A Second Chance

In prison, she’s number 388975. Or the guards called her Wood-Sims. But in the classroom, she became Tiana—a human—again.

“It’s liberating. It’s not a constant reminder of my past and my mistakes,” she says. “My professors are seeing me as the woman I am today with all the growth that I’ve put in and recognizing me for me—not as why I am here.”

Now 35, she was arrested at age 24 for a crime she doesn’t want to discuss, saying it was a mistake of her youth. Indeed, most of the women in FEPPS—along with the faculty and administrators—prefer not to talk about the crimes that landed the women in prison. They caution against judging someone solely based on a mistake, however egregious, they made decades ago. FEPPS director Tanya Erzen puts it simply: “It’s not who they are now.”

Wood-Sims arrived at the correctional facility in 2016, scared and timid. She still had 11 years left on her sentence, which would disqualify her from many prison-based college programs—typically only people with seven years or less left can enroll.

Erzen, who is professor of religion, spirituality, and society at Puget Sound, cofounded FEPPS with the intent of making it open to anyone who qualified academically—whether they had one year left or a life sentence. She points to what she calls the “humanizing” effect of education in prison—as well as data showing that it reduces the recidivism rate by as much as 48%.

“Do we want people to leave prison and thrive, so that they don't have to go back there, and so that their families and children can thrive?” Erzen asks. “Or do we want people to cycle in and out of prison and give them no resources to do better?”

Erzen helped found FEPPS in 2012 after meeting with the Women’s Village, a group at the Washington Corrections Center for Women who had united to promote positive change. Instructors from Puget Sound and Evergreen State College taught the first noncredit courses in subjects ranging from sociology to mathematics. In 2014, FEPPS began a partnership with Tacoma Community College to accredit the courses; since then, 72 women have completed associate degrees from the community college while incarcerated.

State law in Washington at that time prohibited the use of public funding for prison-based college education (the law has since changed). Instead, FEPPS raised money independently, including a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation—money that, among other uses, helped pay the students’ tuition. Deb Sheehan, who until recently was operations manager of FEPPS, has a unique perspective on the program, having served six years at the corrections center for a crime of her own. She says the program wouldn’t exist without Erzen’s tireless work. 

“Tanya had the care and compassion to make this program,” she says. “We wouldn’t have had the associate degree without her. We wouldn’t have had this bachelor’s degree or graduation without her. Women on the inside wanted it, but they couldn’t do it without someone from the outside helping.”

The first classes for the BA program started in January 2020 inside a classroom in the prison’s education building, with Puget Sound professors traveling to the prison to teach in person. Then the COVID pandemic hit, and by the summer, faculty had to record their lectures for playback inside the facility, supplementing the lectures with packets of material.

College students who were on campuses throughout the country still talk about the mental and educational challenges of getting an education during the pandemic, being stuck in their dorm rooms and taking online classes. Those challenges were exponentially greater in the prison, where students had no access to the internet—no ability to email their professors or do research for their homework or papers. Wood-Sims remembers trying to analyze Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake by herself and feeling overwhelmed.

“It was very, very, challenging and hard, writing by hand, rewriting stuff, not having access to our professors to ask questions.”

One day, she told a classmate, “I cannot do this anymore.”

“We’ll get through this,” her classmate told her. “Let’s get an outline.” The encouragement, which got her over that speed bump, is typical of the camaraderie among FEPPS students: “We would get together and figure out math problems, revise each other’s essays,” Wood-Sims says. “We’d talk about philosophers and biology. It didn't matter if we didn’t have anything else in common. There was this mutual respect as scholars, and it created this community.”

Wood-Sims had grown up in Ballard, Wash., living in foster care because of her mother’s addiction. She said her life improved when she was placed with her grandmother (who had just gotten her foster license), but she had trauma from the first six years. Her grandmother was loving, though money was tight: “There were a lot of kids for her to take care of,” Wood-Sims recalls. “I didn't have the nicest this, the nicest that. That didn’t make school fun.” She also felt isolated from other students as a minority—she is Black, Native American, and Mexican—in a mostly white school district.

Wood-Sims dropped out of high school in her junior year, earned her GED, and worked at jobs ranging from Starbucks employee to billing coordinator before her arrest.

