On a recent Wednesday, 43-year-old John Schimmel met with a counselor at Los Angeles City College — his backpack slung over a crisp dress shirt.
It's a far cry from where he was this time last year: serving time at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa for voluntary manslaughter and attempted murder. A dispute earlier in life had gone awry and guns were drawn.
“I just have questions about some of the classes — see what else I need to transfer over to a university,” Schimmel told Mario Escalante, his counselor.
Schimmel is hoping to transfer to Cal State Long Beach next fall to earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and eventually a master’s that will let him do the kind of work Escalante does. He coordinates a program for former inmates enrolled at LACC, called Break It To Make It.
That’s the kind of outcome Southwestern College and several other state schools were hoping for when they started bringing more college programs to state prisons. A statewide focus on rehabilitation, necessitated by legislation beginning in 2011 to shrink the prison population, has taken prison education programs from correspondence courses, to face-to-face classes, to full-fledged degree programs.
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