[ad_1]
Vivian Nixon speaks at the College and Community Fellowship’s 15th graduation ceremony in June 2015.
Lee Wexler/Images for Innovation
There are many ways to stop punishing people with criminal records for crimes for which they have already done the time.
One of those ways, about which Vivian Nixon, executive director of the College and Community Fellowship and co-founder of the Education From the Inside Out (EIO) Coalition, is most passionate, is by increasing access to higher education.
For Nixon, it’s quite simple: Better education equals less chance for recidivism, which equals better public safety and better quality of life for all.
It’s been her life’s work for more than a decade, and Nixon is still only getting warmed up.
“I believe education is a human right and I believe that certain communities in our society do not have access to the same quality of education that I believe every American deserves,” Nixon tells the Root.
Most recently, Nixon, along with the EIO Coalition, has been supporting the recent movement on the issue of banning the box—or the place on an application form that asks about an applicant’s criminal record—in higher education. The issue has been picking up speed in the state of New York, where Nixon does most of her work.
Students from New York University and the State University of New York have been protesting and advocating for the removal of the box in the college admissions process. There is a bill that has been introduced in the New York State Legislature, flirting with the topic.
On Wednesday the EIO Coalition—which advocates to remove barriers to higher education facing students in prison and once they return home—attended the State University of New York board of trustees public hearing on the issue, where advocates of the formerly incarcerated testified on the subject.
But Nixon’s passion and advocacy for education for the incarcerated and those post-incarceration truly started with her own experience in prison. Nixon was arrested and convicted of a drug-related charge approximately three years after she had gotten herself straight. She was clean, had a good job and a great apartment, but then authorities got wind of a crime that had been committed three years prior.
As Nixon had already been arrested once and gotten probation, the judge had no choice but to sentence her to three-and-a-half years in prison. Soon it dawned on her that her education gave her an edge that others do not always have.
“I felt both ashamed that I had wasted a really good education, and also enlightened that we were doing a disservice to these communities by not providing them with quality education, because I always knew that even though I had made horrible mistakes, and there are a lot of reasons for that, that I would be able to figure it out,” she says.
“I would be able to come out, figure it out, get a job and move on with my life, but these [individuals], unless they learn something and got access to either some skills or some education, that they were going to cycle in and out of prison for a very long time,” she says.
[ad_2]