Race/Related: From Prison to Ph.D.

The redemption and rejection of Michelle Jones View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Thursday, September 14, 2017 [Join Race/Related »]( [Michelle Jones was released in August after two decades in prison. Now a Ph.D. candidate at N.Y.U., Ms. Jones is being heralded as an extraordinary self-made scholar of history.] Michelle Jones was released in August after two decades in prison. Now a Ph.D. candidate at N.Y.U., Ms. Jones is being heralded as an extraordinary self-made scholar of history. Damon Winter/The New York Times [Eli Hager] Eli Hager [Eli Hager]( is a staff writer for [The Marshall Project,]( a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues. In April, I received an email from a source: a teacher at a women’s prison in Indiana. In it, she wrote almost in passing that one of her students — who had been incarcerated for more than two decades for the murder of her 4-year-old son — was now getting out, and had already been “accepted at N.Y.U., Harvard and a host of other top grad schools...” You don’t hear that every day, I thought. And that was before I knew that Harvard’s top brass, including its president and provost, had taken the highly unusual step of overruling their history department’s selection of this extraordinary student, Michelle Jones, citing her crime. To Ms. Jones’s many supporters, her story is about her profound accomplishments and her joyful personality. Their goal was in part to convey to the world all she had achieved while in prison — conducting original archival research without the internet, publishing widely, presenting her groundbreaking findings by video-chat to historians’ conferences, and winning the loyal support of the top academics in her field, all without knowing it would lead to any concrete reward. To Harvard, according to a short, largely evasive statement they provided me in answer to my questions about the case, a focal point of the story should be their record on diversity, of which they are extremely proud. The university has, of late, prioritized the recruitment of people of color, and its president, Drew Gilpin Faust, recently met with Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss the role of academia in slavery and racial oppression. But to me, neither of these issues was exactly to the point. Ms. Jones’s achievements were dazzling, and essential to the story. The university’s stance on diversity I wanted to mention, too, largely to suggest the irony of their rejection of this qualified black candidate whose life experiences — a single-parent household, childhood abuse, foster care, a serious crime, two decades of incarceration, and the insistence of institutions on continuing to punish her after she had served her sentence — were familiar barriers to African-Americans and other marginalized groups disproportionately represented in our prisons. Still, it wasn’t quite the main thrust of the story. Harvard’s top officials did not make their decision on the basis of Ms. Jones’s accomplishments nor her race, at least not explicitly. They did what they did because of what they felt was her inability to fully recover from or account for an awful crime. This story, as Harvard’s graduate history director phrased it to me, was at heart about whether our great institutions — and all of us, really — have the courage, and the imagination, to conceive of redemption. Are we actually, as Americans are often said to be, a nation of second chances? Or do we believe in fresh starts only for low-level, nonviolent offenders? Harvard’s handling of Ms. Jones’s application implied that it did not believe the Indiana justice system’s verdict on Ms. Jones: that she was redeemed, and that her time had been served. Not accepting those premises, the university became her post-prison judge and jury. The question now is what’s in the rest of our hearts. We’re testing whether we really believe in rehabilitation, what degree of grace we find acceptable. It’s a question that I think will be the central one for a criminal justice reform movement that is still just beginning to spread its own wings. [[READ THE FULL STORY]( ADVERTISEMENT [James {NAME} at his New York City apartment.] James {NAME} at his New York City apartment. Jack Manning/The New York Times Connect with us. Hear our recent podcast: John Eligon, a national correspondent covering race, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a domestic affairs correspondent, discussed the racial divide in America with Marc Lacey, The Times’s national editor. [[Listen]( Join us at 9 p.m. Eastern on Wednesdays as we examine topics related to race and culture on The Times’s[Facebook page](. Our correspondents Rachel Swarns and Caitlin Dickerson were joined this week by Denia Perez, a law student and one of the 800,000 young adults who who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children and who have been threatened with deportation. [[Watch]( TimesTalks is partnering with The Schomburg Center for their James {NAME} Festival “[And Then You Read]( on Saturday Sept. 23. It is free and open to the public. 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