There once was a little girl who would often accompany her father to work. On the car ride, they would pass by a big, beautiful castle with a medieval edifice. She would stare at this castle and imagine the prince or princess who lived there. One day, she asked her father about it. “Daddy, who lives in that castle? Is it a prince? Or a princess?” Her father shook his head. “No, dear, that’s not a castle. That’s a prison. People who committed crimes have to live there.” The little girl never looked at the castle the same way.
That little girl was Julie Doochin. And some of her earliest memories are those of fascination with the now-abandoned “castle” prison (called “The Walls”), which she would pass on her way to her father’s office at American Paper & Twine in Nashville, Tennessee. When she and I sat down to talk about her founding the nonprofit, the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative (
Have you ever had a dream of making a difference?
Did you ever believe you had a purpose but weren’t sure how all your skills and interests would align to execute such a purpose? Julie’s story is an inspiring one because of such factors. It’s a tale that travels from Jerusalem to Italy, from family history and the H
So, I want to begin right in the thick of it all. Can you tell me about what it was like when you first started the program? How did you get the prisoners enrolled?
By 2010, I knew I wanted to start a college program behind bars but needed a college and a prison. I ran into the president of Nashville State Community College at a fundraiser and presented the idea. He liked it, and so a partnership was formed where I, through a nonprofit I created, would fund and coordinate NSCC college courses behind bars. Recruitment began in 2011 at Charles Bass Correctional Facility — ironically across the street from American Paper where I was working at the time.
I went into the prison and told the prisoners about this program we were starting where they would take college courses for credit right there behind bars (not correspondence) through Nashville State Community College. Honestly, I was terrified. Not because they were prisoners – they were grateful and cool. But, rather, here I had succeeded in getting all of these people to believe in me and what I was proposing to do – NSCC and TDOC admin and the prisoners themselves, but I really didn’t know what I was doing and I had very little help or support.
I pretended I knew, and sort of felt like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.
Each challenge was novel, and I had to strategize at every turn. First major obstacle (after finding the college and the prison) was to figure out how I could get 25 students to meet all the admissions criterion of Nashville State Community College and get enrolled in NSCC to start classes by Jan. 2012. It was Dec. 2011. That admission process meant that they all had to “pass” or score at college level on the college entrance exam, among other requirements.
Note that free world students who don’t score at college level on these tests (and the vast majority of high school grads do not. Only 20% do in math!) can still enroll by taking learning support courses. We didn’t have the funding for that so that wasn’t an option. Most of our applicants had dropped out of high school (and earned per requirement GED behind bars). Some had dropped out in 8th grade. So, we had the odds stacked against us. It was a whirlwind: we had to get all their high school transcripts or GED verifications.
But during all this craziness, something sort of beautiful happened.
We were all so invested in making it work – the warden, the TDOC Director of Education, Asst. Dir. Of Post-Secondary education, and the principal overseeing education in the prison. Some of the correctional officers. And none more than the students themselves. And so we all came together almost every night.
I tutored. Students tutored students. The DOC education directors tutored. We all pitched in. We were all invested. It was “our” program. Most, including the president of NSCC at that time, didn’t believe these students would pass or be able to meet the admission requirements. They were wrong. More than 50 students tested, and roughly 50% scored at college level. Twenty-five students were enrolled in English Composition I and World Religions in January 2012.
And so it began: you had your first cohort at Charles Bass Correctional Facility?
Yes, the cohort model was important to me. There’s a lot of research proving its efficacy in increasing student persistence and motivation. This research bore out with us too. It was like starting with a freshmen class, and then they would move through the program taking courses together. That model has been very successful as they support and motivate one another. They even stay in touch with each other upon release.
THEI is thriving today. Can you tell us about some of the statistics on that?
