Harvard hasn't done too well lately. They offered Chelsea Manning a
fellowship and opportunity to speak, and then retracted the offer at the
behest of a CIA torturer who holds a similar position.
Miriam
Michelle Jones was incarcerated in Indiana for more than two decades and was
released last month. In a breathtaking feat of rehabilitation, Jones has
become a published scholar of American history and an author of plays.
(photo: Andrew Spear/The Marshall Project)
The Remarkable Story of Michelle Jones' Redemption and Harvard's Cowardice
By Andrew Spear, The Marshall Project
15 September 17
Michelle Jones was released last month after serving more than two decades
in an Indiana prison for the murder of her 4-year-old son. The very next
day, she arrived at New York University, a promising Ph.D. student in
American studies.
In a breathtaking feat of rehabilitation, Jones, now 45, became a published
scholar of American history while behind bars, and presented her work by
videoconference to historians' conclaves and the Indiana General Assembly.
With no internet access and a prison library that skewed toward romance
novels, she led a team of inmates that pored through reams of photocopied
documents from the state archives to produce the Indiana Historical
Society's best research project last year. As prisoner No. 970554, Jones
also wrote several dance compositions and historical plays, one of which is
slated to open at an Indianapolis theater in December.
N.Y.U. was one of several top schools that recruited her for their doctoral
programs. She was also among 18 selected from more than 300 applicants to
Harvard University's history program. But in a rare override of a
department's authority to choose its graduate students, Harvard's top brass
overturned Jones's admission after some professors raised concerns that she
downplayed her crime during the application process.
Elizabeth Hinton, one of the Harvard historians who backed Jones, called her
"one of the strongest candidates in the country last year, period." The case
"throws into relief," she added, the question of "how much do we really
believe in the possibility of human redemption?"
The Marshall Project obtained internal emails and memos related to Jones's
application, and interviewed eight professors and administrators involved in
reviewing it.
While top Harvard officials typically rubber-stamp departmental admissions
decisions, in this case the university's leadership - including the
president, provost, and deans of the graduate school - reversed one,
according to the emails and interviews, out of concern that her background
would cause a backlash among rejected applicants, conservative news outlets
or parents of students.
The admissions dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
declined to be interviewed, and a university spokeswoman did not respond to
a set of eight questions about the case, saying that "as a policy, we do not
comment on individual applicants."
Instead, the spokeswoman offered a general statement saying the graduate
school "is committed to recruiting and enrolling students from all
backgrounds" and "strives to create an inclusive and supportive environment
where all students can thrive."
Harvard has, indeed, made room for a wider range of voices on its campus in
recent years, including the formerly incarcerated. Drew Faust, a historian
who is departing as Harvard's president in June after a decade, has expanded
global outreach and financial aid and hired a host of minority faculty who
have broadened perspectives about prison reform and black culture. In that
mode of outreach, staff members of both Harvard's history and American
studies departments took it upon themselves to type Jones's application into
Harvard's online system since she could not.
But after the history department accepted her and the American studies
program listed her as a top alternate, two American studies professors
flagged Jones's file for the admissions dean of the Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences. In a memo to university administrators, these professors said
the admissions dean had told them Jones's selection would be reviewed by the
president and provost, and questioned whether she had minimized her crime
"to the point of misrepresentation."
"We didn't have some preconceived idea about crucifying Michelle," said John
Stauffer, one of the two American studies professors. "But frankly, we knew
that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would
probably say that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child
murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c'mon."
Jones got pregnant at 14 after what she called non-consensual sex with a
high-school senior. Her mother responded by beating her in the stomach with
a board, according to the prosecutor who later handled her case, and she was
placed in a series of group homes and foster families.
In a personal statement accompanying her Harvard application, Jones said she
had a psychological breakdown after years of abandonment and domestic
violence, and inflicted similar treatment on her own son, Brandon Sims.
The boy died in 1992 in circumstances that remain unclear; the body was
never found.
