The “unearned grace and love” of education is “rain in the desert” of the prison
This December 18, 2024, the University of Scranton Prison Education Program hosted its second graduation ceremony at SCI Dallas. In it, 28 professors and University administrators joined in celebrating 13 incarcerated students earning their Associate of Arts in Liberal Studies. The student commencement speaker — looking over a cloud of correctional officers, family, and regalia — moved many in the room to tears. He reflected with profound gratitude on his enriching experience of college; but he did so humbly, and explicitly, against the backdrop of his crime and memory of his victim. He soberly noted how “I don’t deserve this, but I did earn it.”
In this, I feel, he invited all listeners to contemplate the importance of unearned grace and love. Indeed, I have come to see that our program, on its best days, mirrors God’s creative work. While God loves all things into being, before they even exist, we creatures can love one another — extend education, outreach, and connection — before probing whether others “deserve” it. Prison education, I’ve found, throws our usual categories of desert into the blender, mixing us all into the true energies of creation, which is to love all without condition, as the sun and rain fall on the just and unjust.
With great joy, our third cohort of freshly transferred-in students were present at the graduation (along with JPEN’s Fr. Curran!). In turn, they soon underwent seven 3-hour sessions of orientation training with me and other University folk. It was like Christmas morning to hand out fresh books to fresh students, get them oriented with our president and dean, learn how GPA and courses work, run crash-courses on studying and writing at a college level, hear of the Jesuit and Catholic traditions, and practice a sample class with a reading, lecture, and quiz. As many of our students have said, prison life is an intellectual and social desert. And as we again start up this semester with three classes, I continually rejoice in how college in prison is rain in the desert.
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Christopher Haw, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Scranton. He is the founder and director of the University of Scranton Prison Education Program.