The most focused classroom I’ve ever been in didn’t have desks, a whiteboard or even quiet. It was a prison dorm holding 85 women, with rows of metal bunks pressed shoulder to shoulder. The atmosphere was frenetic and loud — feet shuffling along the concrete, plastic bags crackling, the sharp, staccato shouts from officers. We didn’t wait for calm because it wasn’t coming. We carved out space where we could: a corner of a table, the edge of a bunk, sometimes just a strip of floor between beds.
“All right,” I’d say, lifting my voice just enough. “Start where you left off.”
I began teaching GED classes before I had access to college myself. There wasn’t a formal curriculum, just workbooks passed hand to hand, notes in the margins and explanations shared in real time. We had no real books and no qualified teachers. If we didn’t teach each other, no one would.
No one complained about the noise or asked for better conditions. We knew there wouldn’t be any. After the 2016 Baton Rouge flood forced the evacuation of the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, we were displaced, living on borrowed concrete and plastic mats. We moved through satellite camps and even men’s facilities.
During my two decades of incarceration, long-termers were passed over, programming stalled during COVID-19 and opportunities disappeared without warning. There was no expectation that you would learn, and because of that, something shifted for the women I knew. Learning became a choice rather than a requirement.
The women who came carried more than unfinished schooling. Some struggled to read, some had never completed anything they started. Many had internalized the belief that learning wasn’t meant for them. Still, they showed up to our scrappy GED course. For a while, survival — the defining condition for so many women in prison — loosened its grip, creating room for something else to take hold.
Vanessa sat across from me with her workbook open but untouched. She turned a pencil slowly between her fingers, holding it like it might demand something she couldn’t give. ”I can’t do this,” she said, eyes fixed on the page. I told her she could, but she shook her head, certain. She wasn’t guessing. She was repeating what she’d been taught.
When she was young, Vanessa’s family basically gave up on her. She had no support for her dyslexia, and she quit formal education in elementary school.
“I’ve never completed anything in my life,” she whispered, as if it were a settled fact.
So we started small, with single letters — not because she didn’t know them, but because she didn’t trust herself to hold them. Letter by letter became words, then sentences. Some days she moved forward; some days she didn’t. But she kept coming back.
Across the room, Renee watched without appearing to watch. “Y’all doing all that for a test?” she muttered. “Ain’t nobody out there waiting on a GED.”
Life had not been kind to Renee. She raised her children under the thumb of an abusive husband, whom she ultimately killed. She spoke with the certainty of someone who had already decided it wasn’t worth it, who had been told time and again she herself wasn’t worth it.
But each time our GED class met, Renee lingered nearby, listening from a distance. Sometimes she glanced over with interest; other times she dismissed it as a waste. No one challenged her. In that environment, you learned to distinguish between indifference and reluctance to care.
Then, one day, Renee leaned forward and tapped another student’s workbook. “That’s wrong,” she said. “You gotta carry the one.” She corrected the problem, then leaned back again, folding her arms.
Eventually I gained access to college courses through a correspondence program at Ohio’s Ashland University. Classes came through restricted tablets, with no internet, no library and no direct access to professors. Materials were limited, interruptions constant, and I still had a full-time prison job as a GED tutor.
I began waking early to study for a quiet hour before the dorm stirred. A few others did the same. Renee started showing up, too, not because she said she wanted to learn, but because that hour offered space. Fewer voices, fewer disruptions — just enough stillness to think.
We sat at long stainless steel picnic tables bolted to the concrete floor. Most people used them for meals and to watch TV, not to study. But I guess Renee noticed how we claimed them anyway, gathering before the first 5 a.m. count, before pill call lines and feed-up, while the unit was still quiet. Under the fluorescent lights, the space changed. Women leaned over shared pages, working through words together, patient and unhurried. For weeks, Renee kept on lingering, watching, listening, not yet stepping in. She didn’t say much, but she kept returning.
Then one morning, she pulled up a chair and asked, “What page?”
Inside prison, momentum isn’t about keeping pace with a syllabus. It’s about holding onto something that gives your days direction. Without it, time flattens and loses distinction. Learning interrupts that flattening. It gives shape to time and creates something to move toward.
In most classrooms, students show up because they’re required to. Some care, but the urgency is often diffuse. Inside prison, nothing about education is assumed. You either reach for it or you don’t, and that act of reaching changes everything.
The day Vanessa read her first full sentence, she stopped midway. She looked up, uncertain if it belonged to her. “I’ve never completed anything in my life,” she said again. But this time, she didn’t push her chair back or turn away. She stayed, finger still marking her place, as if she intended to keep going.
Years later, women I taught in prison still reach out to me. They don’t remember the curriculum; they remember the moment something shifted.
The women I learned alongside were not lacking ability; they were lacking access. Once they had even fragments of it, they used it fully. That realization continues to inform how I understand education. In my classroom now, I build for continuity — holding a student’s place when life interrupts, circling back without penalty, refusing to let absence be mistaken for inability.
But even today, at a university in pursuit of a doctorate, there are moments when my doubt resurfaces, a voice suggesting I don’t belong because of my past. It echoes the same beliefs I once heard from others inside. The difference is that I recognize it and continue anyway. Most women I knew in prison did not lack courage; they had been surviving on it. What they were denied was the kind of access that allows courage to become something more than forced endurance.
I’ve seen what happens when someone reaches despite that denigrating and doubtful voice. I’ve seen a woman pick up a pencil she doesn’t believe belongs to her and keep going. I’ve seen a woman sit skeptically on the sidelines and, over time, move closer and closer. Change began quietly, with trepidation and uncertainty. And then it became something else: a rhythm, a constant return, a belief neither woman had known was hers to claim.
What stays with me is not just the memory of that makeshift classroom on the floor of a prison, but the genuine shift in self-perception it made possible. Given even a small opening, people begin to see themselves not as fixed by their past, but as capable of learning, growth and change. Without that opening, too many incarcerated women remain confined to false beliefs about their inability and unworthiness, their shame and self-doubt. That confinement shapes what they believe is possible, long before they are given a chance to test it.
