There’s a new face at meetings when the staff of the Higher Education for the Justice-Involved program gets together at Western Michigan University.
Student Office Assistant Jayson DeMarco Hardin (Class of ’28), who was hired in January, brings a particularly well-informed perspective to the team, which staffs WMU’s satellite campus at the Lakeland Corrections Facility, in Coldwater. Hardin was one of HEJI’s first incarcerated college students when it launched a five-year humanities degree program at the prison in 2023.
“When they described what type of education they were offering, rich in the humanities, and what that actually produces inside a person, how it cultivates dialogue and empathy, that was very appealing to me,” says Hardin. “The chance to have a formal education with college professors was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down.”
Hardin’s first college professor was Ann Miles, director of WMU’s Center for the Humanities, which manages HEJI.
“The kind of teaching one does in prison is very different and in many ways incredibly fulfilling,” says Miles. “There’s no access to the internet, so our teaching methods are old-school — no PowerPoint or film clips, just conversation, close reading and a whiteboard.”
Hardin cited “Dr. Ann’s” sociology class, Modern Social Problems, as an early favorite of his. “When we studied power structures and how society operates, it helped give me insight into some of the things from my past, some of my upbringing, some of the circumstances surrounding my incarceration.”
Hardin, now 39 years old, was arrested at age 17 for the armed robbery of a video store in Detroit and sentenced to serve 36 to 70 years in prison. He was released in July 2025, after successfully appealing for resentencing.
Origin story
The HEJI program is the brainchild of Dale Brown, whose Ph.D. dissertation research focused on the transformative and humanizing power of higher education for people who are or have been incarcerated. Now director of HEJI and a lecturer in WMU’s philosophy department, Brown partnered with the Michigan Department of Corrections and WMU’s philosophy department to launch a pilot program offering non-credit classes to men at Lakeland in 2018. The HEJI program continued for three semesters until pausing in 2020 due to the Covid–19 pandemic. It then returned as a five-year degree program in August 2023.
“Both WMU and the Michigan Department of Corrections have put in a substantial amount of energy to make this thing happen,” says Brown.
Miles concurs. “We’ve had so many colleagues helping us, from financial aid to advising to administrators,” she says. Everything’s a little different from what they would normally do, but we’ve had tremendous success, with the university taking the time to work with us.”
The program now has two cohorts of 36 men. Each group lives and takes classes together, studying the same accredited curriculum offered at WMU’s main campus. The university is one of 13 institutions statewide bringing college courses to an estimated 1,300 men and women behind bars. This year 250 men and women earned a degree in Michigan while incarcerated. WMU’s HEJI program paused accepting new students in 2025 but will welcome its third cohort of incarcerated students this fall.
In its first year, more than 100 men statewide applied to study with HEJI, and 25 were accepted, some relocating to Lakeland to do so. The applicants had to have a high school diploma or GED certificate and fill out WMU’s standard college application.
They showed up eager to learn, according to Brown. “These are folks who are extremely dedicated to improving themselves through higher education,” he says. “There’s this hunger for self-improvement, and their curiosity is inexhaustible. And these are not remedial students. These are folks who already had the skills, already had fundamental ideas and viewpoints.”
As he talks about his own intellectual growth, Hardin proves Brown’s point.
“I love philosophy, specifically when you engage with questions of things like love and what is right and what is wrong and whether or not it’s relative or it’s an absolute,” says Hardin. “These things allowed me to fine-tune my own moral compass.”
The collective classroom enthusiasm at Lakeland makes for a different kind of teaching experience, says Miles.
“I found out early on that I could stop preparing exercises or activities to draw the students out,” she says. “I just needed to make sure that I understood my material so I could answer all the questions that came up. I’ve been at WMU for 30 years, and this has been the most fulfilling project of my career.”
