A reason to live

Editor’s note: To protect the privacy of the Westville Correctional Facility men quoted in this story, only their first names are used.

At the Westville Correctional Facility in northwest Indiana, seven men in similar prison-blue pants and sweatshirts sit in a bare-bones classroom in April to discuss Irish literature with Notre Dame professor Brian Ó Conchubhair.

The men relish the opportunity. One after another offers testimony as if he is at a religious revival meeting about the value of the Moreau College Initiative classes that allow them to earn a degree while behind bars.

“I get treated like a person here—a student,” Chris says. “And if employers see you took the initiative to change yourself, they are looking for that.”

David agrees. “A lot of doors are closed to us, but this opens some up,” he says. “With all that goes down here, if you get a degree, you’ve done something.”

Looking ahead to his graduation in May, Tony explains why he asked to transfer to Westville, even though it’s three hours from Indianapolis and his family there can no longer visit him.

“I sacrificed all that to come up here,” Tony says. “I’ve been locked up most of my life. But my daughter and son are coming up to see me graduate. It’s changed the story of my life.”

The Moreau College Initiative (MCI) is an academic collaboration between Holy Cross College and Notre Dame, in partnership with the Indiana Department of Correction, to allow select incarcerated men to become college students and earn credits toward a Holy Cross Associate of Arts degree. Begun in 2012 as a one-semester pilot with 15 students and two courses, MCI now offers 60 classes annually to about 90 students taught by almost 40 faculty members from Holy Cross and Notre Dame.

Classes for people in prison may seem like an odd outreach to some, but studies have shown that earning a degree reduces recidivism dramatically, leading to a path out of poverty. Recognizing that many people exiting prisons struggle to make ends meet, the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative, a pillar of the University’s recently released strategic framework, has emphasized the need for better ways to improve outcomes for this vulnerable population.

“Few groups face greater challenges than those who have been involved in the criminal justice system,” says Jim Sullivan, an economics professor leading the Poverty Initiative. “By investing in their future, the Moreau College Initiative offers them hope for a brighter future.”

College in prison was once common across the country, growing in fits and starts during the 20th century until Pell Grants, federal tuition aid for low-income students, fueled expansion in the 1970s. The results were promising, leading to a 43 percent reduction in recidivism, according to a Rand Corporation report.

But in 1994, Congress took away the Pell Grants for prisoners in a tough-on-crime reaction that saved $35 million per year as state legislators spent billions building new prisons. It was up to religious or private groups to keep the effort alive. In 2020, Pell Grants were restored for prisoners and momentum is finally restarting.

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Ó Conchubhair volunteered to teach in the program right from the start and has seen it evolve and grow. He wakes up twice a week in the darkness, drives an hour to Westville, navigates front-gate security, and walks through often bitterly cold weather to a classroom that may not be much warmer.

Security starts with a metal detector and pat-down like in an airport. Then there is the bracing moment when the visitor is put in a small holding area called a sally port, where the back door must fully shut before a loud buzz sounds and the front door can slide slowly open. Appropriately, the term sally port stems from medieval fortresses.

But Ó Conchubhair is from Ireland, and he says he earned his doctoral degree in Galway where several students had served in prison.

“These are ex-IRA prisoners who served a 20-year stretch in the maximum-security prison,” he says. “Very often they were caught up and they weren’t given choice but to drive cars for shootings or bombings. I got to know these guys and they were very politically engaged, very smart.”

So when an email went out in 2012 asking for anyone interested in teaching in prison, “it resonated with me because I had done this,” he says. “I had known guys before and I found them fascinating to work with.”

As the first in his family to go to college, Ó Conchubhair also wanted to get out of the Notre Dame bubble and see the rest of America. He immediately appreciated the contrast to teaching students with completely different life experiences. He found them smart and engaged, even if it’s because they have little else to do.

Still, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a little nervous at first, despite his black belt in judo.

“I remember the first day of turning my back to walk and write on the board, and there was that moment of—is one of these guys going to charge out of the desk or not?” he says. “Now I’m totally relaxed and calm, but that first day, there was that moment of, ‘What am I getting into here?’”

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Instead, Ó Conchubhair found that MCI has rejuvenated his teaching at Notre Dame because it gives him such a different perspective. The students are experts in real-world subjects like power dynamics, body language, equality, freedom, and economic deprivation. Nearly all of the Irish short story writers he’s chosen for the students to study have also spent time in prison for their involvement in the struggle for Irish freedom.

“The conversations are every bit as good as they are with Notre Dame students, except they’re bringing a totally different worldview and life experience to the texts,” he says. “It’s amazing the affinity my Westville students have with the long-suffering wives that never struck me before reading those texts. But for those guys, a partner, a wife who’s willing to stand by them, is a big deal.

“Anything about crime or politics is fascinating because if there’s one thing they understand, it’s power negotiations. They’re always fascinated if I talk about injustice. And they’re not talking about injustice in Gaza, they’re talking about what happened this morning over breakfast.”

The differences challenged Ó Conchubhair in how he organizes the class, the way he chooses his texts, and the way he teaches the material. Without any technology, he said, it’s more like a Ph.D. seminar, a group sitting in a circle doing close textual analysis—reading, discussing, and debating the printed word on the page.

