasion: maroon UPS banners, some balloons, concrete planters sprouting little roses. And, in the back, folding tables with trays of chips, sandwiches and sheet cake.
Suddenly, music: “Pomp and Circumstance” in D, the graduation march. Everyone stands. A few wipe away tears as the graduates — some smiling, some solemn — file into the gym, up the aisle and to their seats.
CONSIDER A FEW NUMBERS to set this scene in a wider context.
At last count, there were 1,664 prisons in the United States — 1,566 state and 98 federal — incarcerating more than 1.2 million people.
The recidivism rate is dismal.
Within one year of release, around 43% will be arrested again. Within 10 years, 82% will be arrested at least once.
Notably, people originally sentenced for violent crime are less likely to be rearrested at all, for any crime. Among everyone arrested within 10 years of release, most got in trouble for nonviolent offenses: “public order” (a broad category including parole violations) followed by drug and property crime. (These numbers come from 2021-23 reports by the Department of Justice and do not include county jails and juvenile facilities, correctional institutions in Indian Country, etc.)
The fact that we collectively abide such high recidivism strikes Erin Castro — who teaches at the University of Utah, researching prison and college-in-prison programs — as bizarre.
“We have wholly accepted a 60-70% recidivism rate as a normal part of life in the U.S.,” she says. “If you held that kind of metric up for public educators, we’d be done tomorrow.”
Castro is interested in what interrupts that loop. Job counseling and education are leading contenders.
An expansive, much-cited 2018 RAND report concluded people who pursue any education while incarcerated — from basic education to vocational training — are 28% less likely to recidivate. Those pursuing postsecondary education, even if they don’t earn a degree, are 48% less likely. (We don’t have good data identifying outcomes for those who earn a B.A. in prison.)
Locally, the numbers are even more encouraging.
For every $1 the state spends on postsecondary education in prison, it saves $19.74, according to the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, a nonpartisan research group that runs cost-benefit analyses for the state legislature.
WSIPP evaluates the financial impacts of state programs across the board — the downstream effects that save or cost money elsewhere. Kristen Morgan, head of education for the DOC, says reduced recidivism accounts for a huge portion of the state’s college-in-prison savings.
Compare that $19.74 with the rates of return on “hot spot” policing ($5.32) and outpatient drug treatment in prison ($14.05).
At a nearly 20-to-1 ratio, postsecondary education is the state taxpayer’s highest rate of return on investment for any program affiliated with adult criminal justice.
IT’S NO MYSTERY why, explains Elizabeth Shatswell, a former FEPPS student who was released in 2023 and finished her degree on the UPS campus.
“Education is the main thing that allows people to see something different,” she says. “The world gets bigger. I didn’t understand the Atlantic Ocean was as big as it was, or that people in other countries do things differently. And a program being student-centered and not behavior-centered allows behavior to change. Humanization equates change.”
Annousheh, who’s still at WCCW, and once was notorious for fighting and trouble, puts it more bluntly: “Starting out, I didn’t know I was smart. But I have to say — maybe I shouldn’t say this — but in the beginning, having a homework assignment saved so many people’s asses from getting beat.”
How?
“Responsibility,” she answers. “I felt more responsible to finishing the assignment than to my emotional tie to the conflict.”
WITHIN THAT SYSTEM of 1,664 prisons, there are 396 known higher-ed programs, according to a 2022 report — co-led by Castro — for the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. (That report is being updated, but the results aren’t finalized.)
Of those 396 (which vary in quality, from rigorous to perfunctory), only 38 offer bachelor’s degrees: most for men, seven for women and only two for women on the West Coast.
FEPPS is rare. Even rarer: It was not initiated by an institution. It was initiated by people serving sentences.
Castro is careful to point out this unique feature of FEPPS does not reflect a lack of interest among other incarcerated populations.
“There are many instances of folks inside who have tried and haven’t been successful,” she says. “Whether it’s the prison shutting it down, the inability to send and receive mail for courses, or an important letter landing on someone’s desk and never being opened.”
With a little luck, lots of doggedness and some allowances from the DOC (like any big agency, it has helpers and hinderers), FEPPS happened. The students are proud of their achievement — not just their degrees, but the pathway they’ve created. College wasn’t sitting around, waiting for them to show up. They, under difficult circumstances, brought college to them.
“We started fighting for the B.A. program years before we got it,” says Lisa, UPS-FEPPS class of ’24. “When they said yes, I felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t think we were ever going to get it.”
“It’s a ‘no’ first every time in here,” adds classmate Samantha Jones. “But Tanya [Erzen] and the FEPPS staff also fought that fight. It’s powerful to know there are people willing to fight DOC to get us what we’re looking for.”
BY NOW, YOU might be wondering: What crimes did these students commit? Why are they in prison? Totally understandable. As a nation — in culture and policy — we are absolutely obsessed with crime.
On one side, the United States consistently maintains one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. (We used to be number one, but fell behind El Salvador and Turkmenistan.)
On the other, we cannot get enough crime stories: crime movies, crime TV, crime everything. In 2024, true-crime podcasts with names that sound like death-metal bands — Morbid, Crime Junkie, Drowning Creek — are leading the charts, right up there with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.
I get it. I’m a sucker for crime stories, too. I am also part of the culture.
