This week, we’re presenting two stories about incarceration, and its intersections with science.
Part 1: Looking to make an impact with science, Beverly Naigles and her fellow graduate students decide to teach a science class for incarcerated men at a nearby jail.
Beverly Naigles is a PhD student in quantitative biology at UC San Diego, originally from rural Connecticut. Her research focuses on how seemingly-identical cells can respond differently to external signals. In addition to her research, she enjoys doing science-related art and making science accessible to the general public. For fun, she likes to hike, run, swim, and bake.
Part 2: Incarcerated for robbery at the age of 21, Khalil Cumberbatch learns about the neuroscience of brain development after his release and begins to question how the system handles younger offenders.
Khalil Cumberbatch is a nationally recognized formerly incarcerated advocate for criminal justice and deportation policy reform. Currently, he is the director of strategic partnerships for the Council on Criminal Justice. Previously, he served as Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice and as Associate Vice President of Policy at Fortune Society. Pardoned by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014, Khalil earned a Master's Degree in Social Work from CUNY Lehman College, where he was awarded the Urban Justice Award for his work with underserved and marginalized communities. Khalil is also a lecturer at Columbia University.
See also: Sean Bearden’s story, which appeared on our podcast in 2020: Sean Bearden has never been interested in education, but when he's incarcerated at the age of 19, he finds a passion for physics.
Story Transcripts
Part 1: Beverly Naigles
When I was an undergraduate science student, science didn't feel like an institution that seemed to respect my humanity. In the lab I worked in as an undergraduate researcher, no one talked to me and whenever I asked her a question, the professor would just repeat the same thing over and over again, regardless of the content of my question, as if what I said wasn't worth responding to. Later, she would set me up to take the fall for a scientific argument she was having with a lab in France. I felt emotionally manipulated and used as a tool, and no one told me that this wasn't my fault. When I finally managed to quit the lab, I was told that quitting reflected my lack of dedication. A month later, I learned that I was the seventh undergrad to have a similar experience in that lab and two years later had to help extract the eighth. But I also knew that for all that this made me feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in science, I was fairly privileged with how I interacted with science's disrespect for humanity. I'm white. I was going to graduate with an Ivy League degree regardless. I didn't suffer any bodily harm. The history of science has taught me that science historically and to this day is an institution that particularly doesn't respect the humanity of marginalized people from the poor women in Puerto Rico who didn't consent to be test subjects in clinical trials for birth control pills to the black men at Tuskegee whose syphilis was left untreated.
And then within science, the decades of women experiencing sexual harassment, the black and brown scientists excluded from science or whose contributions were erased. I wanted to know how cells worked, but I also wanted to make the world a better place. And could I do that from within such a problematic institution? I decided to let wanting to know how cells worked win in the short term. After all, I could see two ways to use science to make the world a better place: developing medicines and technologies to promote human health and well-being, and educating kids to get them interested in science. However, the reality of research is that it's not possible to count on your research contributing to curing disease. And I worry that getting kids interested in science was just going to land them in the same existential dilemma that I was in. But despite being very down on the institution of science, somehow, I still believed that there had to be another way, a way to make science lead to some sort of community good. Science, observing the world around you and asking questions about it, is beautiful at its core.
So fast-forward to three years ago, at the end of my first year of grad school, where our grad student outreach group is sitting at the coffee cart at UC San Diego, brainstorming how to broaden our outreach. People suggest all sorts of ideas, a booth in the park, partnering with libraries in underserved parts of San Diego.
I think about folks who are the most marginalized in our society. I remember hearing about other programs that work in prisons and mash several of these together in my head to propose that we do a program in prison. The other grad students paused for a minute and then start thinking about how this would be a way to reach a group of people very much excluded from science and to provide engagement to folks who are incarcerated. I don't want to be overly optimistic that this will solve my science leading to community good goal, but I think it could be a good program. We decided that I'll work on this. At the time, I knew nothing about how prison worked or the difference between jail and prison, which it turns out is different in California than the rest of the country. So I naively emailed the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's "Contact us" email and got a response from the director of reentry that she was interested in talking about what this could look like.
Beverly (center in pink coat) with her fellow instructors.
Five months, 16 volunteer background checks, four hours of orientation, one cleared materials list, and one collaboration set up with UCSD Outreach Center later, six of us headed down to East Mesa reentry facility on a Friday night, full of excitement and nerves. We are five small women and one man dressed business casual and carrying boxes who have just sat in traffic for an hour and a half, driving down through rush hour. At the front desk, we train our drivers licenses for our badges and then get escorted through the sally port to our classroom. My mind is racing with questions. I so want this to go well. But what if the students don't like us? What if we fail at making science interesting and they're bored? What if they write me off as a privileged, out-of-touch white girl who they aren't interested in relating to?