My dream was always that this program would be statewide, and now that’s becoming a reality. When I stepped down as Executive Director in late 2017, we had 115 students enrolled at two prisons – the Turney Center in middle Tennessee and Northwest Correctional Complex in west Tennessee, which had become satellite prison campuses offering Associate degrees in Political Science and Business Administration from Nashville State (middle Tenn prison) and Dyersburg State (west Tenn prison). We also began receiving an allocation from the State budget which helped us expand, educate more students and hire staff.
At the end of 2017, 23 incarcerated scholars earned their degrees behind bars, the first time for men since the early 1980’s.
With this milestone, I felt it was time to step down.
Also,
Enrollment for fall 2019 is 115, and by the end of the 2019-2020 school year enrollment will be closer to 165 across the three sites. The recidivism rates (3-year rate of return to prison) for the college students is less than 10% compared to the state average of 50%.
Okay, so now back to you and your background. What were the pieces along the way that all seemed to fit into this puzzle at the end, which was to start THEI? What people or things influenced you?
From an early age, ever since I saw the “castle”, which prisoners aptly called “The Walls,” I often thought about the people who were hidden behind the walls and barbed wire. Also, I’m a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and I don’t think my later passion for helping the incarcerated is a coincidence. My grandfather would talk to me about the Nazi past a lot, and being sensitive I felt a sort of generational shadow or darkness that hung over my family.
It was my family history that played a large part in my initial decision to become a high school European history and psychology teacher.
When I first quit teaching, I served, for a short time, as Director of Education for the Tennessee Holocaust Commission, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about the Holocaust and other genocides. On one of our trips taking TN teachers to the US Memorial Holocaust Museum, I journeyed up the archives and finally figured out what happened to my great-grandparents and all the other family members who disappeared.
Unfortunately, my grandfather died without knowing what happened to his parents and family.
His mother was shot upon arrival at a concentration camp after deportation from a ghetto, and his father in a strange twist of events ended up in a Soviet prison camp where he died. If you think about the historical era I was teaching and would later pursue graduate studies in – fascism, the connection makes sense. Fascism with its prison (and death) camps, barbed wire, control, and punishment. I think there’s some kind of built-in DNA in me where I felt a connection to those who are incarcerated for whatever reason.
In college, did you know you wanted to teach European History?
I’ve had a passion for history since I was a little child. Dr. Echerd, my high school European history teacher at Harpeth Hall, in particular, made a huge impact on me. His breadth and depth of knowledge
There are not many places one can do work in that field, so among other reasons, I picked up and moved to Jerusalem by myself when I was 21. I lived there for about a year and took grad archaeology courses at Hebrew University. I participated in a dig looking for more Dead Sea Scrolls. And I also worked at a “Roman” restaurant in the Old City for $3 an hour, no tips, wearing a toga and feeding tourists’ grapes. This is why I went to Vanderbilt lol. There was a lot of partying too, Jerusalem was a happening place!
It was 1994-1995, and at that time, Jerusalem was a hotbed of intense conflict.
There were terrorist attacks left and right. Buses were blowing up, including the ones I needed to take to get to Hebrew University. The Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated. In fact, I was in a terrorist attack in October 1994. My friend and I were approaching a main pedestrian street where people sit at outdoor cafes. As we got closer, we heard machine gunfire. So, everybody just hit the ground. Two Hamas terrorists in black masks were going from bar to bar, café to café shooting people. There was an elite Israeli force in the area that took them down. 17 people, including the terrorists, were dead.
All of this made an indelible impact on me. I was never the same and never looked at the world the same way again.
It was these sorts of traumatic experiences that later allowed me to work in really intense places, like prisons. It also allowed me to develop this ability, which I value, to pull back and see all sides of an issue. I can put myself in another’s shoes, and realize things often aren’t so black and white…most stuff in life falls in the grey area. After that, it was hard to come back to Nashville and live a “normal” life.
So you came back home to Nashville?