Two years later, during a stay at a mental-health crisis center, Jones
admitted that she had buried him without notifying the police or Brandon's
father and his family. At her trial, a former friend testified that Jones
confessed to having beaten the boy and then leaving him alone for days in
their apartment, eventually returning to find him dead in his bedroom.
Jones was sentenced to 50 years in prison, but released after 20 based on
her good behavior and educational attainment.
In her statement to Harvard, Jones wrote of Brandon: "I have made a
commitment to myself and him that with the time I have left, I will live a
redeemed life, one of service and value to others."
Brandon's father and grandmother could not be reached for comment.
'Where were all the ladies?'
Incarcerated in 1996, Jones worked for five years in the law library at
Indiana Women's Prison, and got certified as a paralegal. She received a
bachelor's degree from Ball State University in 2004, and audited
graduate-level classes at Indiana University.
Her blossoming as a historian began in 2012, when Kelsey Kauffman, a former
professor who volunteered at the prison, encouraged inmates to research the
origins of their involuntary home, which opened in 1873 as the first adult
female correctional facility in the United States. Soon, Jones was placing
library requests for reference books and, when they arrived months later,
scouring the footnotes for what to order next.
After meticulously logging demographic data from century-old registries from
the Indiana Women's Prison, Jones made a discovery: There were no
prostitutes on the rolls. "Where," she asked, "were all the ladies?" meaning
so-called ladies of the night.
With the help of a state librarian, she and another inmate realized that a
Catholic laundry house that opened around that time in Indianapolis was
actually a reformatory for "fallen women" - those convicted of sex offenses.
Then they found more than 30 similar institutions around the country, akin
to the Magdalene Laundries recently unearthed in Ireland.
Under Kauffman's tutelage, they wrote up their findings, published them in
an Indiana academic journal, and won the state historical society award.
Jones also presented the paper remotely at multiple academic conferences,
and, at others, shared different work about the abuse of early inmates at
Indiana Women's Prison by its Quaker founders.
With the help of a state librarian, she and another inmate realized that a
Catholic laundry house that opened around that time in Indianapolis was
actually a reformatory for "fallen women" - those convicted of sex offenses.
Then they found more than 30 similar institutions around the country, akin
to the Magdalene Laundries recently unearthed in Ireland.
Under Kauffman's tutelage, they wrote up their findings, published them in
an Indiana academic journal, and won the state historical society award.
Jones also presented the paper remotely at multiple academic conferences,
and, at others, shared different work about the abuse of early inmates at
Indiana Women's Prison by its Quaker founders.
Jones was supposed to be released in October, but received a two-month
reduction of her sentence so she could start a Ph.D. program on time this
fall. She applied to eight, with Harvard her first choice because of
historians there whose work on incarceration she admired.
While those historians embraced her application, others at Harvard
questioned not only whether Jones had disclosed enough information about her
past, but whether she could handle its pressure-cooker atmosphere.
"One of our considerations," Stauffer said in an interview, "was if this
candidate is admitted to Harvard, where everyone is an elite among elites,
that adjustment could be too much."
Alison Frank Johnson, director of graduate studies for the history
department, dismissed that argument as paternalistic.
"Michelle was sentenced in a courtroom to serve X years, but we decided -
unilaterally - that it should be X years plus no Harvard," she said. "Is it
that she did not show the appropriate degree of horror in herself, by
applying?
"We're not her priests," Johnson added, using an expletive.
'A sentence is a sentence.'
Over the past decade, some universities, corporations, and state and local
governments have begun to break down barriers that block formerly
incarcerated people from education and employment. A "ban the box" campaign
by civil-rights groups led scores of institutions, including Harvard's
graduate schools, to remove a question about criminal records from their
initial applications.
But most of these efforts focus on giving a fresh start to nonviolent
offenders, especially those caught up by tough sentencing laws for drug
crimes.
