Places of detention have been in the headlines — about the shortage of corrections officers in county jails, high rates of COVID-19 infections in state prisons, and colleges offering degree programs in state and federal facilities.
This is encouraging in that the focus has been on the potential of incarcerated people when in good health, engaged in useful programming and in pursuit of a better future. It is in this future-oriented respect that I am involved in efforts to enroll students behind bars in university degree programs.
Our program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, called Scholars Serving Time, admitted a cohort of 12 women at Waseca Federal Correctional Institution, a low-security prison for female offenders in Minnesota, to pursue their associate in arts degree as well as a certificate in nonprofit leadership.
As director of the Nonprofit Leadership Program at MSU, Mankato, I saw tremendous potential for this endeavor. For the cohort members, sure, but more importantly for the nonprofit sector.
The sector strives to address issues such as poverty, family violence, substance abuse, mental health issues and sexual abuse: These are the very problems that a majority of women entering the criminal justice system have experienced. Some 35% of nonprofits operating in the United States are focused on these types of human services.
Yet the people most impacted by these issues are vastly underrepresented at all levels of the sector, including boards of directors, volunteers, donors, staff, management and executive leadership.
Women in general are underrepresented in the areas of nonprofit governance and leadership (though still the majority of staff and middle management), even while progress has been made; however, when viewed through the lens of additional inequities the gaps are more pronounced.
Engaging more women with the lived experiences that led in part to incarceration is essential for addressing myriad societal issues. After all, it would be absurd to ask someone with my lived experience to design — without significant collaboration with directly impacted populations — a program to address any of the above challenges, let alone the intersections of them. The hardest step is defining what the problem even is, let alone creating solutions for it, and some people are simply in a better position to tell that story.
We are of course working against our own innate biases. Many people in the nonprofit sector are well-intentioned, but paternalistic in their approach. They are the judge and the jury about how “those people,” even though they would never utter that phrase aloud, should be living their lives, using their resources, raising their kids, getting their nutrition and generally improving themselves to become good citizens. In short, we don’t consistently trust people to tell us what the real problems and solutions are.
We all want a better community, which means different responses all the way up the stream, from systemic sexism and racism, to opportunity gaps in education, to accessible community-based services for mental health, substance abuse and violence prevention, to a humane criminal justice system, to community reentry services during and after incarceration, to expecting and embracing full participation of all members of the community.
Not solving these problems has implications for everyone. Not solving these problems means we lose the potential of everyone affected. The loss of potential of a human is a great tragedy, I believe. And not one person is immune.
If our stated intention for places of detention is to punish and nothing more, then that is one thing. But if we are the people I believe we can be — people who are sincere in their intent to offer opportunities (sometimes more than one) for rehabilitation and participation — then every person should have the opportunity to live, work, learn, vote and serve.
Nonprofits will always achieve better outcomes when the right people are at the table. And they won’t always have the deepest pockets or richest friends. Their wealth will enrich the community, though: if we’re paying attention.
Kristi Rendahl is associate professor and director of the Nonprofit Leadership Program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
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