Eighteen women from Logan Correctional Center recently celebrated earning their bachelor’s degrees from Northwestern University, marking a historic milestone.
Wearing gowns and stoles representing their accomplishments, the graduates walked into a ceremony years in the making. For their families, it was a chance to watch their loved ones take the stage and celebrate earning college degrees while incarcerated.
The women are part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, which offers coursework taught by university faculty — including classes in political science, psychology and history.
The graduates were honored during a ceremony at the Kewanee Life Skills Re-Entry Center. Guest speakers, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, offered words of encouragement. The cohort then celebrated with family, friends and supporters, sharing a meal for a couple hours.
Jennifer Lackey, the program’s founding director, has led the effort to expand access to higher education for incarcerated students. The graduation marked a significant milestone for the program’s first cohort of women at Logan. During the ceremony, graduates shared how education changed their perspectives.
“Northwestern fostered my imagination and granted me access to knowledge, allowing me to realize the limitless possibilities and potential energy within people and places that have long been denied this privilege,” Chelsea “Irie” Raker said.
Another graduate reflected on how her understanding of education developed later in life.
“It wasn’t until I became a young adult that I understood the importance of education, but by this time I was incarcerated,” Margaret DeFrancisco said.
For Erika Ray, the graduation experience offered a striking contrast to the circumstances of her incarceration.
“We rode down here cuffed to chains on the bus, but then we get in here and its scholars and famous writers and Nancy Pelosi, all under the same roof as us, congratulating us,” Ray said.
Ray is serving a 42-year prison sentence and is expected to be in her 60s when she is released. Still, she is thinking about how she can use what she has learned to help others.
“I hope to start my own organization,” Ray said. “I hope to do some preventive work in Chicago … to tackle social determinants so that younger women don’t end up in the carceral system.”
For Maria Garza, who spent nearly 12 years incarcerated at Logan, the challenges of returning to life outside prison have shaped her work today. She is now the co-founder of Challenge II Change, advocating for reentry services to help others navigate the transition after incarceration.
“My dream is now to make sure that nobody, whether it be a man or a woman, goes through the hardships of reentry the way I did,” Garza said. “It is disheartening. It’s sometimes demoralizing. …. When I tell you I crawled, I crawled.”
The Northwestern Prison Education Program was founded in 2018 and currently operates out of both Logan and the male-only Sheridan Correctional Center in Sheridan, Illinois. Two cohorts of men have graduated at Sheridan.