Yes. Once I realized being a biblical archaeologist would require me to live in the Mideast, do two years in the Israeli army, learn Greek, Latin, Hebrew
My first job was at Franklin High School teaching AP European history, world history, and psychology. In 2000, Franklin became the first school to get the International Baccalaureate (IB) program in Tennessee. I was on the planning committee and wrote the curriculum for it. I really wanted that program for students in Tennessee because I was a global person and wanted to give my
So, because of all that training, I got offered a job at an IB school in Italy.
From 2000-2002, I lived in Italy and worked at the American School of Milan and taught IB European History and IB Psychology. It was harder than I thought. I remember my mom getting me this beautiful leather bag which I was going to pair with some chic outfit to go about my days. I envisioned life being like a set of a Fellini foreign film. In reality, I was housed in this 1970’s era blue-collar town, 45 minutes outside of Milan, riding a bike and “schvitzing“ my way to work. I never carried that bag by the way. The first year, I spoke no Italian, and no one spoke English in my little outskirts’ town of Opera, and I was so stressed out.
Did I mention, I had a puppy? My pug, Sigmund Freud, came along for the adventure. We were both very hot.
It seemed like there was no air conditioning in the country. At least, I didn’t have any. At the school, the language of instruction was English, which at least allowed me to do my job. There was a wide range of wealth and cultural diversity within the student population. One-third of the students were American, one-third were Italian and one-third a combination of other nationalities. As the European History teacher, I taught all the non-American kids.
And for obvious reasons, I spent a lot of time
For example, when teaching a unit on WWII, from the position of the victors. I might say, “well, when we invaded Normandy…” and an Italian student would say, “Miss? We were on the other side.” Teaching the Mideast conflict became a feat of political correctness and cultural sensitivity with Egyptian, Palestinian and Israeli students in one class. I was the teacher sponsor of Model United Nations at Franklin High in TN, but now I had the real United Nations in my classroom!
It required a paradigm shift, the way I view the world. I’m so grateful for that shift in perception.
Did you make friends?
The first year was rough. The second year, my Italian improved; I moved into the city of Milan and got a little French car, a Citroen. My sister, Karen, was there for a visit and tried to teach me to drive stick to no avail. But I drove that car around, and I still don’t even know now how to drive a stick shift! I lived in an old converted convent from the 15th century with that little medieval door you have to duck down to go through and the original tile floors. Right by where I lived was a prison. I kept feeling drawn there.
Though I loved teaching, I felt like there was something else I was supposed to be doing.
I was driving myself crazy trying to figure that out. With summers off, I would dabble in other things – like documentary film-making or there was that time I went to faux painting school. Always trying to find something that was a better fit, but I knew the skills I was developing and the knowledge I was gaining would be beneficial anywhere.
So what did you decide to do next?
I decided I wanted to get a Ph.D. in European history with an emphasis on Italian Fascism. The University of Pennsylvania accepted
Historically what I’ve found is education propels me to that next thing.
Through connections, and being in the atmosphere of academia, being exposed to new ideas, the support of professors. You’re thinking deeply and critically and learning. Those times when I’ve been a little lost, academia has helped me find direction. I guess I get lost a lot because I’ve earned 4 degrees. Did I mention I love learning?
Back to Italian Fascism…I earned an MA in European history but decided not to finish my Ph.D. (Years later I returned to college at Lipscomb University and earned a Doctorate in Education). It just wasn’t for me. The US invaded Iraq in 2003, and something about that made me realize I wanted to take a more active part in the world rather than researching fascism in a dingy basement library. I loved Philadelphia and wanted to stay there so I picked up a new teaching job at Germantown Academy in Ft. Washington, PA, which is the oldest non-religious school in the United States. It was a wonderful community with great kids.
The history faculty there was so robust. Sometimes, I would take my history students into the hallway to look at the class photos of students from the Civil War, WWI, and WWII periods. The designer of the Liberty Bell designed the bell for Germantown Academy. The school colors had originally been red, white and blue, but changed to red, white and black when President Lincoln died. It was so cool to teach history at a school that was integrated into US history.
Was there anything about your teaching at Germantown Academy that affected your interest in prisons?
