This is a story about avocados. And soft pillows. A fresh breeze coming in through an open window. Family — both genetic and chosen. It’s about deep friendships that endure. It’s about healing past traumas, transformation, changing perspectives and shifting paradigms. It’s a story about steadfastness and dedication. It’s about love. And it’s about liberation.
Berenice Montano grew up in South L.A., where she was an honor roll student who played volleyball and basketball and ran track at George Washington Preparatory High School. Her neighborhood, she says, was impoverished. But that didn’t stop her mother from insisting she always put education first. After graduating, Montano enrolled at Cal State Northridge. Life was great.
Then, at 19, she fell in love. For her first serious relationship, she’d chosen a nefarious partner who soon introduced her to the streets and selling drugs. She never tried the drugs, but did get “addicted to a certain lifestyle.” After nearly a decade, that lifestyle caught up with her when she found herself facing charges for transporting methamphetamine. A lenient judge gave her an 18-month sentence, explaining that any future offense would see Montano facing a much longer bid. Montano told the judge not to worry. She thought, You’ll never see me inside a courtroom as a defendant again.
She was sent to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Victorville’s medium-security prison camp for women. FCI Victorville is a complex of drab, low-slung buildings situated in a desolate section of wasteland in Southern California’s High Desert. Roughly 1,300 people are confined at Victorville at any given time; Montano’s time among them started off rough. She exchanged barbs with the prison staff because she “just felt like they didn’t want the best for me. It was just like a defensive mode.”
Battling her demons, and working through her past with a dangerous, controlling partner, she made a decision to focus on the next stage of her life. Then, she saw a bulletin board notice for an upcoming orientation for a UCLA course. Her interest was piqued. She decided that no matter what else she did, she would be at that orientation and find out what UCLA was offering in a place like this. When the date for orientation finally arrived, she was overcome by the welcome from the leadership staff of UCLA’s Prison Education Program (PEP). Jai Williams ’16, PEP’s program coordinator, and Acacia M. Warren, then the program’s managing director, won Montano over after just a few icebreaker exercises. “I sat down,” Montano says, “and I automatically felt like everybody’s energy was positive.”
PEP sits at the axis of world arts and cultures/dance, law and African American studies. It also houses the Center for Justice, which works to end inequities based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation and disability. The program’s goal: to create collaborative learning by bringing traditional UCLA “outside” students into prison facilities to take courses directly alongside incarcerated “inside” students.
But the program, and its visionary leaders, accomplish so much more than that. In PEP classrooms, inside students teach as many profound lessons as their professors do. Bryonn Bain, co-founding director of the Center for Justice and the founder of PEP, says he teaches “for very selfish reasons: because it’s a way for me to continue learning.”
In its 10-year existence, PEP has administered UCLA courses inside a half-dozen juvenile and women’s facilities. Of the women who participate, Warren estimates at least half are mothers. She tries, she says, to bring joy — and a vision of a better future — into a place most people don’t associate with either. The joy she transmits, evident in her broad, beaming smile, is fed by a simple abiding principle: “You are alive, and you mean something to somebody.”
Berenice Montano’s first PEP course, in fall 2023, was “Justice of Theater,” taught by UCLA lecturer Aaron Bray, a “scholar warrior” with a Harvard Law degree. Montano calls it a hands-on “critical thinking class,” in which the students explored legal cases and engaged in impassioned debates. In winter quarter, she took “The Spoken Word,” a creative writing and performance practicum with the indefatigable Bain, himself a champion of spoken word poetry and an activist, producer, director, hip-hop theater innovator and multimedia storyteller.
Born in Brooklyn to parents who immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago — his mother was a nurse, his father a photojournalist in the U.S. Army and, before that, an award-winning calypso singer — Bain had had a harrowing run-in with wrongful imprisonment in 1999 (ironically, while he was attending Harvard Law School). The story is well documented on platforms as large as 60 Minutes, as well as via freewheeling wordplay in his one-man show Lyrics From Lockdown, produced by the late Harry Belafonte, which was developed in prisons in 25 states around the country over the past two decades (and is available on YouTube as a TED Talk).
So storytelling is clearly in Bain’s blood. It’s woven into the DNA of PEP’s coursework, too. Claudia Peña J.D. ’08 is on the faculty at UCLA School of Law and in gender studies and is the Center for Justice’s co-founding director and the co-director of PEP. “Storytelling is one of the most important traditions that exists in humanity,” she says. “It’s the way that knowledge has been passed on from generation to generation forever.”
