Skip to main content

Volunteer Profile: Ali Franz ’18

“I think the teachers learn more than the students.”

Human Development major Ali Franz volunteered as a CPEP study hall tutor in her junior and senior years as an undergrad at Cornell. “I helped with student questions on everything from Greek mythology to physics, philosophy, ideas about life, a lot of psychology questions.”

“What kept me coming back,” she says, “was that I really think teachers learn more than the students. [CPEP students] just have a very unique outlook on life, different than anyone you’d meet on campus. I think a lot of that is a lack of technology. When you go into prison, everyone wants to have a three-hour conversation about life and what they are learning. I’d go home after being in that immersive environment, and my roommates wouldn’t want to talk about anything but cat videos on Facebook.” 

Today Franz, a native of Buffalo, NY, is a second-year law student at Cornell Law School. And she is thrilled to be teaching her very own CPEP college course in Cayuga Correctional Facility: Psychology and Law. She modeled the class on a course of the same title that she took as an undergrad, taught by Professors Valerie Hans and Jeff Rachlinski. 

“I grew up in a kind of conservative community,” Franz says, “where the general attitude was that [our students] are in prison because they are dangerous, and if someone commits a crime, lock them up and throw away the key. It was shocking how different interacting with actual people in prison was from what I’d always heard growing up. There’s a huge desire to learn and capacity for growth that you just don’t see in students outside.”