How California’s colleges are supporting formerly incarcerated students

By Titus Wilkinson

Crystal Navarro stumbled upon one of the most impactful components of her college career completely by accident.

In a stroke of luck while looking for a classroom at Fresno State University that she could use for a Zoom class, Navarro knocked on the door where Project Rebound meets. A student assistant in that classroom explained what the program was, Navarro said, “and I qualified because I had been previously incarcerated. So I went that very same day to sign up.”

She hasn’t looked back since, now in her third semester with the program.

Project Rebound, as she came to learn, did a lot to help formerly incarcerated students financially, from food vouchers on campus to school books. While affiliated students were previously reimbursed for books after they bought them, Navarro said, “This is the first semester they just gave us the option to go into the student store and get our books, and they’re completely free to us.”

The program also helped her with grants for emergencies and tuition costs, although the grants usually depend on exactly what a student needs.

But Navarro has received far more than financial help.

“When I got to Fresno State [from Porterville Community College],” Navarro explained, “I was still, I guess, used to being by myself all the time.” She said she’d gotten in the habit of not sharing her past while in community college.

“I never once spoke about my past,” she said. “I was always made to think that was just something that I should keep to myself because I would not be accepted. Or maybe my professors wouldn’t, you know, like me.”

Navarro continued, “And so when I came across Project Rebound, I felt like I found my place.”

Navarro truly had to work her way back up from an extremely tough situation. “When I was incarcerated in 2016, I was pregnant with my son. And that was just very rock bottom,” Navarro said.

She knew that once she was released she would have to have a plan to provide for her son. With student financial aid, Navarro said, “I was able to just kind of better my life, you know, a little bit at a time.”

Beyond the financial support, she was also able to get connected to other volunteer opportunities through Project Rebound and Fresno State. Navarro works through Americorps’ California Justice Leaders program where she says they help formerly incarcerated people with reentry services. “We help them get back into school, get them into trades … get them employment, help them build resumes [and with] interviewing.”

She also works with youth in Fresno’s juvenile hall and is able to share her story about the importance of education, although she admits she had her doubts about school.

“I actually almost didn’t even go to a university because I was worried that my education was not going to help me. I thought, ‘I’m going to do all of this school for what? I’m not going to be able to get a job.’”

But, Navarro said, “I started going to school, and I actually enjoyed it.”

Regarding her studies, she explained that she started as a business major while at Porterville Community College but quickly switched to social sciences.

As a psychology major who also is interested in sociology, Navarro said, “I feel like I’ve kind of learned the whole aspect of how to help people and the ways that our environments, you know, shape us and hurt us.”

She added, “Sociology is pretty much studying all of the environmental factors — like dead-end cycles of poverty — and how they affect a person, how they shape you.”

And then there’s psychology. “Now you’re studying the brain,” Navarro said, “and how certain traumas and different functions of our brain affect us as well. … The population of people that I come from, we don’t think about the way that you’re living as wrong or bad or even not normal, because it’s all you grow up knowing.

“I’ll be honest,” Navarro continued, “the chances of a family member of mine being sent to jail or prison is a lot higher than if they graduated high school. That’s just what I grew up in. So living in those cycles and not understanding them, you stay in them. And I stayed in them for a very long time.”

Now, however, she credits studying sociology and psychology with “completely transform[ing] me and help[ing] me understand why I was the way that I was or why I did the things that I did.”

Navarro is closing in on the finish line as she nears getting a bachelor’s degree in psychology where she hopes to get a job as a clinician. “My education, like I said, has transformed me and has saved my life.”

— Ramon Castaños contributed to this story.