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GEDs offer hope for life after prison
By STEVE PENNThe Kansas City Star
Every eye was cast on a wicker basket full of rolled-up paper.
No amount of smokes, food items or good behavior could buy one. They had to be earned.
And inside the walls of a prison, just like on the outside, they are invaluable.
Just like graduates from high schools all around the area who are earning their diplomas this month, each GED recipient that I heard from last week was filled with the possibilities that a high school equivalency could bring them.
I was honored to give the commencement address Friday at the GED graduation ceremony at the Lansing Correctional Facility. Once the gigantic steel door slammed shut behind me, I was escorted past a guard’s post to a chapel where 35 men wearing burgundy caps and gowns sat. After the program, I spoke with some of them about their aspirations and goals.
Mike Tully, 24, who has been an inmate at Lansing for the last five years, has nine years left to serve.
“This is going to help me when I get out,” Tully said of his GED. “It’s going to help me get a job that I want that I probably couldn’t have gotten before.”
Tully offered his advice to a young person struggling to get through high school.
“I’d tell them to stay focused,” Tully said. “You can do anything you want. You’ve just got to aspire to it. … If you want to be something in life, you really have to go to school.”
His father, Charles Tully, 68, of Independence, drove up to see his son receive his GED. When Mike gets out, he would like to go into real estate with his dad.
“I’m proud of him,” Charles Tully said. “He’s the only one out of seven kids who graduated. Mike is A-OK. I support him 200 percent.”
LeMarco Williams, 33, another GED recipient, sat with his arm around his mother, Ava Williams.
“Getting the GED was just something I had to do,” LeMarco Williams said. “I never really doubted that I needed one. But nowadays you need something. You’ve got to climb a ladder.
“So you have to get that degree before you can move on up to something better.”
Jorge Ruiz, 23, graduated from Lansing’s vocational welding program. He dreams of starting an FM radio station geared toward minorities.
“It’s a stepping stone to where I want to get,” said Ruiz, who gets out of prison in June 2009.
Ruiz wishes more people from the outside world would come to motivate guys like him.
“Sometimes you need somebody to give you that extra push,” Ruiz said. “Somebody needs to say, ‘I believe in you. I believe in your dreams.’ ”
Eric Bell, 22, another inmate who earned his GED, isn’t due for release until 2025. Bell echoed Ruiz’s request. He’d also like to see more minority role models come to Lansing.
“The thing that this penitentiary lacks is brothers and sisters being involved in what’s going on here,” Bell said.
“We make up a large percentage of the population in these places. We should have the most support.”
You can read all the stories about prison and the abundance of minorities locked up there.
But when you’re there and you see the numbers of blacks and Hispanics for yourself, you realize the problem is real.
So when you get the chance to hear a prisoner render advice, as a minority, you’ve got to listen. And to a man, each person I spoke with is convinced that the best way to get his life together is through education.
They all seem to understand that a degree can’t open prison gates. But it can unlock the mind.