Name: From Prison to Careers in STEM
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Studies have found that educational programs can lower misconduct and violence rates in prison and recidivism upon release.

Watch how four accomplished scientists began their careers or education in prison.

Studies have found that educational programs can lower misconduct and violence rates in prison and recidivism upon release.

From Prison to Careers in STEM

Watch how four accomplished scientists began their careers or education in prison.

Body & Brain

From Prison to Careers in STEMPublished: January 13, 2022Noel Vest: The wonderful world of empirical research and study just really kind of changed my life.Syrita Steib: I was always good in science. I wanted to have a career in STEM. I wanted to be in the hospital and my aspiration was to go to med school.Stanley Andrisse: One scientific article that’s about 15 to 20 pages long, I would literally spend hours and hours diving in having as much fun as you might find yourself exploring like a new vacation spot.Christopher Medina-Kirchner: Then I applied to the PhD program again in psychology at Columbia, and this time I was accepted. And I just couldn’t believe it. This was a best-case scenario. I had never had a best-case scenario happen in my entire life until then.Narrator: These scientists all started their careers or education in prison. It’s an uncommon path, due in part to limited funding for postsecondary education programming. In the U.S., roughly 1.5 million adults are incarcerated, the most per capita in the world. Less than 2% are enrolled in postsecondary classes.Andrisse: When your body is actually locked inside a cage, it’s actually pretty difficult to not also allow your mind to be locked inside prison as well. Learning about diabetes was a way for me to break free from that psychological prison.Medina-Kirchner: You can be a scientist, you can do it, and we're going to teach you how. And I just started to feel like, “Oh, wow, I might have a future that doesn't look like a cell.”Steib: Being incarcerated is something totally different. You have to have a heightened sense of awareness of your environment. Your survival depends on it. So I think that the power of observation becomes something that we unintentionally become great at.Medina-Kirchner: So I’m 17 years old, I’m selling drugs just to support myself and support my brother. And I was sentenced to six years by a judge for selling MDMA to an undercover officer. The judge says, “I’m giving you the sentence because of the dangers of this drug and the amount of people overdosing for this drug.” I thought it was warranted.And so while I’m in prison, this is what’s going through my mind: “When I get out, I’m going to study this drug, I’m going to study the dangers, and I’m going to warn people about the harmful consequences of using this drug.”Narrator: Studies have found that educational programs can lower misconduct and violence within prison and recidivism upon release. After taking classes while incarcerated and completing his sentence, Christopher Medina-Kirchner transferred into community college, eventually making his way to graduate school where he now works in a lab studying the effects of drugs on behavior and the brain.Medina-Kirchner: So we do studies where a drug is given to participants under controlled lab settings, and we study the immediate and the delayed effects of repeated MDMA dosing in humans. And we didn’t find any drastic increases in heart rate and blood pressure or negative mood in the days following the repeated dosing.So I just felt like I had been lied to my whole life about the real effects of drugs. Like what drugs actually do and don’t do. And then, I learned that MDMA could be administered safely in laboratory settings and that MDMA-related overdoses are just especially rare. Drug misinformation can lead to just harsh punishments.Narrator: For Noel Vest, studying was never his focus as a kid. He wasn’t a great student in high school. But that changed once he was incarcerated.Vest: When college classes were offered in prison, for me, it was kind of a do-over. I was able to take an environmental science course while I was there. I absolutely enjoyed it. What was probably the most important thing about those courses was that they really just laid this foundation for me, that had much more to do with study habits. I got straight A’s in every one of those classes. And it kind of cemented this idea that maybe when I got out, I might be successful there as well.Narrator: After his release, Noel immediately enrolled in college. He went on to get his PhD in experimental psychology. Today he’s a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford studying addiction.Vest: I don't think I can ever learn anything or everything about addiction, but I can definitely do my best in the short time that I have in the rest of my life to try and do that.Narrator: Upon release, people meet with more challenges. These scientists are working to increase access to science education—in prison and beyond.Vest: I’m going to focus on one challenge—the box on college applications that asks about an applicant's criminal history.Steib: We know that 60% of people, when they get to the question on the application of: “Have you been convicted of a felony? Are you formerly incarcerated?” will just stop and won’t even go past that question.I was denied like almost immediately, I got a rejection letter back. Like I had no clue that a collateral consequence of incarceration was a denial to education. So I was like, “I wonder what would happen if I just unchecked the box?” And I got an almost immediate acceptance letter.In 2017, we began work on what is known as “ban the box” on college applications. And that became law here in the state of Louisiana, making Louisiana the first state to pass that type of legislation.Narrator: Other states have enacted similar policies.Vest: That’s potentially thousands and hundreds of thousands of people coming out of prison behind me that now are not going to face that particular barrier and hopefully will go on and apply to college and to get into college and do incredible work and be able to add to STEM, add to science as we know it.Andrisse: STEM-OPS stands for STEM Opportunities in Prison Settings. This is a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration to broaden participation in STEM education and careers for people who are currently and formerly incarcerated.An analogy that I often use is it’s hard to really tell someone to shoot for the stars when they’ve never seen the sky because they’ve been locked in a basement all their life. So when they see people that have been through the challenges that they’ve been through doing these things like astrophysics and information technology, it makes it more real. So we really go through this process of lifting them up and helping them see that they already have all the skills needed to be successful. It’s not about what’s wrong—it’s about what’s strong and how do we make that stronger... seeing the positive in an individual and helping bring that out. We do that by providing mentoring, by providing employment opportunities, providing educational opportunities, putting individuals in this network where they can see themselves as scholars.Steib: One of my professors, he kind of referenced that I wasn’t like everybody else who had been to prison. And that didn’t feel right. I was like, “I’m not an exception to the rule. I'm not exceptional. I left behind thousands of women who are smarter and deserve the same chance that I now have.”Medina-Kirchner: I assure you, I was locked up with people who worked much harder than me, who were much smarter than me. I was just lucky enough to get opportunities afforded to me that other people didn’t have afforded to them.

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From Prison to Careers in STEM

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Support Provided By

Explore More

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