The students come in and we instructors are clustered nervously between the door and the desk. The students are wearing standard jail attire, tan scrubs, white socks, orange slide shoes. We try to make eye contact and say hi to them and we shake some of their hands. Beto, our partner at UCSD's Outreach Center, has taught us about the subculture of these institutions so that we can be prepared, sensitive to that culture, build community. Trying to purposefully act welcoming in a space that isn't yours and you aren't yet entirely comfortable in is really hard, but we try. Once everyone is in the room, we sit spaced out in the chairs that we've pre-set in a circle and encourage the hesitant students to take a seat. A couple of the students are more outgoing and my fellow instructor, Maria, has already struck up a conversation. The students seem open to us, but still skeptical. We go around the circle to introduce ourselves and talk about why we're in this class, adding an adjective to our names, so I am Bouncy Bev and one of the students is Serious Sam. This helps both us and the students start to relax as they see that we're here to get to know them and we learn more about how they describe themselves. Many of the students tell us that they were "voluntold," a superb jail word, to be there. This surprises and worries me somewhat. I don't want to be the reason someone has to do something they don't want to do. Some of the students add that they're open to learning science. Others seem not that interested. They're very surprised to hear that we really want to be here and are not being paid, which makes more of them engage with us with more curiosity.
My fellow instructor, Julie, led that first lesson on DNA, what it is, how it works and how big it is in relation to physical things. And the students seem interested. Sitting in a chair next to one of the student tables, I start to feel like this is really going OK.
Students working on a science experiment in class.
The students ask questions and I'm impressed by their breadth, from molecular biology to astrophysics. As a scientist, nothing shows me that people care more than asking questions does. So we left the lesson feeling that the students really were going to engage with our class and I felt this high leaving the facility, a high I almost never get at UCSD. We plan the class so that we have lessons every other week and we and the students got to know each other better. The students amazed me with their creativity. When, in a lesson on mutation and adaptation, we asked them to design a creature adapted to a specific environment, Sam drew a half penguin, half human, adapted to live in San Diego after a sea level rise, and students would ask such interesting questions for us to look up after class. What is the difference between black tea and green tea? Is there a way to target mutated cells?
My favorite question ever is from a class at the women's facility. It was, why does heroin stop your period? I'm obsessed with this question both because it's about applying science to personal experiences. But it also really highlights the way that science isn't serving our students as well as it could, like so many health issues affecting marginalized populations, this is understudied in the scientific literature. I'm also really excited about how it shows how much science has to gain from including our students.
I've yet to meet a biologist who already knew this, and there's so much interesting science to be discovered here. And I was honored and thrilled that the students were willing to share with us to make that magic. At the last lesson of the quarter in our first class, we end the class sitting in a circle that superficially looks a lot like the circle on our first day, but feels so different. We are comfortable and feel like we've gotten to know and care about each other. I feel like we've made a science class in jail interesting and relevant, and I'm thrilled that the jail administrators agree and are letting us continue to teach another class. So I will be back soon. We again go around the circle, now saying how we felt about the class. So the instructors share that we had all these positive experiences. Then we open it up for the students to share. And we're a little bit nervous because we're not sure if they had such positive experiences or what they're going to say. And the students say all sorts of nice things. They really enjoyed the class. They learned that scientists are regular people. They learned that science could be connected to everyday life. And then we have this pause and our student LEO shares that what he most appreciated about our class was that we treated him like a person. And all the other students look around and sort of nod in that "we also thought this but didn't want to be the one to say it" way.
And I'm a little taken aback and surprised, and I hadn't expected this much emotion, I'm still too much in facilitator mode to really process. But Beto thanks him for sharing. And so then we move on, we finish the circle, and at the end of the class, the students leave and I spontaneously give Julie a big hug. I am elated that we have done this, that a science class in jail has worked beyond what we'd ever hoped. We debrief after in the lobby, and that's when the "treated me like a person" comment really starts to sink in for me. We hadn't gone to jail trying to be the one group treating our students like people because, of course, everyone should always be treated as a person. We went to the meeting to teach science and be entertaining and help students see science in their everyday lives. I had been hesitant to think that this program was actually going to even approach my dream of using science to build community good. But as we debriefed, I realized that we'd gotten closer to that than I'd ever been before, that really science is our excuse to go in and build relationships between the inside and the outside, between two groups of people who probably never would have otherwise met, but have so much to share with each other, that science could actually be a way to make people feel valued, empowered, human.
