16 Months After My Justice Class

Around 22 months ago, I received a message that would profoundly change my life. It was an email that I had been accepted into “Justice,” the Inside-Out Prison Exchange class, which consists of half Amherst students and half incarcerated students from the Hampshire County Correctional Facility. Going into the class, I was quite skeptical that the class could faze me emotionally, because I had always thought of myself as somebody who was not very sensitive to other people’s suffering. However, this class helped shatter both my sense of self and perception of Amherst. 16 months after “Justice,” this class’s ghost still haunts me, and it still affects how I view Amherst College to this day.  

There are details from that class I still do not feel comfortable discussing with anybody aside from my closest friends and professors. There are assignments that I still refuse to read to this very day. “Justice's” impact was not necessarily because of what it was like to learn in a prison; rather, the class made the place I felt was home — Amherst College — feel utterly jarring and off-putting. It turned my self-perception upside down and made me see myself as someone who reached Amherst, in large part, thanks to luck and privilege. Even now, 16 months later, I am off-put by how much unearned privilege we have as Amherst students compared to the surrounding community.

Inside and Out

One of the most intense moments came on the very first day of class with the incarcerated students, when we talked about disability in prison. I was surprised to learn that around two-thirds of incarcerated people have disabilities. This was not the first time that we had touched on this topic: Before going to prison, our class had studied how under-resourced schools with mostly minority student bodies tend to label their students with disabilities as “deviant” and "fulfilling low expectations,” which then pushes these students into the school-to-prison pipeline. In contrast, wealthier school districts have more resources that enable them to address disability more holistically. Hearing these ideas in Amherst felt vague and abstract, but within the prison walls, they became real. I grew up with a disability, yet I had never once worried that I or the people around me would end up incarcerated because of their disabilities. Then, I realized that growing up in a privileged community with a well-funded school district had shielded me from hyper-criminalization. More specifically, I had realized that a substantial reason why the behavioral and disciplinary problems my peers and I had were not read as “criminal” by school authorities was that I attended a well-funded public school district with strong support for students with disabilities. I was making the links between my growing up on Long Island, a hyper-segregated place, and my school treating my disability as a medical issue rather than as an indicator of potential “criminal” behavior. 

I returned to campus with a shattered sense of self. Before “Justice,” I had attributed my success entirely to my own hard work and self-control. I studied hard, made sure not to show any signs of my disability in public, and was able to attend Amherst. In that immediate moment, I thought of myself as nothing but a beneficiary of unearned privilege. Amherst College is not designed to have students actually interrogate how they have benefited unjustly from socioeconomic segregation. Rather, Amherst is designed to shelter its students and assure them that they are part of a handpicked cohort who belong amongst the “best and brightest.” 

And this realization was only the beginning. Personally, the weekly transition between prison and Amherst was immensely jarring. I could not bring myself to sit with my friends at Val for dinner after I returned. The prison exposed how much of a tremendous privilege it was for us students to be able to sit communally, without surveillance, and to be served and cared for. 

These realizations made me feel tremendously isolated, because I thought I was the only person trying to grapple with the guilt that arises from being the beneficiary of unjust systems. I would walk around Amherst and think that I had to be weird and crazy for being so obsessed with a prison 20 minutes away. These feelings have been tremendously difficult for me to grapple with, but they have also been immensely valuable for me to have to think about. They have put so much about my life into perspective. 

This lived reminder was too much for me to handle. I carried this question with me: “Why was I able to go to Amherst while people in towns only a short drive away from my own are ending up incarcerated because of systemic factors?”

What it Means to be Free

 In “Justice,” the normal rules of classroom conduct at Amherst College — such as the expectation to perform, sound smart, and the threat of Fizz — were suspended. Instead, it created a unique space where myself and others could draw on our lived experiences as valid sources of knowledge. With this extra freedom, I was able to bond with other students in the class on the basis of shared personal experiences. This enabled me to have so many revelations about myself and Amherst College because I was able to remove myself for a second from the college’s usual hyper-involved, hyper-alert, and hyper-uptight mode. Of course, I cannot discuss this without also noting the tremendous irony that I found this space in a prison and that a substantial portion of the class was incarcerated. Having this safe space in the prison, therefore, was only a further extension of my privilege of being an Amherst student.