In FEPPS, a whole world of scholarship opened up to her as she immersed herself in African American studies, feminist theory, political theory, and sociology. Many of the courses available to FEPPS students are the same ones offered to Puget Sound students on campus: Seth Weinberger, for example, has taught the American Political Thought course at the prison; FEPPS students have taken the Law and Ethics in Business course from Lisa Johnson; and Douglas Sackman has taught the History of the West and Pacific Northwest course.

Elizabeth Shatswell ’24 is a FEPPS graduate who did the first three-fourths of her Puget Sound degree in prison before being released in July 2023 and finishing the degree on campus. Shatswell grew up in a low-income neighborhood and served time for a crime committed in 2002. “If you have a hard life, you don’t have the privilege of being curious,” Shatswell says. “As I learned new facts about the world, it made me curious. It was like Harry Potter before he went through the wall and realized there’s a whole magical world there.”

Samantha Jones ’24, who also received her degree at the correctional center in May, says the students encouraging each other improved the vibes in prison and reduced tensions. Prison, she says, “isn’t conducive to empowering each other, encouraging each other, being kind to each other. It’s a really high-stress environment. It’s really easy to be critical and bitchy. But when you are in the classroom together, people are super supportive.”

When she arrived at the prison in 2020, Jones was overwhelmed, crying every day, her 25-year sentence looming ahead of her like an eternity. In a peer support group, she talked to a woman who was serving a life sentence but was encouraging. “It blew me away that she was so upbeat and kind to others. The thing that kept her focused and on track was education.” The woman suggested that Jones sign up for FEPPS. Jones, who had previously earned an associate degree as a vet tech, found the liberal arts classes daunting. The professors and the other students all have high expectations, Jones says. “It gives you a reason to push yourself harder than you think you could.”

By 2021, faculty were allowed back in prison for in-person classes. Students had more freedom, but even so, they only had access to computers to write papers during study halls, scheduled for a few hours four times a week. Meanwhile, in Tacoma, Puget Sound undergrads taking Erzen’s Prison, Gender, and Education course helped out in the prison study halls.

Jenna Pfeiffer ’24 and Luca Grace ’26, who both took the course and worked as interns for FEPPS this past summer, asked the women who were incarcerated what research they needed for their capstone project. The students would leave the prison and help find resources through the campus library. The research would be printed out or put on hard drives and uploaded to the FEPPS students’ prison-issued computers, a process that could take as long as a week.

“It just made me more aware of my privilege,” says Grace, a junior with a double major in politics and government and communication studies, and a minor in crime, law and justice studies. “The simplest thing we didn’t think twice about, like finding research articles, was so much more challenging.”

Wood-Sims had the highest GPA of the FEPPS students graduating on that June day. She could have given the valedictory speech, but suggested that everyone make a small speech instead, and others agreed. “I felt it was only right due to everyone having different experiences,” she says. “That representation needed to be honored.”

The event featured a speech by Puget Sound President Isiaah Crawford, as well as an address by UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, whose scholarship focuses on race and criminal justice. Bestselling author Roxane Gay taped remarks in advance that were played at the ceremony.

Sheehan arranged for treats like the nail polish and fresh fruit and allowing children to attend. She knows firsthand how hard it had been for her boys to visit her when she was in prison and return back home, worrying about her being stuck there. The graduation ceremony presented a counternarrative: their mothers thriving, and others admiring them.

Samantha Jones brought the crowd to tears when she dedicated her speech to her 11-year-old daughter, Saylah. “She’s never been angry at me for being here, even though she has every right to be,” Jones said. “She keeps me going every day and motivates me to do better.”

Jones told her daughter that if she could get a degree in prison, her daughter could succeed in her own path. Family members sat with graduates throughout the ceremony, and Jones’ daughter kept her hand on her mother for the entire celebration.

Wood-Sims’ daughter was also brimming with pride. As Wood-Sims readies herself for her release, currently projected for 2026, she is thinking ahead to not only family bonds but using her college degree to work in the nonprofit space, possibly to advocate for alternatives to incarceration and help people who were incarcerated reenter society.

She believes her college degree and exemplary grades will help her overcome the challenge of getting a job after she is released. “It will show the fact that I can think critically, that I can complete something that I have dedication to. I think it will open doors for me.”

The doors she thought were slammed shut when she walked into prison are now open, thanks to a program that believed in her.