It’s a sentiment Bain echoes. “Across the world, we look at oppressed peoples — it’s the stories that we tell ourselves that help us understand our place in the universe,” he says. “These stories give us a sense of meaning and a sense of purpose. What is the story that you tell yourself about why you are here, what you’re doing and who you are? That will determine the choices you make and the life you live.”
With the launch of PEP in 2015, Bain and UCLA set off a movement, and other UCs and California universities followed suit. For the first time this year, 23 incarcerated students earned their bachelor's degrees from UC Irvine and UCI LIFTED, while Cal State L.A. offers a bachelor’s to students confined in Lancaster. Both programs followed PEP. Bain’s point: When a leading institution like UCLA dives into this work and puts the weight of its resources behind it, it sends a clear signal that other institutions should be doing the same.
Bain and PEP leadership are not merely teachers; they are advocates for the women they’re pulling into their orbit. So it is of little surprise when they begin lobbying the Victorville warden to allow the inside students to come to the UCLA campus for a March performance. In week 10 of the quarter, the warden finally says yes.
Every Friday, Bain and the outside students enrolled in “The Spoken Word” take an early morning bus to convene with the class’s 12 inside students at Victorville. Bain reveals the good news to the outside students during the two-hour trek to Victorville for their last classroom meeting of the term. The student reactions, even at that early hour of the morning, are loud and joyous, akin to the leaps and shouts of a surprised Academy Award winner. On March 15, Montano and her classmates will put on a live stage performance — titled Literary Liberation — at UCLA, featuring 19 pieces by PEP poets.
Four days before the performance, Montano transitions to a halfway house near her childhood home in South L.A. to serve out the remaining three months of her sentence. She sweats whether the director of the house will even grant her permission to attend the show; she pleads her case and gets the green light.
Before the performance, PEP holds a lunch reception for all of the students. It’s the little things that Montano and her incarcerated classmates really enjoy — like fresh fruit. “Imagine avocado being one of your highlights of the day,” she says. “In there, we don’t get avocado. All the food and everything that was catered to us was a plus for us. We always talked about avocados in there.”
Those guests include members of the Sugar Heal Gang — a local organization of Black and Indigenous practitioners who work with families who are pregnant for the entire birthing process and postpartum.
Courses like these resonate with both inside and outside students. Some are mothers, many others will become mothers — all have mothers. Birth is universal, but the traditional practices discussed in the course no longer are. It feels like a gift of esoteric wisdom is being passed down to the class’s lucky participants. It’s a reminder that the university can, and in fact must, still function as a place where learning for learning’s sake is an unmitigated good no one should have to apologize for. Encouraging the holistic growth of a whole person, feeding their curiosity beyond how the material they learn affects their future job prospects, is as worthy a goal of education as any other.
There’s a chill in the early morning air on Dickson Plaza. The grass is wet with dew, the skies gray, typical of late May. Students congregate at a bus bench across the street from Murphy Hall, chatting energetically as they wait for the black minibus to take them to the women’s prison in Santa Fe Springs. They’ve taken this trip each Friday morning of the quarter to join 15 incarcerated women in attending a gender and African American studies course called “Women of Color and Social Movements.”
Creating a blended learning community of traditionally enrolled UCLA students and incarcerated students has proven invaluable. “Our inside students tell us all the time that it’s meaningful to them,” Bain says. “It makes them feel like regular students, makes them feel humanized” when an entire class of UCLA scholars comes into the facility, as opposed to just a professor or two.
The bus rumbles down the 405 freeway to the 10 East, then 5 South. It eventually enters what looks like an industrial park but is actually the Custody to Community Transitional Reentry Program (CCTRP) facility, a nondescript 60-bed facility. You leave your bag on the bus. Entering, each person signs in at a counter, not unlike checking in for a doctor’s appointment, except in this case you hand over your ID. You can’t bring in phones; only the one or two laptops necessary for teaching the course are allowed.
The women housed here — most with less than two years of their sentences remaining — don’t wear uniforms, and they don’t live behind bars. CCTRP provides rehabilitative services that assist with alcohol and drug recovery, employment, education, housing, family reunification and social support; there are monthly trips to Walmart. Classes take place in a roughly 2,000-square-foot room that resembles a high school library.
