"I became a woman in prison," Shawanda Whitfield says, a beautiful, elegant, soft-spoken woman of color.
"After 11 years, I started to feel some real change going on with me," she explains. "I was 28, doing things differently, and serious about wanting to go home. I went to my third parole board and they hit me with another two years for the nature of my crime. I thought, 'Wow, I'm never getting out of here."
Shawanda was 17 when she went in, a lonely, confused, angry girl growing up in the 1980s, amid the chaos and depravity of the crack era, in one of the poorest, most drug-infested and violent neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
"My whole family was on crack," she says, "my mother, my father, my aunts, my uncles. I would watch them in amazement. I couldn't understand what type of drug this was that would make people lose themselves like that."
Shawanda's mother had Shawanda and her older brother by the time she was 15. She gave them to her mother to raise. Shawanda's grandmother was affectionate and kind, but Shawanda yearned for her mother's love and would do anything to earn it.
"I took the role of protector," she explains. "I wouldn't let anyone disrespect her. I got into fights all the time for my mother. I was tough. My older brother was not. He was a peacemaker. There's nothing wrong with being a peacemaker, but when you live in an environment like I lived in, you can't allow anyone to disrespect your mother or anyone in your family, because they were going to keep doing it. I knew that."
"I went to school," she continues, "but I was so unfocused. I made it to ninth grade, but I don't know how because I couldn't multiply or comprehend anything I read. The teachers would be teaching and I'd be thinking about how I wanted my mother to love me and my father to love me. My mother lived downstairs and my father lived next door. Even though he didn't take care of me, I was so happy to have him as my father. I'd tell everybody, "That's my daddy." I must have been seven years old when he told me to stop telling people I was his child. I was always trying to figure it all out because I couldn't understand for the life of me how you could have a child and not love her."
"Honestly, when I stabbed my mother's boyfriend, I wasn't really thinking about him," Shawanda reveals. "I was thinking about everything else that happened: how my mother fought me if I asked for more food; how my shoes had holes in them and she took our welfare check to buy drugs; how my brother was pistol whipped by the guys he sold drugs for; the crack heads walking up and down the block; the constant arguing and fighting. My mother sent me to collect some money from her boyfriend. He refused to give it to me and pushed me. I think I just finally snapped. I went into the kitchen and got a knife. He started swinging a stick at me and fell and that's when I stabbed him. I can honestly say I wasn't there for a moment."
She pauses – "This is so hard to remember," she says – but pushes on.
"Afterwards, I sat in the hallway with the knife. Then, I went upstairs and told my grandmother what happened. She said, "Baby, I think you're going to jail."
Shawanda took a plea bargain – seven to 21 years for manslaughter. By the time she reached Albion Correctional Facility, way up north on the frigid Canadian border, she had blocked the details of her crime and stopped talking.
"I just cried and cried and cried because I never meant to kill him and I couldn't believe where I was."
Still, something positive in her prevailed.
"I realized you can either come out of prison worse or you can make the conscious decision to come out a better person," she explains. "My decision was I didn't want to come out the way I went in."
When Shawanda arrived at Albion in 1994, it still had a college program.
"I used to see women walking to school with their books," she recalls. "I thought, 'I want to be a part of that. I have to get my GED so I can become a college student.'"
Removed from the bedlam of her life "outside", Shawanda found she could focus on her schoolwork.
"I wasn't so distracted and I had people helping me," she explains. "I went to tutoring every day. I learned how to multiply. Then, I went on to division. Then, I started reading and fell in love with books. Every word I didn't understand I'd write down in my notebook. Then, I'd try to use it in letters I wrote home."
Shawanda got her GED in 1996, a year after Albion's college program was cut, when the federal and New York State governments barred prisoners from receiving financial aid.
"They took it away," she says, "but there were still other things I could do. I took the computer class four times. Computers were a way for me to disappear out of prison. I didn't feel so incarcerated. I took poetry, writing and philosophy. Oh my God, I loved it! I started speaking again. I always had something to say in school. Then, I became a teacher's aide, tutoring other inmates. It felt so good to discover I was more intelligent than I thought I was. It uplifted me."
After 14 years, Shawanda was finally set free. She was paroled to a halfway house and joined a work program for returning prisoners, run by a nonprofit that later hired her as an administrative assistant. In 2008, she moved into her own apartment.
"But I still hadn't fulfilled my dream," she says. "I still didn't have a degree. I didn't know how to go about getting one, but I knew that – especially as an ex-offender and woman of color – I needed more education. I heard about the College Initiative from a friend at work, so I emailed Cheryl Wilkins, the associate director. I told her about myself and how I wanted to go to college. She told me to come down."
"Cheryl was with me every step of the way," Shawanda smiles. "She put me in their College Prep class to prepare me for the CUNY entrance exams. She helped me apply for financial aid. She said, 'I'm going to show you how to do this, because you're going to have to do it next time." She sat right next to me through it all. I am just so appreciative of her help. No matter what, I can call her and she will listen to me. Any time I accomplish something I want to tell her. It feels so good to share it and know someone is sincerely happy for me."
Shawanda will begin her second semester at New York City Technical College in the fall of 2008 as a human services major.
"I'm going to become a case manager working with troubled youths," she says. "I want to tell them where I'm from and say, 'Look at me now. I'm in college.'"
