A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• This week, we’re publishing Part 1 of a Q&A with Erik Maloney, a lifer in Arizona, and Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University. Over the course of seven years they co-authored Imprisoned Minds, a book about trauma and healing in prison that was published in December 2024. 

• We want to hear about your experience with college and career during reentry. Due to an overwhelming response we got to a LinkedIn post, we’ve made this survey to help inform future coverage in this newsletter. If you are formerly incarcerated, please take a few minutes to share your insights!

• The Stillwater Awards, which recognize excellence in prison journalism, awarded College Inside contributor Juan Hernandez first place for Best Illustration. 

• In a recent blog post, Ess Pokornowski and Tommaso Bardelli of ITHAKA S+R dig into how New York's recent 22-day prison guard strike in February severely disrupted higher education programs for incarcerated students. Their article highlights systemic vulnerabilities in prison education and threats to students' Pell Grant eligibility even after the strike's official end.

• ICYMI: Ron Palm, an incarcerated man who recently transferred from Illinois to Minnesota, is one of just a few incarcerated students in the country studying law behind bars. Co-published with our local partner, WBEZ Chicago.

A new book explores trauma inside and outside prison — and how to address it

A new book, Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison, published in December 2024, represents an unusual academic partnership between someone who studies the criminal justice system and someone who lives within it. The book is a collaboration between Erik Maloney, who is serving a life sentence in the Arizona Department of Corrections, and Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor who directs the Center for Correctional Solutions at Arizona State University. 

The two met in 2016 when Maloney participated in an Inside-Out class that Wright taught at the prison that brought in outside undergraduates. The book was the result of a seven-year process that involved Maloney transcribing interviews and writing chapters by hand, Wright providing edits, and lengthy written exchanges about which stories to include and how to structure the work.

For the book, Maloney interviewed over 20 men he’s incarcerated with, ultimately selecting six whose stories best illustrated "imprisoned minds" — the book’s central concept that explains how childhood trauma creates patterns of self-destructive thinking and behavior that can lead to incarceration.

"The real epidemic in this country is not drugs and alcohol or violence. Those are symptoms of a bigger problem — the real epidemic is untreated childhood trauma," explains Maloney. This insight forms the foundation of Maloney and Wright’s collaboration, which aims to make complex psychological concepts accessible to both those with "an eighth grade education and someone with a PhD."

In Part 1 of this interview, Charlotte West talks to Maloney and Wright about their aim to address trauma behind bars and how they collaborated across prison walls.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. We’ll be publishing Part 2 of this interview in the next issue of College Inside. 

Charlotte West: Can you define the concept of “imprisoned minds” and how incarcerated people can overcome it?

Erik Maloney: An imprisoned mind is an irrational mindset that develops from untreated childhood trauma and is enhanced by drug or alcohol abuse or risky behavior. The irrational mindset is the flawed decision making ability that is void of logic and reasoning, where critical thinking is influenced by a hyperfocus on satisfying immediate desires.

How to overcome it? It's a long process. You cannot overcome the imprisoned mind without confronting your past, and then beginning to develop yourself in the present.

Kevin Wright: It was important for us to include "Lost Boys and Trapped Men" in the book’s subtitle to make that connection for people. Society often feels sympathy for children who've experienced trauma, but when that same child becomes a 40-year-old man, that connection is gone. People don't think about how childhood experiences set someone on a destructive pathway. We wanted to emphasize that men in prison once were those boys who experienced trauma, making that link that's often missing in both public perception and academic research.

West: Most academic books about trauma and criminal behavior are written by outside researchers. How does Erik’s insider perspective change the narrative?

Maloney: When you read psychology books talking about trauma, they very vaguely allude to guys who experience trauma as children growing up with irrational minds, but that's as far as they go. These neuroscientists will give you scans of the brain and show you how it lights up when it's not supposed to or doesn't light up when it's supposed to. They show that there's a dysfunction going on in the emotional part of the brain, but they don’t tell you what it looks like. As they're talking about [all] this, I clearly understood what they meant, because I lived it. I had that irrational mindset. I thought, how cool it would be to actually demonstrate to the people who are writing these books what the irrational mindset looks like?

Wright: This book is about people and their stories. So often as criminologists, we just take all the people, all their characteristics, all their bad and their good out of the story, and they become data. It's this very antiseptic writing that just isn't in touch with people. We're also hopeful that this will make its way into correctional training academies and into correctional leadership spaces.

West: I'm curious about the actual writing process for this book, given the constraints of working across prison walls. What did that collaboration look like day-to-day?

Maloney: The writing process was challenging. Each chapter was written by hand with pencil because when I first tried using pen, there were so many mistakes that the pages looked horrible. Once I completed a chapter, I'd give it to Kevin. He would make a photocopy and edit it, then return both the original and the edited copy to me. I would rewrite it in pen and give it back to him. He would have someone type it up, and then I'd move on to the next chapter.

For the interviews, I had to be careful about privacy. We don't have a room to lock ourselves in, so I worried about eavesdroppers overhearing personal histories. I'd find places with enough privacy, conduct the interviews, and take notes by hand. The whole process for each person took about two and a half days, assuming there weren't any lockdowns. Some guys had repressed memories, and I would ask probing questions to help them recall details. Sometimes they had to call family members to clarify what happened during certain periods.

Wright: What's remarkable is that most of our collaboration happened through written correspondence. We couldn't just hop on a call or send a quick email. We exchanged lengthy letters about the concept, which stories to include, and how to structure everything. I'd read my responses multiple times before sending them to make sure I was clear. When we disagreed on something, we had to work through it carefully in writing. It was like people did for centuries before modern technology — there's something pure about exchanging ideas that way.

The publication process was another challenge. We faced a lot of rejection, and it was tough to tell Erik we got another ‘no’ after months of waiting. Academic publishing moves slowly, with review processes and revisions, and explaining all that through our limited communication channels tested our patience. But we persisted.

West: Now that the book is out there in the world, what kind of response have you been getting?

Wright: What's been most gratifying is seeing the book reach people we never expected. We've had school teachers reading it and saying, ‘These are our kids. We see these traumatized children in our classrooms every day.’ That recognition — that these patterns start early and could be addressed before incarceration — that's exactly the connection we were hoping to make.

West: Erik, what has this project meant to you personally?

Maloney: This book gave me a chance to turn my own painful experiences into something that might help others. When you're serving life, finding meaning becomes essential. Through this work, I've been able to show that lifers aren't just people to be warehoused — we can contribute valuable insights precisely because of what we've lived through. That's the greatest achievement of this project: proving that solutions can come from within the prison walls.

Related: ++ “Reviving women’s stories and critiquing the carceral state”
++ “Scholarship behind bars”
++ “Trauma is unavoidable in prison. Here’s how educators can help.”

Let’s connect

Please connect if you have story ideas or just want to share your experience with prison education programs as a student or educator. You can always reach me at [email protected] or on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To reach me via snail mail, you can write to: Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

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