And this work is also brought out the humanity in my scientific colleagues, where we debrief about our feelings after each lesson, and I sit in meetings about what scientists can do about mass incarceration. There's so much more work to be done, we are working in racist, oppressive institutions that require structural changes to create a world where everyone is included in science, the justice system, or just everyone treated as fully human. While I find it deeply fulfilling that we're able to use science to connect with our students as humans in a system that doesn't treat them that way, I know that this is just one small step. I still struggle with this a lot. But I know that these personal local relationships matter. And so I have a deep hope for a future where scientists engage with their communities, listen before speaking, and take responsibility for making our institutions and society more just so that all humans can be engaged in science and so that the undergraduate Beverlys of tomorrow don't feel like they need to choose between science and making the world a better place.
Part 2: Khalil Cumberbatch
Khalil Cumberbatch shares his story at Caveat in May 2019. Photos by Zhen Qin.
I will start by talking about summer of 2001. It was a great summer for me, started off as a great summer. I was 19, I had purchased a Infiniti J-30 T. It was a V6, it was more -- it was 140 miles an hour on the dashboard and it was way more power than a 19-year-olds should have at that point in their life. It's like I made it my business to test every bit of that hundred and forty miles an hour on the dashboard and as most 19-year-olds would do, I was consistently recklessly driving just for no reason, no apparent reason, no goal in mind. Just because of the mere fact that it was mine and I had the ability to do it, I did it. And one of these nights stands out pretty prominently for me, and I'm going to tell you why. It wasn't because I was driving more than a hundred miles an hour. It wasn't because I was recklessly driving on the Belt Parkway in Queens. What I remembered the most was that at some point in this whole process of speeding and switching lanes, it dawned on me that to, instead of slow down and dial it down a notch, I should just up the ante. And so what did I do? I turned the lights off. But in my mind, I'm like, yes, this is the best thing ever!
Like, I didn't even have, like the "oh no, that's just crazy" moment. It was like, this is perfectly sane. Of course, I would turn the lights off, and drove for who knows how long. Finally, when I got to the exit that I was going to and I got off the exit, turned the lights on and -- you know, because I can drive reckless on the Belt Parkway, definitely can't drive reckless on the service road -- and so I pulled up to to the light. And the moment that the car came to a stop, I saw police cruiser lights behind me. And this was not the first time that I was pulled over by police, which is a whole another Story Collider story, and so I roll the window down and the cop comes out. And he was a highway patrolman who was, I would say, about mid 40s, and he came to the car and he looked at me. And he just shook his head. And he said, "Do you know why I pulled you over?" "No clue, sir. No idea." But in my mind I was like as a 19-year-old, very arrogant from the south side of Jamaica, Queens, it's like, look, you're just going to give me a ticket or you're not. And he said, "You know, you could have killed yourself." And he didn't say anything, he didn't give me the lecture, he didn't he didn't tell me that I could have killed someone else. In hindsight, in looking back on that moment, he said, "You could have killed yourself." And it was something that I now realize, on some level, he gave my life more more value than I did at that time. And this was one of many, many instances where reckless decision making put me at risk. And that mentality continued, unfortunately -- continued to the point where myself and three childhood friends committed a string of robberies. One of which I was ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison for. And I was 21, entering into a maximum security prison for the first time ever, being involved in a criminal justice system. And as a twenty-one-year-old man in age, but a boy in mentality, it still didn't dawn on me that my decision making was putting me at risk and so what did I do? I just continue to make the same decisions. I just gravitated towards the same character types. The names may have changed, but it was the same character types. And for the first year and a half, I continue to make those decisions that put me and others at risk. And I'm surprised and shocked, quite honestly, that I've never, I didn't walk away from that experience being stabbed or cut or spending any time in solitary confinement because the decisions I was making were still putting myself and others at risk.
Something that changed my trajectory, though, was the ability to attend college-level courses. In a maximum-security prison was the first time that I sat in a college classroom and I'm not lost on the irony of that. And I studied theology. And it's something about the study of not just one spiritual experience, but many spiritual experiences, and what you start to see is that they have way more in common than they do actually have in difference. And it changed the way that I saw myself in my current situation, but more importantly, it changed the way that I saw myself in my future situation. It changed the way that I saw myself. It changed the way that I saw my role in my family, my role as a son and as a man and as a community member. And it dramatically changed my experience while incarcerated and I went on to do multiple programs while at Greenhaven Correctional Facility, many of which helped to create the man that I am today.