"It's like we only have enough imagination - and courage - to envision
second chances for the people who shouldn't have been in prison in the first
place," Johnson said.
Jones's many supporters include Heather Ann Thompson, who won the Pulitzer
Prize in history this spring, and submitted a recommendation letter on her
behalf. There is also Diane Marger Moore, the prosecutor who argued that
Jones receive the maximum sentence two decades ago and is now writing a book
about the case.
"Look, as a mother, I thought it was just an awful crime," said Marger
Moore, now a lawyer at a large firm in Los Angeles. "But what Harvard did is
highly inappropriate: I'm the prosecutor, not them. Michelle Jones served
her time, and she served a long time, exactly what she deserved. A sentence
is a sentence."
Her backers saw her background as an asset, given the growing academic
interest in incarceration.
"It was a chance for us to do something that we've been saying we're trying
to do at Harvard, which is to set up conversations between academics and
eyewitnesses," said Walter Johnson, director of an American history study
center at the university.
But the American studies professors said in their memo to administrators
that "honest and full narration is an essential part of our enterprise," and
questioned whether Jones had met that standard in framing her past. In the
personal statement, which was not required, she did not detail her
involvement in the crime, but wrote that as a teenager she left Brandon at
home alone, that he died, and that she has grieved for him deeply and daily
since.
Stauffer emphasized in interviews that he and his departmental colleague,
Dan Carpenter, were simply trying to ensure that Harvard did its due
diligence about the candidacy.
"We do not want to stand in the way of, advance a case against, or in any
way hijack the career of Michelle Jones, who has served her time, who has
clearly done amazing things while incarcerated, who shows passion for her
craft, and whose full story the two of us can never really know," they wrote
in the memo.
"If officials who take a careful look at the case decide that Harvard should
move forward, then we think that the university should do everything in its
power and ability to welcome Jones here and support her, and we are indeed
happy to play a part in that effort," they continued. "We have stated our
concerns as questions, and we hope they are treated as nothing more nor less
than questions, not as an implicit or explicit judgment against a person and
her candidacy."
Jones, in an interview, said that if anyone at Harvard wanted her to
elaborate on the criminal case or her preparedness for the Ph.D. program,
they should have asked. "I just didn't want my crime to be the lens through
which everything I'd done, and hoped for, was seen," she said.
"I knew that I had come from this very dark place - I was abhorrent to
society," she continued. "But for 20 years, I've tried to do right, because
I was still interested in the world, and because I didn't believe my past
made me somehow cosmically un-educatable forever."
'I've already graduated from the toughest school there is.'
Yale University also rejected Jones, though it is unclear what role her
crime may have played in its decision; officials there would not discuss her
application.
But she was courted by the University of California, Berkeley; the
University of Michigan; the University of Kansas; and N.Y.U., which assigned
graduate students to send Jones welcoming notes on JPay, a prison email app.
She arrived in Manhattan during the back-to-school season of fresh starts,
having never used a smartphone. She wore prison-issue glasses and carried
boxes full of jailhouse research notes.
If her new parole officer allows it, Jones hopes to teach in N.Y.U's prison
education program, as a way to remember where she has been. She also hopes
to take the train to Cambridge, Mass., every other week to sit in on a
Harvard seminar on the history of crime and punishment in America.
"We're having her come up here for that partly out of a sense of pique,"
Walter Johnson said.
At N.Y.U., Nikhil Singh, faculty director of the prison-education program,
acknowledged that "Michelle will have a lot to prove."
"Our hope is that she is actually far, far more resourceful and driven than
most college students," he added, "who take for granted they are supposed to
be here."
On the Friday before classes started, in a lounge on the N.Y.U. campus,
Jones said any presumption that she is not ready for a Ph.D. underestimates
her own moxie and "sells prison short."
"People don't survive 20 years of incarceration with any kind of grace
unless they have the discipline to do their reading and writing in the chaos
of that place," Jones said. "Forget Harvard. I've already graduated from the
toughest school there is."
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