Yes, the last year I taught at Germantown Academy, I was awarded a grant the summer prior to train in documentary filmmaking and write a curriculum to facilitate a class of my students making one. Instead of the traditional history research paper, my 10th grade World History students would make a historical documentary. We researched a lot of local
One day while walking around the prison, we noticed this commemorative plaque on the wall and it said “To all the men who died in the Great World War” and then listed 117 prisoner numbers. No names. Prisoners fighting in WWI? Felons, and certainly not prisoners, were not permitted to go to war. So, we found our documentary subject, which was to figure this mystery out. It was a fascinating story.
With the US entering the Great War in 1917, there was a need for soldiers, and the warden during WWI had prisoners he thought would make good fighters. Through some sort of political connection with President Woodrow Wilson, he was able to let them out of prison, despite having life sentences, to go fight in the war. By all accounts, they fought valiantly. Many died. Some returned home. One escaped. The prisoner-soldiers wrote the warden letters, many of whom referred to him as “father.” He had the plaque made to commemorate the 117 Eastern State prisoners who bravely fought in Europe in WWI.
There was something about finding out about that paternal relationship he had with them, as well as how heroic their efforts were in fighting for our nation….I think it also informed my journey over the next few years when I became driven to help forgotten human beings hidden behind bars.
Though we learned a lot, we never finished that documentary. Had bitten off way more than we could chew. I occasionally get a Facebook message from one of those students, now all in their early 30s, jokingly asking if we’re ever going to finish the film.
During this time, I was increasingly feeling ill and was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. It was life-changing news, so I decided to move back home to Nashville to regroup and get well. After 9 years of teaching, that was the last year I taught school. By 2007, I settled into working for the family business, American Paper & Twine. I worked on developing a marketing strategy for the company and garnered partnerships like the Tennessee Titans.
The negotiating skills I developed would be a big benefit to me later. Coincidentally, my office window directly faced Riverbend Maximum Security prison, which had replaced “the castle” when it closed in the late 80s. I would look out the window a lot. Spiritual meditation and prayer became a regular practice. I was pretty palpably feeling pulled to the prison, and I didn’t know why. I knew the next phase involved doing work in the prisons, but that’s all I knew.
What was your “Ah-ha!” moment?
In 2007, I caught a 60 Minutes segment about the Bard Prison Initiative, a college in prison program in New York. I got chills. I wrote down the director’s name, Max Kenner, and called him the next day. It solidified stuff for me. That’s what I was going to do in Tennessee.
Someone once told me that people in prison get meaning in their lives from two things – religion and education. I wanted to bring meaning to
I knew the US had a “prison problem,” but not until I really buckled down into the research did I realize just how bad the problem was. The United States, home to only 5% of the world’s population, yet 25% of world’s prison population.
My awareness of the immense moral, social and economic toll of this mass incarceration (as well as the revolving door of recidivism – 70% re-offend within 3 years!) really drove my desire to provide high education to prisoners. At the time, there were several universities in Nashville teaching courses inside the prison walls (Vanderbilt, Belmont), but only one, Lipscomb University, awarded college credit and Associate’s degrees at the Tennessee Prison for Women.
It bothered me that the prisoners weren’t getting credit even when they were doing college level work.
I wanted to change that. So I called or visited every director in the nation I could find to seek advice. I wanted to pull elements from other programs and select the best pieces I thought would work in Tennessee. One example of this was copying Boston University’s practice of having the students pay some sort of fee every semester to encourage investment in a program that would be essentially free to them.
Once I started the program, we charged the prisoners $20 (they later voted to raise it to $25) per semester. So that’s $75 per year, and they only make $250 per year (19 cents an hour). So it’s a big investment for them, but it made them committed, increased persistence and was a source of pride for them. In all the hundreds of students who participated in the program over many years during my tenure, I think we were maybe $20 short. Incredible.
So between 2007-2010, you’re working at American Paper, and also working towards the day that you know you’re starting this prison college program?
