BRUNSWICK — Years ago, JoJean Keller visited Kentucky’s extensive Mammoth Cave System. She stood in the middle of the cavernous space and the tour guide turned out the lights. The darkness was heavy, she said, and in the complete absence of any light, she remembers feeling lost. 

This feeling is what comes back to her every time she thinks about the incarcerated men and women she has worked within her decade of volunteering with Brunswick-based organization, College Guild. 

College Guild provides free, non-accredited courses to prisoners across the country. Volunteer readers receive coursework from inmates and provide constructive, thoughtful, respectful feedback. Materials are mailed to the prison and the readers receive electronic copies of the work. Correspondence and names behind the work are anonymous. 

“You have no idea how much education they do or don’t have,” Keller said. “You don’t share anything personal but you help the person see that there is someone who cares. 

“It lets you get to the (idea) that it’s a human being you’re dealing with, and you can take everything else out of the equation.” 

This is what Executive Director Mary Malia hopes happens with volunteers. 

“The entire (prison) experience is designed to be dehumanizing,” she said, and many of the incarcerated people they work with report that they “start to feel like a human being again.”

“All human beings deserve respect,” she said. “We can all hope that nobody thinks we are the worst things we have ever done.”

The courses offered range from traditional science and math to more creative subjects, such as writing on the nature of captivity or about family. There are no grades and the courses will not count toward a diploma. Instead, they work to foster a connection through people who are incarcerated and people who are not through a shared love of learning.

On Oct. 15, College Guild is hosting a “Shine a Light” breakfast fundraiser at 7 a.m. at the Curtis Memorial Library to get the word out about the organization and bring in new volunteers. 

College Guild was founded in 2001, and Malia estimates that in the past 18 years it has offered the program to over 8,000 incarcerated people, teaching roughly 500 students per year. The waitlist has more than 400 people and the volunteer mailing list has more than 200 names. 

Still, this is only a dent in the roughly 1.4 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons across the country, with just over 2,300 of those in Maine prisons in 2017, according to the National Institute of Corrections. 

More than half of incarcerated Americans have had little access to education, but those that receive post-secondary schooling during their sentence were less likely to return to prison. According to a 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, the most recent report of its kind, about 65% of incarcerated citizens had not received a high school diploma. Of those, 41% had dropped out, and 23% obtained a GED. 

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, prisoners that participate in post-secondary education are 43% less likely to return to prison. College Guild estimates its rate is closer to 50%. 

Most of the students are spread across the country, but College Guild has a special agreement with the Maine State Department of Corrections in which any prisoner in solitary confinement who wants to go through the program will immediately be enrolled. 

Solitary confinement, usually used as a punishment, can be very harmful, Malia said. According to the New York University Applied Psychology Opus, isolated inmates experience higher rates of suicide and self-harm compared to the general prison population. 

In solitary, inmates are only allowed access to mail. Since College Guild materials are mailed anyway, it is one more way to help preserve humanity and offer help, she said. 

Despite almost two decades at work, Malia said there is relatively little data on what they have accomplished, something she is trying to change.
Malia joined as executive director in 2018, and is working to compile the evidence basis for the work they are doing and restructuring the board of director’s goals from a start-up to a growth mindset.  She is trying to expand the 28-course catalog and offer more courses, some of which focus on more practical skills like finance management– something that is often requested. 

Now that founder Julie Zimmerman is taking a step back from carrying the organization, organizers are also trying to increase fundraising to account for more paid staff. 

For Keller, who is now chair of the board of directors, the decision to volunteer was an easy one. 

The cause “spoke very clearly to my heart,” she said. “It’s very powerful to work with someone on that level.” 

hlaclaire@timesrecord.com 

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