Professor travels to prison, engages inmates

Two years ago, sociology professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and her students got kicked out of prison. Ever since, she's been trying to get back in.

Sensing a strong racial divide within U.S. prison walls, Fernandez-Kelly traveled with her sociology students to the maximum security New Jersey State Prison in Trenton to participate in Hispanic Americans for Progress, Inc. (HAP). The program, founded by Puerto Rican inmates more than a decade ago, seeks to reduce Hispanic incarceration rates.

"I didn't think of it as charity, but political work," Fernandez-Kelly, a Mexican immigrant whose research focuses on issues of migration and class, said. "I object to huge power differentials."

With black incarceration rates eight times higher than those of whites, Fernandez-Kelly said it was necessary to fight against a "highly punitive system that has harsh effects upon vulnerable people."

Fernandez-Kelly, along with her students, regularly entered the prison, dedicating her time to the production of "InsideOut," a publication created by inmates that documents their crimes, time in prison and aspirations for the future.

Expressing their behaviors through art and poetry, the prisoners hoped to use their own lives as cautionary displays. "We thought that we should do more to educate the public," Fernandez-Kelly said. "This way, we might move to rehabilitation and away from just custody."

After the prisoners produced poems, paintings and essays, sociology students designed the issue, assisting in the publication's first color edition.

Fernandez-Kelly was also inspired to teach college-level courses to the prisoners — the same courses she was simultaneously teaching her Princeton students. This was to counteract the possibility of the deprivation of freedom leading to depression and apathy among prisoners, she said.

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Though the presence of Fernandez-Kelly and her students proved successful for two-and-a-half years, a change in prison administration in 2004 has interrupted their initiative. Fernandez-Kelly remains persistent in attempting to regain admittance to the prison so she may continue her volunteer work.

Immigrant experience

Arriving in the United States from Mexico in 1976, Fernandez-Kelly naturally sympathized with immigrants and minority populations. Having already obtained a Ph.D. in art history at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, she drove herself to earn a second Ph.D. in social anthropology at Rutgers University.

As part of her dissertation research, she worked as a seamstress at a large company in Juarez, Mexico. Through the experiment, she sought to gain insight into the composition of the women's labor force and subsequently wrote the book "For We Are Sold, I and My People."

In her first six years after entering the United States, Fernandez-Kelly had already obtained a Ph.D. and published a novel. She then produced an Emmy-winning documentary called "The Global Assembly Line," which portrays the lives of factory workers in the Philippines, the United States and along the Mexican border.

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Though her life has contained many awards, Fernandez-Kelly said her most rewarding experiences have been those dedicated to public service. While living in Baltimore, for example, she initiated a program called Parent Plus, which facilitates collaboration among families to increase social and educational opportunities for impoverished children.

"Through the program, I sought to get people interested in reducing racial and economic divisions," Fernandez-Kelly said. "I paired families bearing more resources with underprivileged families; the two families would go to movies and on other outings together."

In between attempts to break into prison, Fernandez-Kelly dedicates her time to researching segregation and sharing perspectives with her students. She teaches Sociology 101: Introduction to Sociology every spring.