Yes, when I first started going into the prisons on a volunteer basis with Vanderbilt and Belmont, I wanted to confirm that this was my direction. And it did. I felt at peace and at home. I knew my work was here. In 2010, I met the then-president of Nashville State, Dr. Van Allen, at a party. I pitched him my idea of a prison college program, and he said he would be interested. So, I started meeting with him to plan it. I also googled the director of education for the Tennessee Department of Education. I called her up and
The night before the meeting, I also googled “funding for higher education in prison” and a page popped up about a federal youth offender grant. I printed the page and took it to the meeting. I asked Sharmila about it, and she said “Yes, you can use those funds ($123,000) as your seed money. We get it from the federal government every year to support programs like this one.
At that point, I decided to go back and get a doctorate in education. In addition to my love of learning, I thought it would help get an institution behind me to support this program and give me more credibility to pull this off. In 2011 I started at Lipscomb. They had a successful college program in the Tennessee Prison for Women.
I received a Doctor of Education in Learning Organizations and Strategic Change in 2013. Dr. Doochin. Finally, in November 2011 it came down the pipeline from Commissioner Schofield that Warden Miller at Charles Bass Correctional Complex had agreed to host a pilot program.
The federal grant would be our seed money.
I had hoped this would become the Nashville State Prison Program (it’s the original name), and I would be the director. For various reasons, that wasn’t the best direction, and I filed for nonprofit status for the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative (THEI) in January 2012. The first cohort of 25 students began classes at that time with two NSCC courses – World religions and English Composition I.
What were the key concepts you built into the program?
There were several core parts of the model:
Credit and degree-granting: They would obtain college credit and work towards an Associate’s degree.
On-site -professors would teach their courses behind bars, and not through correspondence. The prisons would essentially become satellite campuses of the community colleges we partnered with.
Liberal Arts education: There’s a level of critical thinking skills in a liberal arts education you don’t obtain through vocational education. Majors became Political Science and Business Administration.
The Cohort: a group of students who matriculates together over the course of their years in the program. Each year, there would be a new cohort of 20-25 students who would take the same courses at the same time, allowing them to grow together and learn from each other.
Community College partnerships – working with community colleges, with their mission to serve all in the community, was a good fit. They are also less expensive and willing to award credit. Transfer to campus in free world upon release would be much easier. They have been wonderful partners.
Student Investment: Each student would pay a nominal fee (now $25 per semester) each semester as an investment in their own educations.
Technology: Students deserved as much equity in education as possible relative to security concerns. We would incorporate technology wherever we could to support teaching and learning. Each program got a computer lab and later we were able to successfully lobby for limited internet access.
Why Liberal Arts?
When I say Liberal Arts, the two Associate’s degrees offered were A.S. in Political Science and A.S. in Business Administration. But with those, everyone had core General education classes they had to take. I also feel when you’re exposed to reading the classics, or studying history or political science, those critical thinking skills are the best way to engender a change from the inside out. You have the ability to take yourself outside of yourself and look at the way you think.
You’re reading great works — it takes you out of this small world.
There’s been some research substantiating that Liberal Arts education helps create change from the inside out. I wasn’t trying to save souls or anything, and if they changed the way they thought about themselves, it was going to be indirectly through academics. The goal wasn’t to make them change; it was knowledge for the sake of knowledge. To give them meaning to their lives, and if they couldn’t be free physically, they could be free in their minds.
What changes did you make to the infrastructure of THEI along the way?
In the beginning, being able to have the $123,000 Federal Youth Offender grant was amazing, and it got us started. But that grant had some very specific stipulations. Applicants couldn’t have more than 7 years on their sentences, had to be under the age of 35, no murder, or sex offense. Once the federal grant expired at the end of 2012, and we transitioned to funding through THEI those stipulations fell away and sentence length became less than 15 years.
