“I wasn’t really living. I was just existing.”
Mario Francis Mency, 50, was incarcerated at Wyoming Correctional Facility at age 45 after injuring someone in a restaurant fight. Although it was his first trouble with the law, “My life was not on the right track,” he admits.
Prison shocked him—it was violent and humiliating and boring. One day, a fellow inmate suggested that he look into the college program offered there.
“I enrolled and flourished,” Mency remembers. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me… it opened doors that empowered me, let me recognize my worth. The more I learned how to study, the more I wanted to learn.”
When the program at Wyoming CF shut down, Cornell worked with the program and the Department of Corrections to offer students an opportunity to transfer to the Cornell Prison Education Program, and Mency wound up at Cayuga Correctional Facility, where he enrolled in CPEP’s Associate in Arts degree program.
“Education showed me what’s needed to live a productive life,” Mency says. “Knowledge is power. Even if you don’t become a scientist, you can use it just to know what’s going on in the world, to understand documents, to be able to read. Everything is about understanding. That’s why I was honored to go to that CPEP event (see photo above) last month. They don’t know what they’ve done for me, the people who make education in prison possible. Before those classes, I wasn’t really living. I was just existing. Once I realized that I am smart and it’s okay not to know everything, but it’s not okay not to try to learn, my path in life totally changed.”
Mency was so engaged in his CPEP coursework that he was released six months ahead of schedule for good behavior, just five credits shy of his associate’s degree.
CPEP Executive Director Rob Scott told Mency that CPEP would see what they could do to help him on the outside to help him complete his degree. “I was skeptical,” says Mency. “But I got out and they paid for my classes. I completed my Associate’s degree in August.”
Now he is employed in NYC with Economic Opportunity Commission, a community action agency and food pantry working to eradicate the kind of poverty Mency himself grew up in. He plans to pursue a degree in human services at John Jay College (CUNY) in New York City.
Does he see any connection between education and the kind of violence that he engaged in before prison? He does: “Through my education, I’ve learned that it’s okay to disagree, but it’s how you disagree that matters. If I had been the bigger man, taken a moment to collect myself, known more how much I was worth, I could have walked away from that argument.”