ASHLAND — Professor Stanley Andrisse spends his time lecturing and studying endocrinology at Howard University and Georgetown Medical Center — much like he did on Wednesday morning at Ashland University’s second annual Correctional Education Reentry Summit.
But in his early 20s, his life was on a much different path. He was standing in front of a judge, facing 10 years in prison as a “prior and persistent career criminal” for his third felony drug trafficking charge.
He started dealing drugs in his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri before he was a teenager, and he continued down that path until his third felony conviction.
According to a prosecutor on Andrisse’s case, he had “no hope for changing” and was a “dangerous threat to society.”
Eventually, he was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 10 years in prison. As the judge read his conviction, Andrisse had an out-of-body experience. When he finally came to, he asked the judge if he could hug his mother one last time before he was sent off to prison.
“She was bawling, in tears. And the judge denied me the opportunity to go hug my mother. And it was in this moment that I really started to see the system for what it was,” he said.
He felt that the justice system lacked respect and civility, and didn’t see him as a human being. Every day in prison he continued to experience these moments of “inhumanity” where he felt he wasn’t allowed to be a person.
When his father passed away due to complications from Type 2 diabetes, Andrisse felt that he couldn’t even grieve in prison.
“On the outside, you’re able to get angry and feel upset and express and go through the stages of grief. In prison if you start yelling and screaming and being angry, that can literally bring harm your way,” he said.
He decided to channel his unexpressed emotions into learning about diabetes. He didn’t know a lot of medical and scientific jargon, and there certainly were no scientific dictionaries in prison, so the first scientific research paper he read took weeks for him to finish.
Despite these hurdles, learning made his mind feel free while his body was not, he said.
Encouraged by his growing knowledge and a mentor who advocated for him, Andrisse decided to apply to multiple universities while he was still in prison. He had to check the box that said he was a convicted felon, and he was rejected from every college except for Saint Louis University.
After his release, Andrisse earned his M.B.A and Ph.D. degrees at the same time, eventually graduating at the top of his class and moving on to become an endocrinology researcher and professor.
Now when he’s not researching or teaching classes, he spends his time trying to increase education access for prisoners and formerly incarcerated people through his organization From Prison Cells to PhD.
His organization runs a Prison-to-Professionals program that both helps inmates gain access to education and also works to change policy surrounding correctional education.
“An analogy that I often use is that there are all these hurdles and barriers in place. I was about to jump over the hurdles, climb under the barriers, get around the roadblocks. That’s what our direct services do, it teaches them how to crawl, how to jump, how to get over the hurdles,” he said.
“Our policy side is trying to just kick the hurdle out of the way in the first place, it didn’t need to be there.”
Andrisse told his story at a gathering where attendees could hear from politicians, professors, researchers, and others speaking about educating prisoners and formerly incarcerated people.
Ashland University runs one of the U.S.’s largest programs for educating prisoners, and is one of a handful of colleges in Ohio that have a correctional education program.
Many people in these programs utilize Pell Grants to pay for their education. But from 1994-2015, the U.S. government was barred from using federal money on education for inmates.
In 2015, the Obama administration created the Second Chance Pell Experiment that allowed prisoners to use federal money for their education for the first time in 20 years. The Biden administration recently announced the experiment would continue for a third round and expanded the number of colleges participating to 200.
For Andrisse, every dollar spent on a prisoner’s education is worth it.
“Education is the most powerful tool to reduce recidivism. It is the most cost-effective tool to utilize to really help change lives,” he said.