When we began a second college program at the Turney Center in 2014, lots of applicants would come up expressing interest but I would have to turn them away because their sentences were too long to qualify for the program. This wore on me. It reached a turning point when one day an 18-year old young man sat patiently through the info session and approached me at the end. “I want to go to college, but my sentence is too long.” I asked him how long, and he responded “250 years.”
I went home that night and cried. Everyone deserves an education and meaning in their lives.
I became determined to change our sentence policy even if it wasn’t going to be politically popular. A wonderful foundation out of North Carolina said they would be willing to support that population. And so I said to TDOC: we’re going to start educating some students who have life sentences, but we won’t use public funds. They ok’d that. That student earned his Associate’s degree last
I would often walk by him sitting alone at a table engrossed in a history or physics book with a smile on his face. The Turney Center is a large prison with about 1700 prisoners. That’s its own community, and if you’re going to be spending the rest of your life there, you can play a role in making it a better place. The college programs have made their prison communities into better places.
For the prisoners who have gone through the program, it has to be so much more helpful to their future when they get out?
Yes, because they already get so much discrimination because they might have a felony. Sometimes the students would get down and say “what does it matter? I already have a felony.” And I’d say, “yeah, but you’re going to have a felony AND a degree. Look what you did behind bars. It shows you’re trying. It’s even more of
Let me be clear – This is not watered-down education that we provide. This is high-level stuff. Professors come from colleges all over the state including, Belmont, Vanderbilt, NSCC, Lipscomb, TSU, MTSU, etc. Roughly 50% of the professors are full-time from Belmont University but adjunct through NSCC. Almost every professor repeatedly told me these students were just as good if not better than their free-world students. There is some incredible talent behind bars.
Idealistically, when I first started all of this, I believed that education could and would cure all .
One thing I have learned through all this is that education is not a cure for everything. There are insidious and long-standing socio-economic problems, social injustices, mental health and addiction issues that the best learning can’t compensate for. And these issues, among others, remain and present big obstacles upon release.
I helped one former student, for example, get a job at American Paper. But he couldn’t get his driver’s license. Prisoners only make 19 cents an hour while incarcerated, and there are often all these fees to get their licenses back. Well, the bus only runs to the end of White Bridge Road, and what’s he supposed to do — walk along the interstate to work? And we’d run into that again and again. Practical things.
And there’s trauma in getting out.
In prison, you have to be in fight or flight mode 24/7. You basically get out shell-shocked like you’ve been living in a war zone. Especially someone who’s been in 20 years, and you’ve been told what to eat, what to do, et cetera. And then they’re out in this big world. Well, they have this degree that’s broadened their horizons, but the day-to-day needs are still there.
They have to find a place to live, and they can’t because they have a record. And there’s no money saved because they were making 19 cents an hour.
What do you think would help with that transition upon release?
There needs to be a spectrum of services provided starting inside the prisons and bridging to post-release in the first year or two. Participating in educational and rehabilitative programming prior to release can make a big impact. Prisoners need access to quality mental health care with licensed therapists. Mental health treatment is essentially non-existent in prison.
I think the state needs to provide returning citizens with access to some free trauma-informed therapy sessions (a minimum of 3). Also, more time behind bars needs to be spent on helping them build soft skills to help them succeed in the workplace. Imagine having guards yelling at you and ordering you around much of the day. That doesn’t set an individual up for skillful social and workplace interaction in the free world.
More business and financial literacy skills would be beneficial. Thankfully, as THEI has entered a new phase in its operation, the new executive director, Molly, is confronting this challenge and putting a lot more resources into much needed wrap-around services.
And like I said, the driver’s license problem is huge.
How do you pick up your children from school or get to work, when the bus line doesn’t run there? There’s been some attempt at working on getting a temporary hardship license in the legislature. It was on the docket at one point, and I’m not sure it went anywhere. But really, these folks did their time, we need to make sure they don’t have to continue doing time for the rest of their lives. Also, there were some students in the program who were doing 20 years for pot. Now that marijuana is legal in many states, I think some retroactive measures need to be taken there. That’s a bit ridiculous.
