At the time of my incarceration within the Massachusetts state prison system back in 2004 access to postsecondary educational opportunities were almost nonexistent at most facilities. Educational attainment was capped at the high school diploma/GED level, so if one already possessed these credentials the doors to advanced learning were solidly closed.  So, my peers and I got creative and used an existing program platform (Toastmasters) as our launchpad for higher learning.  We started out in 2006 by staging internal debate events within Old Colony Correctional Center on relevant public policy topics and our team-based debates quickly became a popular outlet for the thoughtful analysis and synthesized presentation of some complex academic subject matters. Our non-traditional process made higher learning accessible to people of all educational backgrounds and our internal events generated a great deal of inspiration amongst our population and staff alike. As my teammates and I continued to challenge ourselves, and each other, our self-confidence grew and we began looking to test our skill beyond the walls.

Since none of us could attend college at the time, we invited the colleges to come to us, and Bridgewater State College (now renamed Bridgewater State University) was the first to accept our challenge in 2009. We beat them so convincingly during our first contest in the Spring of 2009 that we really opened a lot of eyes to the true potential of incarcerated people.  Even tough, old MA-DOC officers and administrators were openly complimentary. All of a sudden we were changing the entire culture of the prison environment and I was selected to meet with then Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (D) to discuss our programming.  We hosted another successful, and winning, debate against Bridgewater State in the Fall of 2009 and that led to the formation of the first Inside-Out Prison Exchange Pilot Program in Massachusetts in the Spring of 2010 wherein a group of incarcerated learners were given the opportunity to spend a semester with a co-ed group of criminal justice students from Bridgewater State College. It was a very enriching and transformative experience for all full of dynamic discourse which bridged our two social worlds and created a unique space for the sharing of different experiential and cultural viewpoints. We concluded the semester with another fantastic debate event, and this time we integrated the teams for the first time ever with a mixture of Old Colony and Bridgewater State debaters.

Later in 2010, I transferred to MCI-Norfolk to pursue the college programming offered there by Boston University and I took my debate training model with me. It took a while to convince the administration to give us a chance to officially revive the legendary Norfolk Prison Debating Society and engage local universities but I eventually sold my proposal. In 2016, we hosted Boston College’s Fulton Debating Society and won. Norfolk went on to host bi-annual events against MIT, Harvard, and Cornell as well. COVID-19 then hit the world and prisons especially hard and stalled all programming indefinitely.

Since my release from prison in June of 2022, I’ve been working to replicate the successes of our prison education model here in Massachusetts in an effort to provide empowering new opportunities for incarcerated men and women everywhere. Thanks to our organizational partners at the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, our academic partners like John Katsulas of Boston College and Dr. Lee Perlman of MIT, our media partners at the Prison Journalism Project along with award-winning journalist Natasha Haverty, and NPDL’s Associate Director Brittany LaMarr, we are now actualizing my vision for a National Prison Debate league.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/06/07/the-inside-story-of-a-legendary-prison-debate-team