Valedictorian Knows What Future Holds
Thursday was graduation day for Cathy Watkins. She received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Marymount Manhattan College.
Ms. Watkins did so well in her courses that she was named the class speaker. She set her speech on the lectern and put on her reading glasses. At 41 — a grandmother of three, no less — she was not the standard age for a graduate.
Much of what she said would sound familiar to anyone who ever sat through a commencement ceremony. “One person can make a difference,” she told her fellow students. “Let that difference start with you.” Afterward, she joined her classmates and visiting relatives for lunch.
And then Ms. Watkins returned to her normal life, locked up behind the walls and concertina wire of the maximum-security state prison for women in this Westchester suburb of New York City.
She has been here for 12 years. She is likely to stay here for a long time, having been found guilty of a 1995 murder in Manhattan. She didn’t do it, she said in an interview. But “innocent or guilty,” she said, “you can still grow to be a better person.”
“Even though these walls can restrict our physical movement,” she said in her valedictory, “they cannot restrict our imagination, nor our connection to the outside world.”
In some ways, a commencement exercise inside prison is much like any held on the outside. The graduates wore caps and gowns. They filed in and out of the Bedford Hills gym to Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance.” Their worthiness was affirmed by a guest speaker, Lanie Robertson, a playwright. “You each have your own spark of celestial fire,” he told them.
But how many ceremonies have you gone to where the robes hide state-issued green uniforms, or where the proceedings are interrupted and the graduates told to stand so that the guards can count them and make sure no one has slipped away?
At how many commencements can you say with confidence that the graduates enjoy the unqualified support of every one of their mates? At Bedford Hills, there was no such thing as polite applause. Dozens of inmates attended, and let out enormous cheers and whoops for each woman who walked on stage. It was as if every diploma was a victory for them all.
Thirty women graduated: 5 with bachelor’s degrees, 9 with associate’s degrees and 16 with high school equivalency diplomas that qualify them for college-level work.
Marymount Manhattan, on East 71st Street, has conferred degrees here since 1997 in collaboration with six other schools. “What better deal there is for the people of New York State, I simply don’t know,” said Judson R. Shaver, the college’s president. “The recidivism rate for women who graduate in our program, as far as we know, is zero.”
A 2001 studyby the Graduate Center of the City University of New York showed that Bedford Hills women who took college courses were far less likely to land back in prison than those who skipped the program. Overall behavior inside the prison improved. “If you want your degree, you have to stay out of trouble,” said Aileen Baumgartner, the program’s director since 2002.
IN a prison with about 800 inmates, Ms. Baumgartner had 175 students this semester. For those who stay in the program all the way, the road to a bachelor’s degree is long. Only a few courses may be taken each semester. Ms. Watkins needed 11 years to get her degree. Monica Szlekovics needed 10.
“I took my time,” Ms. Szlekovics said, adding with a glint of irony, “I have a lot of time.”
That she does. She was found guilty of a 1996 murder in Rochester and sentenced to a minimum term of 50 years. At 33, she can expect to stay where she is into old age.
For her, graduation was “bittersweet.” The program “allowed me to live in here,” she said. Now she wonders “what’s the next chapter in my life here? How do I engage myself intellectually?”
Women like Ms. Watkins and Ms. Szlekovics are “the most compelling” for Ms. Baumgartner. Most people focus on how a program like hers can help prisoners once they’re freed. “But frankly,” she said, “I’m here for the ones who won’t get out — because they still have minds and spirit, and can grow. Part of me thinks that crime stems from a lack of imagination. What higher education does is broaden the imagination.”
“I’m not in the business of shutting doors on people,” she said.
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
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