SALT LAKE CITY — Sylia Olive didn’t know that a visit from her little sister while she was incarcerated would change the course of not only her prison sentence, but her entire outlook on what her life could become.
“She asked me, very clearly… ‘When are you going to start choosing us? Why are you going to keep choosing these people over us?'” Olive said.
Returning to her cell in the maximum security wing of the Utah State Prison, her sister’s words hit her hard.
So, he decided to change the direction of his life. Oliva, who was serving a sentence for participating in the murder and aggravated kidnapping of a 22-year-old woman, she was released from maximum security after a prison captain “took a chance” and released her into the general prison population to run a dog care and training program.
He eventually took advantage of that opportunity to take college classes through the Utah Prison Education Project, a program aimed at promoting educational equity through higher education, research and on-the-ground advocacy.
It was there that he met Erin Castro, co-founder of the Utah Prison Education Project and associate professor of higher education at the University of Utah.
“I started making different decisions. Because I didn’t want to miss school, I started hanging out with different people,” Olive said.
Eighteen and a half years after her conviction, Olive was released from prison.
“The only thing I knew I could hold on to that was consistent in my life was my education,” Olive said. “So, I asked Erin to help me get into the University of Utah.”
Now, Olive is taking college classes toward a bachelor’s degree, in addition to being a full-time mother and working at the U.
To prison education advocates, she is a living testament to the value an education can bring to incarcerated people, and now, more people like Olive will have the opportunity to receive an education. The Utah Prison Education Project announced Tuesday the admission of its first group of 15 degree-seeking students currently incarcerated at the Utah State Prison.
Title Applicants
The opportunity to offer bachelor’s degrees to the group of 15 students is the culmination of eight years of work, problem-solving and collaboration across the U. campus and at the prison, Castro said.
Students in Utah State Prison’s designated women’s unit will earn a bachelor’s degree in undergraduate studies and a certificate in professional and technical writing from the U.
“This is the first time in our university’s history that we have allowed a currently incarcerated group to apply to the U. We are committed to preparing students from diverse backgrounds to be global leaders and citizens who strengthen our society and democracy,” said T. Chase Hagood, senior associate vice president for academic affairs and dean of undergraduate studies at the U., in a statement.
U. professors and graduate assistants will travel to the prison to offer a course once a week for two and a half hours. Castro added that the Utah Prison Education Project offers “resource room hours” on two additional nights for two hours to give incarcerated students the opportunity to ask questions, read, write, complete assignments and work on laptops.
“We know that in prison it can be very difficult to access a quiet space, for example,” Castro said. “It can be difficult to access peers who take classes with you because you are housed in different areas of the complex. We have really built a lot of meaningful time into the structure for students to be students.”
In addition to taking classes and studying several nights a week, Castro said incarcerated students also work at the facilities, volunteer and take sentencing-mandated courses.
“Our students are busy,” Castro said. “We now offer evening classes because our students work during the day and we don’t want them to have to choose between work and school.”
Castro said every student in the inaugural program has at least some college education and he hopes this group of students will receive their degrees within three years.
“We will see in the coming years how long it will take people to complete the program of study,” Castro said, adding that the bachelor’s program is starting small, taking a scaled approach to identify and navigate any obstacles that may arise. in the process. .
“We have to (take an approach at scale). We owe it to everyone to get this right,” Castro said.
‘I can use that to help someone’
Although Olive has moved far away from the person she was when she was in prison, she hasn’t forgotten where she came from.
To that end, Olive currently serves as the first reentry coordinator for the Utah Prison Education Project, helping people who find themselves in the same shoes as her pursue an education in hopes of a better future.
“Prison is a very demoralizing and very dehumanizing experience and I can see why the recidivism rate is so high because of that,” Olive said. “I went through that experience, but at the same time, without realizing it, I found something that I could hold on to and that I was familiar with and that I really had control over.”
She doesn’t shy away from those experiences either, but rather leans on them and leverages them to impact the lives of others.
“I can use my lived experience to help someone and it’s not something I have to hold back,” Olive said. “It’s that hope that education gave me that I want to help other people find.”
Olive said she believes one of the main reasons people reoffend and return to prison is the feeling that they don’t matter or don’t have a sense of purpose. Education, Castro and Olive said, can change these feelings.
Now that Olive is busy between her studies and her role with the Utah Prison Education Project, she finds herself in a wonderfully ironic situation: trying to gain access to the prison to volunteer with inmates.
“I told them, ‘What better person to come and talk to women than someone who worked as long as I did?’ According to statistics, I should be curled up in a corner of my house or I should have gone back to prison a long time ago, but that’s not the case.” Olive said.
“Who would have thought I would be fighting my way back to prison?”
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