Cooper Street by Colin

Cooper Street by Colin - September 2017 Scholarship Essay

The fall semester of my senior year, I enrolled in what I was sure was going to be the most important class I had ever taken in college. Indeed, for every other undergraduate course, I had simply registered online and that was that. For this course, I had to submit an application, undergo a background check, and sit for an interview with the instructor and her graduate assistant. The rigor of the selection process and the fact that only 12 other students were selected felt like proof of its importance.

This class was special in a lot of other ways, as well. For one, our dress code was unusually strict: closed-toe shoes, nothing skin-tight or revealing, no jewelry, and on top of all that, we were required to wear these special gray and green MSU T-shirts our instructor had purchased for us.

However, probably the most unique aspect of this elective was the fact that it took place in a prison – Cooper Street Correctional Facility, to be precise – and that the other half of the class was comprised of incarcerated individuals. The 26 of us would all be studying the field of corrections, together, as peers.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget waiting for the other half of class on that first day. I had been to prisons before, but there was something far more intimate and nerve-wracking about this. We presented ourselves to security, showed our ID’s, removed our shoes and socks to show we weren’t smuggling in contraband, and then were escorted by a pair of guards across the yard to a classroom where a GED course was taught during other hours.

We waited in a nervous, heavy kind of silence for a few minutes before 13 men in blue and orange jumpsuits came in with their notebooks and the assigned readings printed off.

Black, white, Hispanic, 20-somethings, 40-somethings, tattooed, bearded, clean-shaven, tall, lean, heavy-set; there was an enormous amount of heterogeneity to the group. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but somehow it wasn’t these guys. There was a seriousness to them, a quiet intensity and reflectiveness that made me want to withdraw and watch them. We went around and introduced ourselves – first names only for security purposes – but as soon as we got into substantive discourse about the assigned readings, I knew that I was participating in something remarkably powerful and something ineffably special.

A man who introduced himself to us as Mike X opened his mouth to speak and when he finished, I could hear audible whispers of stunned disbelief from many of the other MSU students. Mike X was incredibly well spoken, clearly and obviously highly intelligent, and thoughtful in a way that most people just aren’t, college educated or not.

We drove back to campus that evening in the dark, and I thought a lot about what I had just seen and heard. I had goose bumps and the feeling that somehow something was different, though at that point, I couldn’t articulate just how.

Every Monday for the next thirteen weeks or so, we drove to Cooper Street and talked and read and discussed for three hours with men who had all been convicted of crimes that we were forbidden to ask about. Though this course was about corrections, our incarcerated classmates were our peers, not our study subjects. They were free to share what they wanted, and many referenced things they had experienced while in prison, though many did not.

While it is true that the incarcerated students were exceptional as compared to other inmates in that they were a self-selected group (they too had to apply for admittance into the class), the same could be said of us, the college students. And as we continued to get to know one another, prejudices and preconceptions on both sides of the bars began to melt away. The incarcerated students, we later learned, had been just as afraid of us as we had been of them. They feared our judgment, our condescension in much the same way we feared stereotypes about them, their perceived capacity for anger and violence.

This elective has impacted my education in a number of ways. Most singularly, it has solidified in me a desire to attend law school come fall of 2018. I believe a legal background is exactly what I need to leverage the kind of change I want to effect. The United States incarcerates more people than almost any other country in the world, and though I would love to see Congress make sweeping reforms to a deeply broken, unbelievably costly, and patently unconstructive system, my understanding of the world, along with my experiences in this course have led me to believe that litigation is the surest way to effect real policy changes.

This elective has also broadened my horizons in a way no other single course has ever managed to. Studying corrections is and was fascinating, but I think had it not been done in a prison alongside inmates, the subject would not have had the same kind of humanity or impact. Though it feels unbearably cheesy to write, what I couldn’t articulate after that first class was that a spark had been lit inside me – a spark that I feel both terribly grateful for and terribly heavy about as I move forward with my life and career.