Concern for Students amid a Pandemic
Members of the CPEP staff have a remarkable drive and determination to help people in prison get a fair chance at education. The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us that the drive to educate is undergirded by a commitment to peoples’ humanity that is imperiled by the threat of infection.
Kyri Murdough not only is the coordinator of the college program at Auburn State Prison, she is also coordinating a statewide working group that will look at both the short and long term challenges prison educators and programs will face in the COVID era. But Kyri’s commitment to honoring the humanity of incarcerated people began when she was young.
Inspired Early
In 1999, Kyri Murdough turned to her mother and said, “I’m going to work with prisoners someday too.” She was a sophomore in high school. Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, was in town on a speaking tour about working with prisoners on death row, and Murdough was in the audience, energized by the idea of helping people others had written off, considered unredeemable, and even wanted dead.
“Guilty County,” North Carolina
Her first chance came when she was a student at Guilford College, a small Quaker school in Greensboro, N.C., where she was a Bonner Scholar, a national scholarship program that requires recipients to make a weekly commitment to “intensive and meaningful service with a local community organization” for all four years of college. After graduating, she worked at a literacy center, Reading Connections. One day Murdough asked the director if she could launch a reading program in the local jail. The director said yes.
“That changed the whole trajectory of my life,” she said last week.
Some people called Guilford County “Guilty County,” because, as Kyri puts it, “They made you sit in jail long enough that you’d take a plea. They are on lockdown 23 hours a day and they’d say, ‘We can’t wait to go to prison so we can go outside.’”
Looking for the Good, Asking Questions
But it wasn’t only that experience in North Carolina that set her on the course toward a career in prison education. It was also the way she was raised: Her family are Quakers, members of the Society of Friends, as Quaker congregations are called, and part of the religion’s theology says that we should look for God within everyone we meet.
“From when I was a little girl,” Murdough remembers, her mother would say, “it’s easy to hate somebody you don’t know.” The logic was clear: “Really get to know someone and it will be difficult to still hate them.”
Her parents and grandparents also passed down a habit of asking questions.
“We’re from Chicago,” Kyri said, “and my parents weren’t the type to say, ‘Oh, that’s just a bad neighborhood,’ or ‘some people are violent and some people aren’t.’ It was more like, ‘Why is there violence there?’ My parents always asked, ‘How does advantage and inequity and compounded inequity change the way someone experiences the world?’ They really fed my inquisitiveness.”
Violent Offenders Are Also Human
“Most of the people I knew in [the jail] in Greensboro were in mostly for drug offenses. But when I started working at Auburn, where many of the students have caused real harm, I really had to think about what forgiveness and redemption means to me.”
She learned that many of CPEPs students committed violent crimes in their teens. Some of those students are now in their forties or fifties and have been incarcerated their entire adult lives. She quotes her hero, the lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who says, “We’re more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Many CPEP students have not only dedicated themselves to studying math and writing and science, but also to studying themselves and their crimes. “Many of our students have gone on a complex journey within themselves,” Murdough said, “a journey that many of us on the outside are too afraid to attempt, and they’ve reckoned with not only the harm they’ve caused but also what systems of inequity contributed to their ending up in prison. They are able to see the complexities of what it means to be human far better than many of us on the outside.”
One former CPEP student, Michael Hoffler, who will spend the rest of his life in prison, said on the day of his graduation that he pursued his education to prove to himself that “I’m still worth living for.”
Student-Centered Education
“There’s so many small moments that amass in your heart as you do this work,” Murdough said.
As CPEP’s Auburn Prison Coordinator, Murdough’s work and responsibilities encompass all parts of Cornell’s education program in Auburn Correctional Facility (one of four prisons in which CPEP runs college programs in): tutoring and academic advising, degree tracking, administration of entrance exams, working with the prison administrators, recruiting instructors, and running the weekly tutorial sessions that involve on average 40 or 50 incarcerated students coming to the classrooms to review material, get help with homework assignments, be tutored, and participate in extracurricular activities like editing the literary journal or debate.
There are 82 students currently enrolled in the program at Auburn. Prior to the shutdown, CPEP was running thirteen classes there, including Oral Argumentation and Debate, two Certificate courses (Plant Pathology and Latin American Literature), Human Brain & Mind, a writing seminar for new students, Anthropology, and several English courses.
“Most recently,” Murdough said, “Tess [Wheelwright, CPEP’s academic director] and I were at Auburn doing a new student orientation for 18 new students, and we asked two of our current students to help us give the orientation and talk from their perspective. Because of the way prison works, we couldn’t meet with the two students beforehand to tell them our agenda, and when we were all in the classroom with the new students, Julio, one of the current students we’d asked to help us, said, ‘I’ve actually prepared an activity.’ We had our little packet of policies and procedures for CPEP,” Murdough said, “but Julio handed out an index card to each new student and asked them to write down ‘one expectation you have for yourself in this college program.’ Then he collected them back, shuffled them up, and passed them out again. ‘We are going to read these aloud,’ he told them, ‘to show that we are going to be accountable to ourselves and each other.’”
The moment perfectly demonstrated something Murdough considers fundamental to CPEP’s success. “It shows us that our students will always show us the way,” she said. “When Bryan Stevenson talks about ‘getting proximate to the problem,’ this is what he meant. Those most affected should always be our guidepost.”
“I love it,” said Murdough. “It’s the best job. And I love having a new faculty come—they are just blown away. We can constantly challenge people’s assumptions about people. For me what’s important about my job is we try to create a college experience in as many ways as what someone on the outside would have, while recognizing that it’s prison.”