Brown says of his incarcerated students, “They do the things that we want all college students to do all the time — to think and connect and have an earnest, basic, fundamental engagement and mental activity. I’m still captivated by what happens in the classroom, because it’s the ideal of an educational exchange where there’s dialogue, where there’s ideas, and this baseline openness to other possibilities of understanding the world or ourselves.
“We’re not saying that these men didn’t make mistakes or commit crimes or minimizing the fact that they have caused harm, have made decisions that landed them there. But we are saying that providing incarcerated students with quality, in-person higher education is shown to provide myriad benefits to the individual, the prison, the surrounding community and society as a whole. These are incredible folks. Their hunger for self-improvement is otherworldly.”
Sacelia Strong-Sangster, one of seven HEJI staff members teaching at Lakeland this term, talks about the unity that comes from the students living and studying together. “Living together helps build the tightness within the cohort,” she says. “They help each other with homework. They help each other practice their speeches and their presentations. They study together.”
Strong-Sangster is a Ph.D. candidate in interdisciplinary studies at WMU and an instructor in the Department of World Religions and Cultures. As the HEJI student success coordinator, she meets one-on-one with the current 36 students to help support their needs.
“The students are very dedicated to what they’re doing. There’s a lot of passion with them,” Strong-Sangster says. “It’s incredible to see the growth in their writing and critical-thinking skills from when they began.”
Miles recalls hearing from prison staff right before the start of spring semester in 2024 that there was a “strange mood” among the prisoners in the housing unit that the guards couldn’t identify.
“Turns out it was happiness,” she says. “They were so excited to get back to the classroom.”
From prison cell to campus
Thanks to the work of the HEJI staff, Hardin was able to move to WMU’s main campus in September. The team worked across and within two bureaucracies — at WMU and at Lakeland — to get him to Kalamazoo in time for the fall term, arranging housing, tuition (funded by grants) and class registration. When Encore spoke with Hardin in mid-September, he had just six weeks of freedom under his belt and was getting used to the whole new world of college life — classes, technology and living alone.
“I’ve always had either a bunkie or someone around me, and, being that I went to prison so young, I’m not used to being by myself,” he says.
Hardin also missed the other students, but parole regulations prohibit him from communicating with them.
“I had a lot of brothers in there, and I miss all of them,” he says, “especially the cohort, because we actually became very close, and that’s not typical inside that environment. This program provided us with an opportunity to develop a brotherhood amongst ourselves, because we studied and lived together in the same unit, going to class with each other every day, and you can’t help but, especially in those types of circumstances, lean on people in times of hardship or stress.”
“Everyone in Coldwater asks about Jayson,” reports Miles. “They ask, ‘How is he doing? Do you see him in the hallways? What’s the food like that he’s eating?’ They want to know all these things about what his experience is like. So, he’s got a lot on his shoulders in many ways, because they’re also looking to him as a role model. Jayson is getting that college experience that so many of them are trying to achieve. They’re really proud of him.”
It’s clear that HEJI staff is proud of Hardin as well, though he insists he’s not unique.
“I need to tell you, I am not exceptional compared to my classmates,” says Hardin. “The only difference is God blessed me with the opportunity to obtain my freedom first. I’m not about to mess up under any circumstance.”
McGwire Hidden, program coordinator for HEJI and the Center for the Humanities, teaches philosophy on the main WMU campus and at WMU Lakewood. He says recent data shows there is less recidivism and there are fewer violent incidents at Michigan correctional facilities that offer college programming, which doesn’t surprise him.
“The thing I’m proudest of is the feedback we get regarding our students’ ability to function at a higher level in their day-to-day lives,” says Hidden. “I heard one student say, ‘I was talking to my daughter, and I was better able to handle this situation because of the things that I’ve learned.’ That’s incredibly gratifying.”
Hardin saw for himself the social and emotional benefits of education in prison.
“I can personally give a testament to that,” he says. “Coldwater is what they call a program prison, where they have the college program but also a cognitive behavior therapy program, substance abuse program, and they all work together. So, prisons where you have programming — going to school and getting education — it changes people. It really does. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and I’ve experienced it in myself.”
