Now a professor, she is bringing her students from campus into the prison classroom.
It started, as it so often does, with Mary Katzenstein’s course on prisons. In her junior year, Anya Degenshein found the course eye-opening, including the class fieldtrip to Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison founded in the early 1800s and now holding over 1,500 men.
“It was a shocking experience all around,” Degenshein recalls. “The number of guards, the way it smells—it smells like a place where people are being warehoused. It doesn’t feel like a place where people are living or thriving.” She was also struck by how the prison was right in downtown Auburn, “but so remote from the outside world.”
Teaching inside prison
The next year, Katzenstein invited Degenshein, who had performed onstage with several Cornell student productions, to be one of two undergraduate TAs, along with Jason Beekman, for the first-ever Cornell theater class taught inside Auburn. Carolyn Jane Goelzer, an acting instructor in Cornell’s Theater Department, was the teacher.
“It was a really amazing experience,” Degenshein says. “Carolyn came into the class with no preconceptions or baggage about what they [the incarcerated students] might be willing to do, or any hesitation. We did theater warmups, vocalizations, stretching. All the guys were really game. The play we read through was August Wilson’s Fences,” she says. It is the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning 1985 play about a Black family’s financial, health, and relationship struggles.
“I can’t imagine my understanding of that play,” Degenshein says, “without the help of that class. The interpretation they brought to the play… a lot of the men spoke about how the characters’ experiences reflected their own.”
Degenshein’s fellow TA Beekman, who is now Head of Legal for the global media production company RadicalMedia, also found the experience TAing for the class profound.
“Mass incarceration and the exponential rise of the prison-industrial complex has not only denied families time with loved ones and peoples’ unique contributions to society, it has also denied us generations of artists—musicians, playwrights, painters. It was impossible not to see that the members of our class were so eager to express themselves, to vocalize their lived experience, even if through August Wilson’s words. They made them their own. It was a powerful and life changing experience for me, and one I am so grateful for to this day. It has largely been the reason that I moved in the storytelling business and focus, in particular, on representing underrepresented emerging artists, particularly those of color, share their stories with the world through music, film, and television.”
Her trajectory
After graduating from Cornell in 2007, Degenshein knew she wanted her career to have something do to with the justice system. Law school, she thought. But instead of going straight to school, she went to South America and taught English in Chile for a year.
When she returned to the states, Degenshein got a job working as a court advocate at the Fortune Society in New York City. Two years of hard work within the city’s criminal justice system advocating for people, with a front row on prosecutors, judges, and public defenders, made her realize she’d been wrong about law school: “I came away from work every day with questions about why the system was the way it was, how punishment operates. I realized that those are not the questions that lawyers answer in their work.”
Today, after earning a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and another master’s degree and PhD in sociology from Northwestern, Degenshein is an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University, in Milwaukee. It’s her third year in the job. Her areas of interest are law and society, punishment, surveillance, and racial and economic inequality.
Evolving prison ed programs
At Northwestern, she helped launch an in-prison education program. At Marquette, she is teaching an inaugural class in the university’s new Education Preparedness Program (EPP), an initiative to “support those impacted by incarceration to succeed in higher education” through “wrap-around” services, or college classes plus what comes before and after college classes, ideally: college prep, and reentry services like job placement, financial literacy, counseling services, and continuing education. The initiative was awarded a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in January.
“In Milwakee,” Degenshein explains, “a lot of the neighborhoods most impacted by incarceration surround the university. Colleagues who founded the prison ed program asked ‘How can we be helping these communities?’”
Unlike Cornell, the Marquette program includes inside-out classes, where Marquette students (not just TAs) go in and take classes inside prison. It also includes classes like one that Degenshein will teach next semester, for full-time Marquette students alongside formerly incarcerated community college students, who will earn Marquette credit.
“I don’t think that any of my colleagues think they are about to solve inequality or Milwaukee’s incarceration problem or food deserts, but it’s a step towards addressing that and acknowledging that there’s more to do than just offering classes inside prison. When EPP students exit, that’s where many issues arise, with reintegration, finding jobs, occupational regulations, probation, all of which just make the lives of formerly incarcerated people difficult and hard to succeed in.”