It’s billed as a “story of strong will over circumstances and education over incarceration.” And it tells the tale of Daniel Geiter of Chicago, who describes his former self as “a really good thief,” but he’s now a man with a big idea that can change lives.
Geiter, who just earned his PhD in education, wants to turn a South Side warehouse into a nonprofit community college geared toward the formerly incarcerated, called Ward College. “Forty percent of our students will be former offenders or current offenders from either Cook County or Illinois Department of Corrections,” Geiter says.
He’s positive that it’s a way for him to open doors for those who have been behind bars and to keep them from becoming repeat offenders like himself. For decades innumerable studies have shown that attainment in education reduces recidivism; yet Pell Grants were pulled from prisons in the ’80s due to the unrelenting pressure applied by then-Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutcheson.
“I’m a convicted felon myself,” Geiter explains. “I was last paroled in 1999. From my juvenile years up until about 25, I was a repeat offender. Twenty-some odd times in and out of jail.” But he, like myself, turned his life around.
“It was 1998. It’s like 180 degrees. I’m in Vienna Correctional Center and the walls are sweating literally and I woke up and I looked at that room and I said, ‘Lord if I ever get out of here, I’ll never come back’ and I haven’t been back and the only thing that saves me from going back every day is education.”
Geiter, who earned a bachelors degree at St. Xavier, a masters from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from Benedictine University, credits a nun, Sister Sue Sanders, as the angel who pushed him to succeed.
“One of the things that will make Daniel a fine professor and a teacher and president of Ward College is he understands what it means to need help and what it means to return it to others,” Sister Sanders said.
Now Geiter wants to pass on the opportunity for education to other former offenders.
He is rallying the support of many who have aided in his journey, including 91-year-old E. Glen Ward and his 92-year-old wife Adelaide for whom the college will be named.
“Just the whole idea of helping people who were having difficulty finding jobs because I automatically know that if people don’t have work to do they’re going to steal,” said Adelaide. “We want to be able to do something now to help them trade in their guns for pens and computers,” says Glen.
“Why is Ward College important to me? Because I want to be able to give back, like those individuals gave to me,” said Geiter, who plans to open Ward College in August in partnership with another local university to help with accreditation and is also working to raise about $250,000 to get the school up and running.
We can duplicate such efforts here in Ohio, and go one better: We can take one of Ohio’s prisons and turn it into a college campus. The only thing blocking the implementation of such a proposal is the recalcitrance of the folks who don’t want to see prisoners educated — who obviously would rather see them go back to prison, at a cost of $30,000 per year to taxpayers.
The logic is simple: Undereducated young men go into prison every day, and when they try to pick up a book there are some knuckleheads that step to them and say, “Screw that, let’s shoot some hoops, play some Spades, or watch some TV. What do you need education for?” And some impressionable young men believe this and go along.
But if all of the prisoners that want to take advantage of education while incarcerated were aggregated in the same institution the results would be simply amazing; I know what I’m talking about. I’ve damn sure done enough time to know.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.