One day at the Five Points Correctional Facility, Jesse Johnston overheard a conversation between two “good guys,” churchgoing fellow inmates that he liked. One of them said something about “octosyllabic couplet,” and Jesse thought, “Whoa! I can’t even say anything right now because I have NO idea what they are talking about.” That was the moment he decided to apply to the college program. The classes, he remembers, “altered my whole perception of the prison experience. They made me speak differently and kind of ostracized me from different groups.”
Education changed Jesse. “Even the classes I hated,” he says, “taught me something I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s not about the information being taught, it’s how it’s teaching you to think about that information that’s really important.”
Johnston was part of the first graduating cohort of students in the Cornell Certificate in Liberal Arts Program at Five Points, a selective program that offers classes taught exclusively by Cornell faculty. The certificate program was made possible by generous funding from Andrew Potash ’66 and Andrea Potash.
Johnston says that the Cornell Certificate courses were “definitely more challenging. Nothing against the teachers who taught in the other classes, but those certificate courses were taught by professors with a lot of time and knowledge in that specific area.”
Johnston credits Cornell’s Prison Education Program — both the associate’s degree and the certificate program — with changing the course of his life dramatically.
“Without CPEP, I would have probably settled for something I wasn’t happy doing. If it weren’t for CPEP, I wouldn’t be following my gut, my heart, my mind.” Instead, he looks forward to earning a bachelor’s degree in English and then attending law school.
Does he plan on being a practicing attorney? No, he says. “I would actually like to teach. Even if I’m the best lawyer in the world, I won’t be able to affect as many people as if I’m a teacher.”