What about the professors involved? How have their experiences been?
All of the professors want to come back again and again. They say it’s some of the most students they’ve ever taught. The students are so hungry for knowledge and so grateful. Occasionally the Belmont University professors will bring in their Belmont free world campus class to have a class together.
You stepped away from THEI at the end of 2017. What are you doing now?
Yes, it had taken a lot out of me to get it all off the ground, and after we had reached a certain level and saw continuing success, I stepped away from the Executive Director role at
Yes, when I first got started developing this in 2010, saying it was a hard sell is an understatement. There has been a major cultural shift since that time. The need for criminal justice reform is one of the only issues that Democrats and Republicans agree on. It’s pretty amazing and wonderful how the thinking has changed on this. Also, hundreds of colleges and universities operate college programs behind bars nationwide. In 2016, a pilot program that reinstated Pell eligibility for prisoners got
As for THEI , we now have 50 scholars who have earned degrees behind bars. Some have gone onto pursue other degrees post-release.
Two students earned degrees at Belmont. Another at TSU. One student earned his BS degree at ETSU upon release and is now pursuing a Masters degree there. The recidivism rate is less than 10% compared to the state average of 50%. If more than 95% of folks will eventually get out of prison, who do you want them to be? Providing education and other rehabilitation programs rather than just warehousing human beings is not only the moral thing to do, it’s just the smart, rational thing to do.
If people want to help or get involved, how can they do so?
To learn more about THEI, make a donation or learn how you can volunteer or intern, visit their website, thei.org. Tennessee Governor Lee, as announced in his January 2019 “State of the State,” has started a Volunteer Mentorship Initiative. It’s for people in the community to sign up to be mentors to prisoners in the college program. Go to the online form and complete it if you’re interested.
Would you say that while education is not the panacea for everything, it’s still a worthy endeavor? And many of these men now have
Yes, definitely! One student, a gang leader, quit the gang. His 5 children want to be just like daddy now…go to college and not to prison. Another student in the program graduated from a metro high school and soon after killed someone in a drunk driving accident.
In prison, it can at times be a “kill or be killed” mentality, and you can come out of it pretty criminalized.
But he did our program and got out of prison before he finished his degree. He then finished his Associate’s degree on the Nashville State campus and went onto Belmont to get his business degree. He and I have discussed that without college behind bars, his life would have gone drastically different and he could have become lost to the system. College gave him direction and a healthy community to transition to upon release.
Another student got out of prison before he finished the program. He had always known he wanted to start a car repair business. He’s doing that now in Columbia and his business is thriving. He said the classes helped him to be a
What advice do you have for someone starting a nonprofit?
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Do your research and copy what works. Understand the lay of the land, look at what other people are doing. Investigate other models. If you can afford it, pay a lawyer or hire a consultant to file the paperwork. It will save you a ton of time and be worth the investment.
Also, look at your goals and the best model in which to achieve them. It might be that a non-profit model, however it might sound — lofty and good — is not the best fit to reach your objectives. Be prepared to wear many hats, be strategic about picking your board, and be prepared to work harder than you ever imagined.
What are some of the takeaways you’d like to leave us with?
Let’s stop the revolving door of recidivism. 70% of prisoners in Tennessee who are released will re-offend within 3 years, and roughly 50% will return to prison. An abundance of research proves over and over that
And as for you, what did starting THEI mean for you personally?
We were all put here to do something. When we’re helping others in some way or giving back — some way of paying it forward — that’s what I think we’re all meant to do. Helping this group of individuals, traditionally neglected, hidden, and forgotten, to achieve their full potential was my purpose. These men and women — I just can’t believe that God/universe/higher power would put them here to fester in prison.
But ultimately, I hope that I was able to bring some light to a very dark place.
And I’m so grateful for the blessing, the opportunity to create something from nothing that has brought (and will continue to bring) light to a very dark place. Everyone deserves meaning in their lives. Everyone deserves an education no matter where they reside.
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