Everything I witnessed while incarcerated made me want to be an advocate for individuals who were afraid to speak for themselves,
who felt like they didn’t have the words to say, who felt like their voice would be ignored when they said it.
I found myself facing three years in prison instead of doing an amazing job after receiving my degree from Harvard.
I never received my degree. And I was incarcerated. And I didn’t know what to do.
I never saw that as part of my future.
It’s an experience where you don’t know who you are anymore.
You have this idea of, I am capable, I am strong, I am an advocate for myself.
These are things that I know about me.
When you’re told when to wake up, when to use the bathroom, and how many sanitary napkins you can have, it really changes the world that you live in.
Every form of your life is controlled by someone else.
The institutionalization process is to break you down.
It is to make you feel like you’re less than, to keep you in line and to let you know that you don’t have a voice.
You don’t have any power. You don’t have any agency. So when you come home, those are the things you’ve begun to internalize.
So it’s an uphill battle to say, no that’s not who I am, that’s what you tried to make me.
I fought every day to not let that system change who I was, but I did witness frequently how much it changed many women that surrounded me.
And that was always discouraging because at that point, I couldn’t do anything. What can you do? You’re here sitting next to them.
I had an amazing transformative experience while in prison.
That was a course I took with the Boston University Prison Education program where we had a joint class with the Harvard divinity school.
And so there were Harvard students and incarcerated students and we studied crime and punishment while in prison.
It seems like the strangest thing ever, but it was the first time that I interacted with individuals
who knew my story from the outside, because I was incarcerated after
you know, everything happened. And the support that they gave, the lack of judgment was something I didn’t realize that I was missing.
My experience at Harvard had really shattered a bubble that I lived in.
And they helped me to see that the circumstance was not who I was. They were willing to look at Brittany and not look at an individual who committed a crime,
an individual who made a mistake. It was just, you’re Brittany and your experiences may shape who you are, but it’s not who you are.
It was also really important because I was able to finish my degree while in prison,
so when I came home in 2014, I was able to walk across the stage and get my degree,
which was an amazing experience after having fought Harvard for my degree and not been able to receive it after attending there for four years.
When I was released, I didn’t know what the next steps were, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I had this rich educational experience at Harvard.
And even a great educational experience while incarcerated with Boston University, but I was ashamed and I felt like everyone was judging me.
I battled with seeing my worth and I felt like I had a grasp on that, but I felt like everyone would always judge me by the circumstance
and I wouldn’t get the opportunity to let me shine through.
I knew I wanted to do social work. I knew I wanted to do social services
and I was scared to put myself out there because how do I explain this gap on my resume
if the question doesn’t come up. And if it does come up, how do I navigate a conversation about my incarceration history and not feel like
that the only condition that you’re going to look at. You’re not going to get, you know,
the extensive volunteer experience I have both in Harlem and in Dorchester.
You’re not going to look at the rich educational experience I have. It’s going to be
And I didn’t know how to deal with those emotions with having people judge me based on the incarceration experience
I was nervous. Oh my God. Day one, I was shaking, writing on the board. I had no formal teaching experience. I had taught GED prep while I was incarcerated
and tutored some of my peers while there. But I’d never been in front of a classroom.
The criminal justice system incarcerates more males than females, so we see a lot more males in the classroom and also it’s a hypermasculine environment.
And that was a challenge for me to address kind of, those concerns and then they saw me as other. And I thought that it was really important
for them to see that while, no none of us have the same lived experience, but I could identify on a very intimate level, the things that they were going through
and being in a classroom, in dealing with their incarceration history, and worrying about what the next steps were.
So I shared my story with them and I cried.
And it was the first time I had spoken to somebody about my experience that wasn’t a family member or know me pre-incarceration and it was a huge relief
and a huge release. And from there I just kind of barreled forward and they became my therapy and I think I became theirs.
It was really important for me to have somebody see that I was more than my incarceration history. Education to me is more than a tool for earning potential.
It’s a tool for empowerment.
As we fight for criminal justice reform, it’s more than just the education classroom.
It’s the advocacy work that we do, it’s the policy work that we do at the Fortune Society.
It’s very important in changing not just my experience or the experience of the people we touch in the program, but in changing the system as a whole.