Woman works to become historian in prison, is released, gets accepted to Harvard -- then rejected.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

Last edited Thu Sep 14, 2017, 11:10 AM - Edit history (2)

Michelle Jones was released last month after serving more than two decades in an Indiana prison for the murder of her 4-year-old son. The very next day, she arrived at New York University, a promising Ph.D. student in American studies.

In a breathtaking feat of rehabilitation, Jones, now 45, became a published scholar of American history while behind bars, and presented her work by videoconference to historians’ conclaves and the Indiana General Assembly. With no internet access and a prison library that skewed toward romance novels, she led a team of inmates that poured through reams of photocopied documents from the state archives to produce the Indiana Historical Society’s best research project last year. As prisoner No. 970554, Jones also wrote several dance compositions and historical plays, one of which is slated to open at an Indianapolis theater in December.

N.Y.U. was one of several top schools that recruited her for their doctoral programs. She was also among 18 selected from more than 300 applicants to Harvard University’s history program. But in a rare override of a department’s authority to choose its graduate students, Harvard’s top brass overturned Jones’s admission after some professors raised concerns that she downplayed her crime during the application process.

Elizabeth Hinton, one of the Harvard historians who backed Jones, called her “one of the strongest candidates in the country last year, period.” The case “throws into relief,” she added, the question of “how much do we really believe in the possibility of human redemption?”

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/09/13/from-prison-to-ph-d-the-redemption-and-rejection-of-michelle-jones#.PNEDw47he

[janterry]

1. There's a lot of talent behind bars

and a lot of people that could be redeemed if we cared only a little.

[Major Nikon]

7. We can't even get many DUers behind that idea

There's so many people caught up in the ideas of revenge and retribution there's little hope of redemption. Meanwhile the reality is that most violent crime is committed before the offenders brain has fully matured and as a society we can't even get past the point of putting juveniles on death row.

[janterry]

8. empathy

I read an article in Atlantic Monthly - a case against empathy. Basically, it meant that as a society we needed people to be more responsible (and not worry about the empathy part).

I found that really disheartening. It's not just for the person locked up that we have empathy - but for US as a society.

For the record, I have an MSW and have worked in a whole bunch of different institutions, including the prisons (and juvenile detention). My guys (and women) really wanted to do better. All of them.

[Major Nikon]

9. Not to mention empathy is often used in half-fast strawman rhetoric

It usually goes something like if you are against the death penalty or life without parole sentencing you MUST be sympathetic to cold blooded killers. While you kind of expect that sort of weak minded logic coming from the right it's rather disappointing to also see it coming from the left.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. Kick with a grabbier headline

[hedda_foil]

3. Enormously worth reading.

[jeffreyi]

4. Pored.

[SharonClark]

5. "Woman earns Ph.D. in prison" is not what the excerpt states. Which is it?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. My mistake!