“It’s talk and chalk, and you only have the knowledge in the room,” he says. “It kind of makes you stop and think about what’s the purpose of reading a short story about Ireland. Up there, if it isn’t engaging, they’re not that worried about the grade. So you don’t have that carrot and stick. For it to work, they have to be genuinely intrigued and intellectually engaged.”

Some other basic contrasts pop up as well. Conversations about the inherent Catholicism in Irish culture demand an exploration different than one has in a Notre Dame classroom, where that may be expected. References to recent technology changes such as artificial intelligence or non-cash payments might not resonate to someone who has been inside for 10 years.

While the conversations can be similar, the writing is more challenging for the Westville students. They don’t all seem to have access to the few internet-disconnected computers for typing, Ó Conchubhair says, and their educational backgrounds reveal a wider disparity range.

Over the years, he has seen the program improve. Now there is a library of donated literary and reference books, a writing center, and some basic resources in the classroom. The students can bring the program-provided textbooks back to the dormitory-style unit where they live.

“When I first started, there was hardly any chalk,” he says. “So you would have to give the chalk to one of the students and he would take care of it. There was one student, an older guy in the class, and he ran the show.

“Whereas the first time out, there was no classroom culture, now there is. There’s been graduations. So there’s a momentum and there’s institutional knowledge of the system. It’s the fact that the writing is better and they also have a sense of what the different courses are.”

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The Moreau College Initiative formally launched as the Westville Education Initiative in 2013. Several years before that, a group of Notre Dame and Holy Cross faculty and administrators began exploring the idea of creating an intellectual community in prison through college courses. They developed a relationship with the Bard Prison Initiative, a thriving system established by Bard College in New York in 1999.

In 2016, MCI became the only Second Chance Pell site in Indiana, one of just 67 programs selected nationally to participate in the study that restored Pell support to incarcerated students. To date, 63 Notre Dame faculty and 35 doctoral students have taught for MCI at Westville, as well as 21 Holy Cross and two Saint Mary’s College faculty members. MCI has conferred 125 associate degrees and 40 bachelor’s degrees.

MCI is now a part of Notre Dame Programs for Education in Prison (NDPEP), a Center for Social Concerns initiative that brings together a range of programs for incarcerated people in Indiana. It includes a college program at Indiana Women’s Prison, Shakespeare in Prisons, an Inside-Out exchange program that brings ND students to Westville, and research and infrastructure to support participants as they re-enter their home communities.

Students who complete the MCI associate degree can seek admission to the bachelor’s degree program at Westville, or, after they are released, at the Holy Cross campus. MCI graduate Miles Folsom, a liberal studies major, was the 2022 valedictorian for Holy Cross College.

At age 15, Folsom was sentenced to 36 years in prison for assaulting an acquaintance with a gun during a drug deal. Books and MCI helped him turn around his life, and in 2019 his thesis about John Milton’s Paradise Lost became the first piece by an incarcerated student ever published in the Notre Dame Journal of Undergraduate Research. Folsom graduated with a 3.96 GPA.

“Believe that you can do anything you want to,” Folsom said in his valedictory address. “I wish to build the most humane prison in the whole world. It’s quite a big dream, and I will pursue it for the rest of my life.”

The MCI admissions process is selective. About 150 men from Westville and facilities in Plainfield and Putnamville wrote an application essay last year, and about half were selected for personal interviews. Ultimately, 38 were admitted into the program.

“We aren’t looking for well-polished students,” says Justus Ghormley, the director of MCI. “We’re looking for diamonds in the rough, people who show signs of independent thinking and creativity who can become good students with some structure. We find their ability and confidence grow tremendously within a year.”

Recidivism rates often depend on how many years someone must stay out of the system in order to be counted, but Ghormley says MCI has a strong track record. Fewer than 10 percent of MCI graduates return to prison, compared to a statewide rate of about a third.

The program has solid funding that is growing. The Pulte Family Charitable Foundation recently gave a four-year, $250,000 matching gift to build an endowment of $1 million. And the Westville facility is tearing down most of its older structures to build new, improved buildings, including one for classrooms.

“Our mission is to provide a transformative liberal arts education that humanizes the incarcerated,” Ghormley says. “MCI helps them become more fully human and helps society see them as more fully human.”

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In the classroom in April, Chris is reading a passage from The Edge of the Bog by Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Unlike some classmates, Chris is a fluid reader. One wall has windows, though most are boarded up. A leftover chalk message on the blackboard reads: Drugs R Bad + Stuff.

Ó Conchubhair occasionally interrupts to explain an Irish term like “tinker woman” or ask a question, such as what the bog represents. Chris and the others offer possible answers, such as life, energy, happiness, and resources. The bog is a dead place that sucks in everything that touches it—a concept they grasp intuitively.

“I never knew what an extended metaphor was before this class,” Rick says. “It opens up a different way of thinking. It helps me be a better writer.”

One of the students says he took the Irish story class because he recently learned from a DNA test that he’s part Irish. Rick says Ó Conchubhair’s Irish roots bring the stories to life through his accent and his authentic expertise.

“When I found that nearly every one of our authors has been a prisoner, I knew we had something in common,” Rick says. “I never thought about books before. I just read. Now I think about character and theme—I’m more analytical.”

Rick says his family appreciates the effort he’s put into getting a degree while at Westville. He shares what he’s learned with them and they look the topics up online. They even notice he talks in a different way. His transformation gives hope that he can improve his future prospects.

“They’re proud,” he says. “This isn’t a cakewalk, but it’s given me a reason to live.”