But this story will not pair individuals to the crimes for which they have been convicted. In the words of Bryan Stevenson, attorney, author and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Instead, I will list some anonymized examples. They’re all heartbreaking. Addiction is a theme.
One person was driving under the influence and accidentally killed someone. Another was involved in what was supposed to be the robbery of a drug dealer. The dealer got shot and died. A third had a deeply chaotic childhood, began using heroin at 12 and dropped out of school not long after. By 17, she was strung out (her words) and involved in a (violent, but nonlethal) carjacking. She spent the next 21 years in prison.
The vast majority of people in prison will be released: more than 95%, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
“If I talk to you as a feeling human being who caused harm — I can truly take accountability for that, all day, and that might make you feel better in the moment,” says Alyssa Knight, who started taking FEPPS classes in prison, got released, finished her B.A. at the University of Washington and is now FEPPS’s executive director.
“But what would make you feel safe with me as your neighbor? Knowing that I mopped floors and played cards for 20 years? Or would it make you feel safer if I had earned a college education and taken steps to rehabilitate myself?”
WHEN FEPPS STARTED, many state-funded programs in prisons, including education, were not available to people with seven or more years left on their sentences.
Arrive at WCCW with a five-year sentence, and you might squeeze into a program. Arrive with 20 years, and you’d have to wait 13. (Technically, state law said people with fewer than seven years had “priority” for programs; functionally, that put them out of reach. The legislature eliminated that restriction in 2021.)
“I came in with this wall up, felt like I was never coming home,” says La’Keisha “KeWee” Roselle, who co-founded FEPPS but left WCCW in 2018, finishing her B.A. at The Evergreen State College. “If you had more than seven years, you were just there. It was literally just people playing pinochle and walking the yard.”
In response, around 2008, some started talking about forming a community — for mutual support, advocacy and accountability.
Not all had arrived as public-minded do-gooders. A few had fierce reputations that reached well beyond WCCW: Newcomers showed up from county jails already knowing and fearing their names.
But they wanted something different. They organized, called themselves The Women’s Village (now just The Village) and set up councils: the violence reduction team, the wellness team, the spirituality team, others.
Shortly afterward, Gilda Sheppard, a filmmaker and sociology professor at Evergreen, attended an event at WCCW and saw a former student, then incarcerated. The student invited Sheppard to speak with The Village, which invited her to come teach. So, with approval from the DOC, she did.
Because Sheppard came on her own, and was not part of a state-funded program, the seven-year rule didn’t apply.
Stuart Smithers, chair of the religion department at UPS, also responded to the word-of-mouth call. He remembers one early moment, leaving the prison after class and watching a full moon rise above the razor wire.
“I felt the paradox of being in a prison, talking about ideas, and then I could drive home and have a beer,” he says. “These women were passionate, intelligent — and in prison. They were also the liberal arts ideal, really hungry for a life of the mind. And it was clear they wanted more.”
Smithers invited his UPS colleague Erzen to participate. She did, and would become a driving force. FEPPS, a program open to short-timers and lifers alike, was being born. To date, 300 students have taken courses, and 72 have earned associate degrees. Now 10 have B.A.s. Knight, the FEPPS executive director, says the program expects 40 to 45 new students this fall.
It was all a chain — people being asked and people saying yes.
A COUPLE WEEKS AFTER after commencement, a few graduates gather in the new FEPPS classroom (it took more than a decade, one FEPPS founder grumbles, but WCCW finally found them a dedicated space) to talk.
Lisa, by her own account, entered WCCW “angry,” a troublemaker. At the prodding of a friend, she signed up for a class, “just for something to do.” One class led to another. She wasn’t particularly inspired — but something profound shifted during a literature course.
“My brain came alive in writing, creative writing,” Lisa says. “I was like: ‘Whoooah.’ My tank was empty, and it started to get filled up.”
Lisa’s granddaughter attended graduation in the gym. The next week, she wore a FEPPS T-shirt to school.
“I don’t think I can put into words the feeling,” Lisa says slowly, wiping away tears. “That my 11-year-old granddaughter, who’s on the spectrum, is proud of me. Me. In prison.”
Jones, sitting nearby, also tears up talking about her arc: “My story is drug addiction. I hated myself when I got here. I was actually losing my mind. This program, the professors, these ladies put me back together — retaught me to do things that are hard. That’s much, much bigger than the degree.”
There’s a pause. Lisa stares intently at Jones.
“We didn’t put you back together,” she says. “We just traded your Scotch tape and Elmer’s for duct tape and superglue.”
Another pause.
“This is a place where people are bound, captured,” Annousheh says. “You’re ‘just a criminal,’ ‘just an inmate,’ just your DOC number. But being a student opens the possibility of another personhood. Now we all have student ID numbers — a different number, in a different system. The myth about yourself starts to deteriorate. People on the outside think their taxes are paying for food, clothes, some domestic-violence classes, some parenting classes, and presto! You’re rehabilitated! It doesn’t work that way.”
“If you want me to be transformed, that’s one thing,” Baker breaks in. “But if you want me to be ‘rehabilitated’? That’s just setting me up for failure.”
I look at Baker, slightly confused.
“Because ‘rehabilitated’ means ‘to be returned to your prior state,’ ” Annousheh explains.
“I don’t want to go back to my prior state,” Baker says. “Not at all!”
“See?!” Annousheh says, opening her arms and smiling broadly. “That’s what education does for you.”