These hard feelings that came from “Justice” did not just dissipate after the end of the class in December 2024. Instead, they intensified and caused me to become increasingly reflective about the Amherst we all know and take for granted. I felt this acutely on the first day of classes in the 2025 spring semester. I had a very typical, discussion-based, humanities class in the Octagon: one where we students would read texts in advance and then discuss them together. It was the type of class I had dreamed of when I was applying to colleges, and I am sure this type of education is a motivating factor for students applying to Amherst. However, this experience — which was an extremely average Amherst class — proved very difficult for me to get through. A professor explained to me that studying something in an academic context sometimes means objectifying it, breaking it down, and holding it under a microscope. It was jarring to realize that what my peers and I could “objectively” examine was the actual lives of others, and that we were the ones holding the all-powerful microscope. We sat around the seminar table, pontificating with arrogance, rather than trying to develop empathy for those we were studying. Why did we students think we knew so much? Why did we think we could remove ourselves and intellectualize everything from afar? 

Likewise, I was so off-put by Amherst after taking “Justice” that I wanted to try to use the college’s resources to benefit the surrounding community. However, I quickly saw how difficult it was to bring Amherst to care for anybody other than its own students. I tried proposing a bylaw to the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) that would redistribute excess funds to local charity organisations, but I ended up never introducing it to the floor after a thoughtful conversation with fellow senators where the limitations of AAS’ budgetary capacity were discussed. 

Despite generally enjoying my role as a senator, I was, at that moment, tremendously disturbed by AAS as an organization. I remember wondering during our first meeting of the spring semester if everything we were working on was just insignificant, and if the world would just be better off without places like Amherst. Because of “Justice,” I realized that AAS is systematically limited as an organization because the only work it can do is to respond to and gratify students’ needs, rather than to serve as a vehicle to promote positive change in the broader community. From there, I struck an extremely weird balance throughout the rest of the semester. I would alternate between two states: I would be repulsed by how we, Amherst students, were benefitting enormously from what I saw as a jarring amount of wealth and privilege, while 20 minutes away, the incarcerated students I cared about were suffering. Then I would go plan events like the campus-wide Easter Egg Hunt. I assume people with similar thoughts about Amherst do not become Easter Egg Hunt planners.

I have no good ending to this story. I am still tremendously put off by what I saw and how I felt in “Justice.” But things are substantially better on a day-to-day basis. And there are a couple of lessons I want to share from my experience. 

Lessons

My first takeaway is that, even on a small campus like Amherst, you can still generally find a group of people to discuss the intense and complicated issues that come up in life. I myself have a small group of people with whom I have found something of a safe space to try to explore these issues around mass incarceration, segregation, and the guilt that I feel. Having these people in my life has given me a much-needed outlet. Many of us students have our own issues that we feel passionate and personally connected to, and I would encourage you to find an outlet to work through them if you have not done so already.

Secondly, we Amherst students ought to be self-aware about the limitations of our own humanity and empathy. I referenced earlier in the article my own attempts to connect with the incarcerated students over the shared experience of disability, but truthfully, there is no way that I could possibly understand what the incarcerated students are going through. This is because neither I, nor anyone I am immediately close with, has been incarcerated. We, as Amherst students, also need to be tremendously careful with our power to abstractify other people, because, as I observed in “Justice,” the ability to be taken seriously was certainly not a power the incarcerated students held. This fact is also part of the reason why I have spoken so little about the incarcerated students in this article; nothing I could write here could possibly convey their full and complex humanity to you.

Finally, Amherst students must approach both our institution and our world with a sense of cognitive dissonance. We should be horrified that we students get to be treated and cared for like full human beings — such as with the amnesty policy — but just twenty minutes away, people just like us do not enjoy those same luxuries. We should be horrified by how we, Amherst students, are able to enjoy massive amounts of unearned privilege. Amherst is not a place that seeks to instill in its students empathy for those unlike us; rather, it seeks to train us in the very skills of abstract analysis. But we also cannot burn ourselves out by submerging ourselves in our horror, as I nearly did, because then we cannot help anyone. We just have to live and move forward and use our privilege for good.

As I have stated before, I have no good ending to this story. But we, Amherst students, do have the tremendous privilege of being able to listen to, and be moved by, the stories of those with less privilege than us, while also having everything Amherst provides us as a safety net. That’s not a privilege most people have, and we ought to use it for good. As for me, 16 months after “Justice,” I still remember so acutely what could have happened had I grown up a few miles down the highway.