[buzzer]
[voices echoing]
What's up, guys?
How you doing?
Now, we're talking about what we're doing
right here, right now.
We're not talking about the past.
We're putting everything else
that happened before this moment behind us.
95% of these incarcerated men and women
are returning to the community,
with 68% returning back to prison in the first three years.
There's a dichotomy here that we're struggling to fix.
This is a country that's built on second chances
but it ends at the prison system.
There's huge amount of guilt with the men and women
that have gone to prison.
But through this college program that we've created,
they're realizing that they can take their future
and really make it very different
than what they've seen in the past.
Because education has given them those tools.
As someone that went to prison, I know firsthand
that this is one of the key components
to helping fix this problem.
When I was 16 years old I shot and killed a person
and I received a 24-year sentence for that.
When I tried to wrap my head around the fact
that I took a human life, the world
got really small, really quickly.
And while I was sitting there thinking about
how I failed everybody, one of the officers came to my cell
and he just said to me, "Is there any chance I could get you
"to help me work with some of the other men?"
At that point in my life as a teenager,
I thought I had no value at all.
But as the older man pulled me on the side and said,
"Man, I heard you could help me.
"You're one of the most educated guys around."
So, I began to read to these men, in an effort to get them
to learn to read and write.
And you fast forward 19 years later,
and we have 588 students, six sites.
It's incredible and it was all born
and came right out of this place.
The students will talk about this education.
They talk about it being a new lens
and how that new lens gives them a way to look at the world
in a different way that they've never known even existed.
I'm fourth generation male incarcerated in my family.
I took my gift for numbers to become a drug dealer.
I took my gift of gab to negatively peer pressure
other people into getting in the game with me.
The education was very important
because I didn't realize the connection
between what I already knew, my natural talent, and success.
We wanna work with the student
that everyone else has given up on.
This is an accredited, degree-granting college program.
Their degree does not say University of Sing Sing,
it says Nyack College, it says Mercy Vollege,
it says Columbia University.
I have seen the rippling effect of that one degree
as it goes into their families, their children,
their neighbors, their community.
We are truly helping the community
through this one person and this one degree.
And we're looking at a very different future.
Welcome home, man.
Yes, babe.
I need some clothes.
Let's get some clothing, let's do it.
Let's get it done.
You know my dreaming, always been to give back to
some of the communities that I damaged,
because a lot of the kids that come up behind me,
they look up to me for all the wrong reasons.
So I wanna change that.
When the students are getting out
and they get to this clothing area, for a lot of them,
they left when they were teenagers.
Now they're coming back in their late 30's or early 40's.
There's no clothing, there's no nothing.
All the education in the world is worthless
if you don't have a clean shirt.
We have 10 racks of business attire to help you
be employable on the outside.
That's good, let's put this one on the side.
I appreciate you all, man.
It's not just about how the community looks at you,
but it's about looking at yourself and knowing
that you could be different enough to start over.
There's a quote by Victor Hugo that goes,
"There's nothing like a dream to create the future."
"Education made us who we are," Claude A. Helvetius.
Dr. Martin Luther King said, "The best way
"to solve a problem is to remove its cause,
"and you can't solve a problem with the same logic
"that created it."
Proud to say that this June I will be graduating
with my bachelor's degree.
[applause]
The students that we're working with upon release,
our alumni coordinator is finding them employment
in five or six weeks.
That's good if you've never been in prison.
We're telling the stories about second chances.
Through this college program that we've created,
we have a less than one percent recidivism rate,
but it's really a 99% success rate.
We're sending a message of hope.