The windshield is bigger than the rearview mirror for a reason.
– Jelly Roll
Alone for 23 hours a day in solitary confinement as part of his 10.5-year prison sentence, Cordero Holmes could not see his future as a great dad,
Dr. Stella Perez
Alone for 23 hours a day in solitary confinement as part of his 10.5-year prison sentence, Cordero Holmes could not see his future as a great dad, Honors College student, or recipient of the MLK Living the Dream Award for community service in his old neighborhood. In fact, he viewed solitary as a hallmark of his success.
From age 14 to age 20, Holmes spent his time on the streets, selling drugs and buying guns, cycling in and out of juvie, and striving to be the baddest character in his West Phoenix neighborhood. Now he was so bad they put him in maximum security lockdown. Looking back seven years later, Holmes says the Incarcerated Reentry Program (IRE) from Rio Salado College gave him a new life map.
Prison education in the rearview mirror
Prison education programs have long been in the crossfire of fierce clashes between those viewing prisons as proper punishment to promote a safe and just society and those seeing prisons as democracy’s hope for rehabilitation and restorative justice.
Early prison education programs were led by religious reformers like the Quakers who brought literacy and moral education to the Walnut Street Prison in post-revolutionary Philadelphia. College-in-prison programs flourished in the 1970’s and 1980’s after the 1965 Higher Education Act made people who were incarcerated eligible for Pell Grants. This trend reversed sharply with the passage of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which banned people in prisons from Pell access. Within a decade of the bill’s passage, in-prison college programs dwindled from over 700 to 12.
