Eighteen women incarcerated in Illinois walked across a stage on Oct. 16 and collected bachelor’s degrees from Northwestern University. No incarcerated women in the United States had ever earned a degree from a top-10 university before them.
The ceremony was held at the Kewanee Life Skills Re-entry Center, about 100 miles north of Logan Correctional Center, where the women were held during their studies. They began in fall 2021. Northwestern professors taught them political science, psychology, history and other social sciences for five years, and they graduated with Bachelor of Science degrees in general studies.
We do not know how many of the 18 are Black. Neither Northwestern nor the outlets covering the ceremony reported the class’s racial makeup, and we will not guess. What the state’s own numbers show is who fills the prison they studied in. On Dec. 31, 2022, Black women were 29.8% of the women held by the Illinois Department of Corrections, according to the department’s calendar year 2022 fact sheet: 439 of 1,466. Black residents are about 14% of Illinois. Whatever opens inside a women’s prison there reaches Black women out of proportion to their numbers in the state.
Jennifer Lackey, the philosophy professor who founded the Northwestern Prison Education Program in 2018, told the graduates: “You will never know the full shade of the trees you have planted here, but they are growing.” Graduate Maria Garza, a co-founder of the nonprofit Challenge II Change, said: “Today is for us, forever the first.”
Families were in the room. Stephanie Bonds, who is serving a 45-year sentence, received her diploma while her daughter, Jala Johnson, and 3-year-old granddaughter, Klover Johnson, cheered. Johnson had driven six hours from Detroit. Afterward Bonds told her: “That’s yours, baby.”
Graduates said they plan to teach, tutor, push for penal reform and practice restorative justice. Two cohorts of incarcerated men had already graduated from the program, in 2023 and in April 2026. The women’s class came last. Former mayor Daniel Biss, speaking at the ceremony, said: “Sometimes our criminal justice system treats women as an afterthought.”
The degrees prove what the program’s founders bet on. They also leave Illinois with a question it controls: whether 18 diplomas become the first of many or stay the exception. Logan, where this class studied, is slated to move about 140 miles north, and its women will find out whether the classroom goes with them.
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