Seats for everyone in the class, PEP faculty and staff included, are arranged in a large circle. The agenda kicks off with a welcome and check-in (“How’s your spirit?” “How’s your mind?”) followed by warm-up and community- building exercises — one, called Ochos Locos, has everyone on their feet for what looks like an adult version of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” Bain is big on movement as a tool. It’s important, he says, in two ways: the movement of bodies, motion, how we communicate nonverbally — and in terms of social and political justice movements.
The lights go off, and the class watches a 10-minute video from NBC News about Native Hawaiians protesting a proposal to build a giant telescope on a sacred mountain. A lively group discussion ensues. Fyrne, a 70-year-old, free-thinking prophet who has been incarcerated at CCTRP for almost two years, delivers a master class of a monologue pointing out the connections between white supremacy, colonialism and how Western scientific projects can be used to rob Indigenous peoples of their rights. Applause ripples across the room; a few students from campus hoot and holler in support. Bain voices his astonishment at Fyrne’s brilliance before asking her, through a wry smile, “Do you want to take over and teach the rest of the class?”
One of the most moving elements of the class are the affirmations. Each person’s name goes into a hat, which is passed around the circle until everyone is holding a name. Along with praise and positivity, there is also a sense of sadness that this is the last time this particular group will be together at CCTRP. It marks the end of something special that’s transpired over the previous nine weeks. The affirmations elicit both laughter and tears: “You’re a great conversationalist”; “Hearing you speak is such an honor. I learn so much from you”; “I really admire you because you are so in touch with who you are and how you see the world … and I love your style!”; “When I read your story for the first time, it was very moving. It touched my heart, and I’m so excited for everyone to hear it.”
That last affirmation is about a CCTRP student named Demisha. Her deeply touching story is about having been the only Black child in a predominantly white neighborhood of Phoenix, and how she didn’t realize that she was any different until a fourth-grade teacher pointed it out during a self-portrait art assignment. Determined to fit in, Demisha bleached her skin in hopes that it would turn white. The story is personal, comical and devastating.
This course is the first for Demisha, who anticipates being released from CCTRP in 2025. Demisha is also taking classes with Loyola Marymount University and Cal State Dominguez Hills. With every college course she takes, a week gets chopped off her sentence. Before she got to CCTRP, Demisha was at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino, the oldest women’s prison in the state — the same facility where, in 2015, incarcerated women penned more than 100 letters to UCLA requesting a center for incarceration studies. Bain launched PEP shortly thereafter.
One of the program’s key goals is to “rehumanize” the inside students who serve their time in a carceral system that seeks to dehumanize them at nearly every turn. Demisha says it’s the simple things she misses: Riding her beach cruiser up the coast in Long Beach. Opening a window. Sitting in traffic. Having her coffee from Starbucks. “Those are things I took for granted,” she says. “There was no restriction. Now, I have to ask to walk out the door.”
During five years at CIW, she dreamed about having a soft pillow. She used a balled-up jacket instead.” Things are better at CCTRP. “My son,” she says with a mother’s pride, “made sure I got a very soft pillow.” Now, deeply dedicated to her education, she feels she has a lot to look forward to on the outside. She hopes to give back — and down the road, to volunteer with PEP. And she’s philosophical about her time in confinement. “When something happens that you don’t understand, just keep going through it,” she says. “The only way out is through.”
Trade Unionist and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was incarcerated for sedition (for speaking out against U.S. involvement in World War I), called prison “at best a monumental evil and a burning shame to society.” He said, “it ought not merely to be reformed but abolished as an institution for the punishment and degradation of unfortunate human beings.”
The situation in today’s punitive system is somehow exponentially worse now than it was a century ago. Today, almost half of Americans have a close relative who has spent time in jail or prison. And the populations inside who occupy those prisons are not only some of the most vulnerable people in society, but also among its most traumatized. Peña talks about the “trauma to prison pipeline,” because 96% of people in prisons have experienced some form of trauma or another — or, just as likely, multiple traumas. Meanwhile, every meaningful metric on the topic points to education as the most powerful antidote to recidivism. While the national recidivism rate is about 65%, only 5.6% of incarcerated people who earn a bachelor’s degree return to prison. Earn a master’s degree, and that number plummets to zero.
