Alumni Profile: Lucy Blevins

For Lucy Blevins, tutoring with the PGP was a chance to give back to others. Along the way she discovered her passion for reforming the criminal legal system. 

Blevins heard about the PGP as a student at Rutgers University. When she first started, she hadn’t nailed down her major yet, but Blevins knew she wanted to help others. After taking a variety of different courses, she found her way into social work. 

By her junior year, Blevins was hoping to get more involved in her community. Her sister, a student at Princeton University, told her about the PGP, and Blevins decided to apply. She soon found herself volunteering at the Mountain View Correctional Facility. 

Blevins remembers tutoring one student who was struggling with Punnett squares, which Blevins herself had to relearn in order to support her student. Through this experience, she learned how powerful programs like the PGP can be. 

“I remember thinking this is so cool,” Blevins said. “[Tutoring] empowers…those who are incarcerated. This isn’t about you; it's about them. They have the capacity to succeed, and it’s about how you can aid them in this process.”

“[Tutoring] empowers…those who are incarcerated. This isn’t about you; it’s about them. They have the capacity to succeed, and it’s about how you can aid them in this process.”

Blevins worked with students who varied greatly in age. However, no matter the age, she soon realized that everyone she worked with needed validation that they were capable of achieving their academic goals.

“I think that there was so much value in just having someone sit there and say, ‘OK,  you're not stupid. This is a really hard thing to figure out, and it's even harder to ask for help when you're an adult,’” Blevins said.

Aside from academic lessons, Blevins learned a lot about how the criminal legal system actually works in America. She had taken courses on criminal justice and how the system affects youth who are caught up in it.

Volunteering with the PGP made her realize that incarceration isn’t just an issue that affects individuals, but a structural issue that impacts entire groups of people. “Individuals who are incarcerated  are often deprived of a lot of human rights and educational opportunities, and there's something really tragic about that,” Blevins said. “I think that Petey Greene helped me reaffirm the systemic nature of all of it, that this wasn't just this one off problem, that this is all so interconnected with race and poverty.”

Blevins continued to tutor with PGP her senior year. As her 2018 graduation day approached, she said she realized that it would be important for her to continue working with or supporting incarcerated people. For her, that meant moving to Texas to start a graduate program in public policy and social work at the University of Texas at Austin. 

“I think that Petey Greene helped me reaffirm the systemic nature of all of it, that this wasn’t just this one off problem, that this is all so interconnected with race and poverty.”

After graduating, Blevins took a job in health policy at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. In this role, she tackles stakeholder engagement and research in health equity and social determinants of health.

Her time at PGP inspired Blevins to get involved with the Inside Books Project (IBP) in Austin. IBPis an entirely volunteer-based non-profit that sends books and personalized letters to people who are incarcerated in Texas prisons. Blevins has volunteered with the organization for three years and now serves on its board.

“For a lot of the people that we interact with, this is their only connection to the outside world, whether they're in solitary confinement or don't have any of those family or friend connections left after all the time that they've been incarcerated,” Blevins said. 

IBP’s work has been critical during the pandemic, as incarcerated individuals are even more isolated than they were beforehand, due to prison lockdowns, library closures, and the rapid spread of COVID-19 behind bars. IBP sends a variety of books, such as GED and college prep guides, dictionaries, drawing and art books, manga, historical anthologies, urban fiction, LGBT+ themed books, and more.

Blevins credits the PGP for developing her passion for education behind bars. The program taught her that  even if you aren’t directly affected by the criminal legal system, it’s important to advocate for those who are.

“I think that the Petey Greene Program is absolutely responsible for planting that seed in me that pushed me to seek out ways to engage in work around criminal justice issues,” she said. “This is a community that needs their voices amplified. So for me it  was really imperative to continue to do this kind of work, even after my time with the Petey Greene Program ended.”

While working with Inside Books Project, Blevins said she keeps in mind another lesson she learned from PGP: for many of the incarcerated individuals she worked with both at PGP and now in Texas, this isn’t in fact their “second chance” to better themselves or gain an education. It’s often their first. 

“I think that the interactions that they've had with the world up until this point, especially as it relates to education, are a lot of people telling them, whether directly or indirectly, that they're not good enough, that what they're producing is not good enough,” Blevins said. “And what that trickles down to is that they as a person aren't good enough.”

“I think that the Petey Greene Program is absolutely responsible for planting that seed in me that pushed me to seek out ways to engage in work around criminal justice issues.”

Blevins encourages anyone who works with organizations like the PGP or Inside Books Project and even those who don’t to change that narrative. It can be easy for those not affected by the criminal legal system to just ignore incarcerated individuals' rights since prisons and jails are so physically and socially isolated from other communities. However, it’s important to remember that incarcerated peoples’ rights are human rights, she said. 

“I learned a lot more from the people I tutored than I would be able to teach them” Blevins concludes.