The Kind of Students You Dream Of
Her students in prison are eager and well prepared for class. They come having already worked through the material, ready to engage with it. “They’re the kind of students you dream of,” says Dr. Shanthini Baskaran. “Of course, they’re not distracted by phones or screens,” she adds with a smile.
Baskaran is Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology at Trinity International University and the academic lead for Trinity’s program at Fox Lake Correctional Institution (FCLI) in Wisconsin, where incarcerated men pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Bible and Ministry with a minor in Psychology. TIU has run the program since 2017, in partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections and the Wisconsin Inmate Education Association, first at Waupun Correctional Institution. It moved to FCLI in 2023.
The coursework is rigorous: six credits each session, with five sessions each year. What surprised Baskaran was everything that came with it.
“In prison, they are reduced to a label,” she says. “They become an inmate, a number, a record, a risk—someone to be suspicious of.”
TIU’s classroom runs on a different logic. The students are Trinity students, addressed with dignity, asked hard questions, and challenged to be thoughtful and wise both in their academics and in their decisions outside the classroom. They actively participate in the classroom with depth and maturity.
More than a degree
Most prison education stops at job training or a certificate. Through its partnership with Trinity, FCLI offers something rarer: a full bachelor’s degree earned over years, alongside sustained attention to questions of faith, purpose, and identity.
By the program’s next graduation this fall, 44 men will have earned their degrees, while 29 students are currently enrolled at Fox Lake.
For Baskaran, the degree is almost the smaller part.
“Our big vision is for them to grow as disciples of Jesus,” she says. “I want them to know how deeply they’re loved.”
In a place where men have spent years being defined by the worst thing they have done, that is not a small thing to tell someone. The program not only shares that love with them; it works to embody it in every class.
Belonging
One former student grew up in foster care, moving from home to home, rarely staying anywhere more than a year or two. He committed a serious crime as a teenager and spent decades in prison. In Trinity’s program, he found the first community he had ever belonged to. He became a Christian, finished his degree, and now tutors other students in the program.
For this student, the degree became the way into something harder to name: a sense of purpose and a safe, accountable, caring community.
Another student arrived carrying so much trauma that he couldn’t write a personal reflection paper. So at first he didn’t. He worked through the psychological concepts using fictional characters instead, holding the ideas at the safe distance of a story he already knew. Over time the distance closed, and the learning became part of how he started to understand himself.
Baskaran has learned not to rush any of this. The change tends to come slowly and quietly as God works his way into their lives.
Changemakers
The effects don’t stay in the classroom.
Graduates have found their own ways to serve throughout Wisconsin’s prison system. They serve as chapel clerks, library clerks and housing-unit clerks, and as tutors in educational and vocational programs. Two graduates have recently served as leaders in BRAVE, a program preparing men for release.
Two graduates now serve as tutors within the TIU-Fox Lake program itself. One has become so proficient with the program’s technology that the TIU team depends on him to help fellow students with their Chromebooks. The other has earned the respect and trust of the men in the program, who regularly seek him out for help with their studies.