Moving ahead
In February, Hardin finished his first semester with a 3.79 grade point average and was invited to join WMU’s Lee Honors College, something he’d promised himself in September that he would accomplish.
“On my first day, we went on a campus tour, and I looked at the Honors College building and said, ‘What’s that?’ And Dale (Brown) said, ‘That’s the Honors College, where the most exceptional students go.’ And I was like, ‘I’ll be there next semester.’ And he laughed, but I said, ‘I’m serious.’ So, when I received the email saying, ‘We are inviting you to join the exclusive membership of Lee Honors College,’ I was very stoked. That’s something I’m real proud of.”
This winter HEJI worked with university administrators to change policy and allow the hiring of formerly incarcerated individuals, making Hardin WMU’s first such employee. The process included Hardin meeting with WMU President Russ Kavalhuna.
“I’m like, ‘OK, I’m meeting with the president. Like, what do you want me to do?’ And they said, ‘Just tell him your story, just go in there and tell him the same things that you tell us all the time, just be yourself,’” Hardin recalls. “So, I told him the circumstances surrounding my incarceration and what I did while I was incarcerated, from the bad to the good. And then what I’ve been doing currently, since I’ve been out, and what I plan on doing. And you know, I just kept checking off all of the things that I’ve been able to accomplish.”
Hardin now works 20 hours per week for the HEJI program while taking a full load of classes. He’s on track to graduate with a B.A. in interdisciplinary studies in 2028 (as are those at Lakeland who continue in the program), and he plans to attend graduate school, hoping to work with youth and do societal re-entry work with former prisoners like himself.
“I’ll be damned if I allow any of my nieces or nephews to go through what I went through, and I’m very vocal with all of them and any young person I encounter that I see on that path. I’m very vocal about what prison is and how to, you know, not go there. If I don’t know how to do anything else, I know that.”
The transition to being a student, an earner and an independent adult continues for Hardin. When asked if, with a semester on main campus under his belt, he still feels like a different kind of student in the classroom, he replies, “It’s hard not to feel like the old guy, because for the most part my student peers are two decades younger than me. I’m starting to feel more comfortable with being that guy. The alienation that I felt last fall I don’t feel it as intensely.”
Brown says of Hardin’s first few months at WMU, “It was a tough semester for him, just making the transition, navigating the world and the campus and the technology. And he ended up doing so well, and now the man works here Monday, Wednesday and Friday — first real job, first real paycheck.”
HEJI on the road
The HEJI team will be on the agenda at the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison’s annual conference this month. Staff will travel to Cleveland to talk about the challenges and rewards of the HEJI program, and Hardin will be among them, under special permission from his probation officer. There will also be some R&R on the schedule, including attendance at a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game.
As they prepare to take their story to a wider audience, HEJI staff reflect on their personal experiences, the program’s progress and what’s ahead.
“I had no idea what resilience meant before I met some of these guys,” says Brown. “I’ve heard them casually say, ‘I had a tough time a couple years back because I was in solitary confinement for 10 years.’ Somehow, against all odds, they’ve found ways to be successful. The amount of wasted talent in prison is devastating, the amount of squandered potential.”
Miles adds, “Some of these men have been waiting a long time to prove they are worth something.”
As for Hardin, he is grateful and determined.
“I understand that this is a privilege,” he says. “I have a lot of friends who are formerly incarcerated, who are very close to me and who don’t have the resources I do, don’t have a program like this one. A lot of people, like a lot of my homeboys, asked why don’t I do school closer to home, like at Wayne State University (in Detroit) — they have a very nice re-entry college program. But I know who Dr. Ann is. I know who Dale is. I know who McGwire is. I know it’s more than just work for them. I’m living proof that if you’re serious, education has the power to transform anything and to make anything possible.”