Fast-forward six and a half years later in 2010, I walk out of prison. And I walk out of prison with two major goals in mind. One was to not go back to prison, totally I was the converted. I totally understood, didn't want to go back. And the other one was that I wanted to change my legacy. I realized at a very young age that everyone will leave a story, everyone will leave a legacy. And I didn't want mine to be the one that my children told that was only of my incarceration. I wanted it to be including my incarceration. But everything else that came after that was to better myself and to better them. And so I began my reentry in that way. And one of the plans that I had was to learn at the feet of elders, was to learn at the feet of people who had did reentry, who had successfully re-entered from prison to society and to learn from them. And one of these people was a man named Eddie Ellis. I was introduced to Eddie by a woman that used to come into one of the programs that I was involved in while incarcerated, and she had met Eddie and said, "You know, there's a there's a young man coming home and I would love for you to talk to him. And could I get your number when he comes home? I would give it to him," and she did that. And so I called Eddie. I was home maybe about three weeks and I called Eddie out of the blue, random, and he didn't know who I was. It was a complete stranger. And he picked up the phone and I said, "Hi, Eddie, my name is Khalil. I just came home. I want to get involved. I want to do the work, I want to change the world."
And he listened. He listened to me and when I finally paused to catch a breath after unloading on him, he said, "Welcome home. And take your time. You should enjoy your family. Enjoy your life, enjoy your freedom, because the reality is that the issues that we all care about, the issue of reforming the criminal justice system as we know it, will unfortunately be here. You need to enjoy your time now with your family because there will come a point where you won't have the time to enjoy them." And I learned many things from Eddie, many, many things. He was someone who he himself was formerly incarcerated. He was a New Yorker, he was a Black Panther. He was a professor. He was an advocate. He was an entrepreneur. He helped to redefine what formerly incarcerated people thought was possible for them with felony convictions. He actually coined the term formerly incarcerated and told the field that if we are going to truly reform a system, we cannot use the same language that that system gives us to refer to the people that they have damaged. And so he said we can't use terms like inmate. We can't use terms like felon, ex-convict, ex-felon. We have to use a different term. And that term was formerly incarcerated. One of the many things that I learned from Eddie was this idea of brain development. Simultaneously, while I was being mentored by Eddie in New York state, there was a massive movement for the prior five or six years to change the minimum age of criminal responsibility in New York state.
And at this time, New York State was one of only two states in our country that automatically trialled 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. The other state was North Carolina. And so here we are as a progressive state, saying that we are progressive in all of these values, but if you're 16 and 17 and you commit a crime, we're going to hold you accountable as an adult. And, of course -- I would hope that I'm preaching to the choir -- there's something fundamentally wrong with that, the idea that that you can hold children accountable the same way that you hold adults. There's something wrong with that. And so as a formerly incarcerated advocate, I cared about that issue. Because although I was not 16 or 17 in age when I went into the system, I was definitely 16 or 17 in mentality. And so when we started to talk about how do we express our concerns about these issues outside of the fact that we're formerly incarcerated, Eddie was the first one that introduced to me, as I'm sure others introduced to him, this notion of brain development. How there are certain parts of the physical anatomy that are just not fully developed at the age of 16 or 17, that rational thinking part of your brain that now, as adults, I hope, stops most of us from doing reckless things like driving 100 plus miles an hour and turning off the lights.
Now, by the way, I can't even drive more than 50 miles an hour. I get nervous, I start sweating. I'm like, "Where's the police? I have a felony. Oh, my God, they're going to stop me." But so Eddie helped to school me on that. And in the movement around Raise the Age, that was one of many pieces of the conversation that was not being talked about. It was in fact not a mainstay. It was not a staple of our argument on why we feel that 16- and 17-year-olds need to be treated differently when they commit crimes, especially when they commit violent crimes. And although I will say that Raise the Age did pass in New York State, through countless hours of tireless advocacy on behalf of myself and others that went up to Albany and met with legislators, talked to them, shared with them our experiences, brought other youth up who were the age of 16 and 17 when they were convicted, but now 19, and talked about the horrific experiences that they had being exposed to adult prisons and adult jails, being housed as a 17-year-old with adults and what that does to you physically. And of course, being able to tell the story of people who were abused by the hands of adults.
Although we passed Raise the Age, from my perspective, it was a hollow win. Because we totally missed the opportunity to use science the same way that other fields and industries use science to justify decisions that they make, particularly the car insurance industry, how they know that at a certain age, once you supercede that, there is no need to charge you at a higher rate because that that part of your brain is fully developed. And that's with cars; here, we're talking about human beings and we were stuck on trying to push against the moral argument. Well, if you can't do the time, then you shouldn't do the crime. And the reality is that it's not that clear cut and dry when we talk about criminal justice in this country, and it definitely is not that clear cut and dry when we talk about criminal justice in this state. The reality is that Raise the Age was a missed opportunity for us to change the conversation. Now, while we're still fighting to reform the criminal justice system, there's always the exclusion for people who are of a certain age and commit some violent crimes. And I am not here to say that we should blanketly forgive everyone. I do believe in accountability, but we must take all of the factors into consideration when we as a society are going to punish someone, but more importantly, when we entrust a system to punish someone. Thank you.