Acacia Warren’s father was formerly incarcerated. As a younger man, he was caught up in criminal activity. He now serves as a chaplain at Santa Rita Prison. “My father tells people all the time, education saved his life,” Warren says. “If he hadn’t gone the education route, he would be dead.”
With all the good that PEP does now, the only question is this: How much more could they do? The desire is there: Peña mentions that more than 100 courses have been offered to PEP by professors who would like to teach in facilities. And the need is certainly there: While PEP usually accepts 15 inside students for any given course, that leaves out many students inside of facilities who are seeking access to classes. Currently, inside students can receive justice studies certificates from UCLA Extension after completing seven PEP courses, but ideally the program would like to offer UCLA bachelor’s degrees to its students who are incarcerated. “The only thing that is limiting us,” Peña says, “is lack of resources.”
More resources mean potentially greater impact on more students — both inside and out. Justine Lightner, a third-year transfer student majoring in public affairs who took the “Women of Color” course, thinks every UCLA student should take a PEP course inside a carceral facility, especially those majoring in fields such as public affairs and sociology. “It’s important to go into a facility and see that these students are people just like everyone else,” she says. “They just happened to have made some mistakes. Those mistakes don’t define them.” In fact, it’s just the opposite. “Everyone in the course has been very open, and I think that’s kind of my favorite part, because I think a lot of people just don’t open up the way that we have in the last nine weeks, particularly in an academic course,” Lightner adds. That experience isn’t the norm. “This class has been really nice; I can actually get to know people. In my other classes, I feel like I’m just a number in a large lecture hall.”
The finals for both the “Women of Color and Social Movements” and “Isn’t She Lovely” courses culminate in a stage performance at the Fowler Museum on UCLA’s campus: Labors of Love: A Storytelling Potluck, where 18 storytellers will each relate a three- to four-minute story.
The show gets underway as Professor Peña, who has Indigenous roots in El Salvador, delivers a beautiful land acknowledgment. She tells a story about the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples native to what is now known as Los Angeles, whose traditional practice of seafaring in plank canoes, called te’aat, was lost as a result of colonization. She explains how they rebuilt the tradition with the help of other nations in an act of intertribal cooperation, a parallel to the way students with different talents and skill sets all contributed to the storytelling potluck happening here.
Narratives follow about overcoming obstacles, love, shame, regret and war. They are powerful, moving, funny, uplifting and often achingly personal. Every performer — and every PEP participant coordinating the show — is dressed in theater blacks. (The exception is, of course, Fyrne, standing out in a long pink cardigan.) The stories explore wildly different themes, ranging from body positivity, abusive partners, family tragedy and fishing to women in gaming, growing up in a war zone, podcasting and justice. By the time the last story wraps, there is nary a dry eye among the 200 audience members. “That just does not get old,” Bain says. “That we can fight for the freedom of our sisters who are incarcerated — even if it’s one day at a time, we’ll take every day we can get.” He calls attention to the case of Monica Frazee, a student from the federal facility who performed her poetry and played the harmonica in a previous quarter while her warden was in the room. The warden subsequently signed paperwork to release Frazee four and a half years early to home confinement.
Berenice Montano takes to the stage to recite a particularly heartrending poem dedicated to an unborn child lost to abortion. She announces that this is also likely the day she’ll be getting her ankle monitor removed. Triumphant shouts and applause thunder throughout the auditorium. It’s another milestone on the path to complete freedom, a testament to how far she’s come. She’s working toward earning her associate’s degree in sociology from Victor Valley College. Her ultimate goal? To get into UCLA as an undergrad.
Nearing the end of her time at Victorville, Montano suddenly found herself crossing paths with one of her old volleyball teammates from high school. Initially ashamed to be meeting under such circumstances, Montano realized she could offer her friend some advice and encouragement. She relayed to her old teammate all of the positive things that she might be able to take part in. The former schoolmate heard her and ended up taking advantage of numerous programming opportunities.
And that’s all Montano wants. What all of them want. To motivate and inspire other women who are imprisoned to seize programs like PEP, programs whose light penetrates the walls that enclose them. Programs that offer women like Montano an opportunity to make the most of their time inside — and ensure they never come back. “Seeing kindhearted people wanting to help us in there is itself a blessing,” she says. “It’s not just a program. They get personal with us. They want to see us succeed.”
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Fall 2024 issue.
