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In fall 2020, the Rochester Education Justice Initiative (REJI) launched the Justice Scholars program as a way to recruit men and women leaving prison to compete for admission to local colleges and universities.

The program is managed by Precious Bedell, REJI’s assistant director of community outreach. Bedell’s life trajectory is similar to what Justice Scholars are building for themselves.

Formerly incarcerated, she completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees (during her incarceration) and later established a nonprofit, Turning Points Resource Center, to provide services and support to incarcerated people and their family members.

She also built a career in community health at the Medical Center, where her colleagues honored her with the David Satcher Award for Community Health Improvement in 2015. In January, President Sarah Mangelsdorf recognized her with a Presidential Stronger as One Diversity Award in the category of Advocacy and Action, for her work with REJI.

The Justice Scholars program is not a scholarship. It does not pay for tuition, room, or board, although it does offer scholars some assistance paying for course materials.

Instead, it’s both a practical solution to a documented problem and an effort to increase diversity in higher education in the richest sense.

Formerly incarcerated men and women become students in the college classroom, working toward important credentials. At the same time, traditional students interact with classmates from one of the most stigmatized groups in American society—and are often enriched by the perspectives they bring.

Bedell is a motivated booster of the program, working to reach as many formerly incarcerated men and women as she can to let them know that REJI can connect them with opportunities for higher education.

“Our program is not a cookie-cutter approach,” she said last summer on the radio program Connections, aired on Rochester’s National Public Radio affiliate, WXXI. “We let people choose where they want to go, and help them navigate the resources,” including the application process and financial aid. At the University, there are five Justice Scholars as of spring 2022.

Jesse Johnston ’22: ‘Head Over Heels’ about Philosophy

Serving a sentence at Five Points Correctional Facility, Jesse Johnston ’22 was working toward an associate’s degree when a staff member of the prison education program there made a not-so-subtle suggestion. Knowing Johnston was nearing his release date, she “forced me to apply to Rochester,” Johnston recalls, laughing.

Years earlier, when he had been struggling with drug addiction, Johnston had failed out of Finger Lakes Community College. He lost confidence in himself, figuring higher education was “for people who are smarter, who can read faster, who can talk better. And I just don’t have it,” he recalls telling himself. But at Five Points, college courses became his lifeline, and he excelled in them.

Among his favorite courses was an introduction to art history taught by Eitan Freedenberg ’20 (PhD), then a graduate student in Rochester’s graduate program in visual and cultural studies. Johnston, a casual sketcher, enjoyed art from the European Renaissance and Romantic periods. “Eitan educated me on what [the art] really meant, and what that stood for,” Johnston says. Freedenberg encouraged his interest and “really opened up my eyes to what else was out there.”

On the suggestion of that Five Points staff member, Johnston got back in touch with Freedenberg, who encouraged his application, gave him a tour of the River Campus, and introduced him to a few other faculty members, along with Precious Bedell, who helped him navigate the application and financial aid processes.

“And here I am,” Johnston says.

Now in his 30s, he’s closer in age to some of the faculty than he is to his classmates. And there have been times in his courses where he’s revealed that he served time in prison. “I’ve had to drop the bomb,” he says. “Mass incarceration, systemic racism—these things come up. I feel like I have to divulge my history to speak as an authority. And, surprisingly, students take it very well.”

Like traditional students, Johnston has branched out since starting at the University. His entrée into art history led him to explore other interests, notably political science (his major) and philosophy. He began to shape, and then to refine, his career plans.

“I was in a hurry to just run out and go to law school immediately,” he says. During his first semester at Rochester, he started working at the Center for Community Alternatives, helping the New York state–level nonprofit pursue an agenda of criminal justice reform. But he credits Alison Peterman—associate professor and cochair of philosophy and one of the first REJI faculty—for convincing him to slow down just a bit, putting law school on hold to pursue his research interest in the history and philosophy of punishment.

Now Johnston hopes to delay law school to pursue a master’s degree in philosophy at Rochester. When he learned that such a path was possible, “I was head over heels,” he says.

Sarah Cushman ’23: A Path to Public Health

Sarah Cushman ’23 completed her first semester at Rochester in fall 2021 while working full time as a community health specialist at Trillium Health.

“I work, go to school, leave right away, and go back to work,” she says, describing a typical day.

In addition to a grueling schedule, Cushman has a challenge few traditional students face: she spent her early adult years without access to the internet, and with limited access to computers. Last fall, with much trepidation, she told her statistics professor, “I’ve never used a computer to do coding.” But Katherine Grzesik, the assistant professor of statistics Cushman calls “Dr. G,” was unfazed. “Every Friday morning, she zoomed in with me from her house,” Cushman says, with a mixture of relief and gratitude.

Twenty years ago, Cushman was a student-athlete at Irondequoit High School, just outside Rochester. She went on to Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she had the chance to play Division I soccer. During her sophomore year, she was sexually assaulted. In the aftermath of that trauma, she turned to drugs and eventually landed downstate at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.

“I thought all of my childhood dreams had just gone down the drain and I was going to be nothing but a felon or a drug addict—all of the labels that society had put on me,” she says.

But Cushman is tenacious. She started college courses at Bedford Hills and earned an associate’s degree. Then, she experienced a setback that tested her resolve: she was transferred to Albion Correctional Facility, where the only courses available led to the degree she had just earned.

“For the first few months [at Albion], I was lost,” she says. “But losing that mental stimulation is what drove me to find something at Albion to fulfill that need to learn and grow.”

Cushman entered a prison-based peer health training program run by the AIDS Institute, a division of the New York State Department of Health. The program whet her appetite for a career in public health.

After her release, she entered New York state’s credentialed alcohol and substance abuse certification, or CASAC, program. And she followed through on a friend’s advice: “If you’re going back to Rochester,” the friend told her, “the biggest piece of advice I can give you is to connect with Precious Bedell.”

Bedell helped Cushman through the process of applying to several schools in the area. (“I didn’t know anything about a common app,” Cushman says.) Between Bedell, Johnston (who had recently completed the same process), and staff in the admissions office, she learned about scholarships she could apply for in addition to need-based aid. “I was hoping to go to U of R because of the connection with REJI,” she says.

At the end of her first semester at the University, she declared her intention to major in health, behavior, and society.

“Right now, I’m kind of on the ground level, and I love it,” she says of her work at Trillium. But she has a growing interest in policy, too.

“I really want to bring a consumer’s voice. Because how are we making decisions about people without asking those people?” she asks. “What are their barriers to care? We make assumptions from a lofty office. And those may not be what’s really the barrier.”