🔵 By Daniel Paul Kirkconnell. Photo by lauragrafie.
This is my graduation speech for becoming a Certified Peer Literacy Mentor on September 10, 2024 in CSATF at Corcoran. This also shows a glimpse of who I am and what I am about. We teach people with disabilities, as well as students at basic counting and alphabet level to twelfth grade level, every subject, every level, and we tutor College students in every subject. We are an integral resource to the success of many of our fellow incarcerated students. We are less than ½% of our incarcerated population, and at pay of less than a dollar an hour, we do this because we want to be part of other people’s successful rehabilitation process.
Hello, my name is Daniel Paul Kirkconnell CDCR number BJ6964. I am a certified peer literacy mentor. This mentorship has been a long road for me and has defined me since the very beginning of my prison stay, through the Covid lockdown to the present. It has given me a purpose to live, helping redefine me as a human being, and has helped me more with my own mental health and rehabilitation than any other program offered me in CDCR. In my sixth month in prison, December of 2019, I was recommended by a teacher to sit in on a discussion for this new program. I had lost everyone I loved and everything in my life that I used to define myself by, but two teachers saw I could teach and people would learn. At this point I was focused on my spiritual and moral compass correction, but other than that I was navigating prison aimlessly with no purpose in my life. I was broken, empty, and I thought about suicide nearly every moment of every day. I didn’t even know who I was anymore. That is until I became a mentor. That first meeting changed my life. It was the first time I had actually thought about the concept of rehabilitation as the trained started sharing facts that the higher a person’s education the less likely they will come back to prison. The most striking statistic shared with me is, not only does every level of education reduce the chance of recidivism significantly, but there is a 0% recidivism rate for a person who has earned a Master’s degree while incarcerated. No other program, vocation, group, mental health, punishment or reward within a correctional setting in California can boast such an incredible impact on crime reduction at that time or that I know of to this date.
That moment I resolved in my heart that I wanted to be among those numbers of success and live a life of service and rehabilitation by helping others become educated and making a better life for themselves, their families, and their communities. I believe that ignorance is the number one enemy to humanity and by helping others, I help in the process of making “one less criminal, one less crime and one less victim.” (CGA)
I owe this debt to my victim, my family, my society, my G-d, myself, to you, and to the CDCR staff. I appreciate the recognition, but I want you to know I do my job, not just because I love helping others, but because I owe this to a world I should have been a light in. I brought so much darkness, but I now live my life to shine a light in the darkness and lead the way to success one student at a time. By living to my fullest potential, I allow others to live to theirs. Even though I and my fellow mentors may never get the privilege of experiencing freedom again, we hope that you will enjoy the company of your loved ones soon, and I am proud and thankful to be a part of that process.
I would like to leave you with a truism about education I read in a book titled “Sociology of the Family” by Dr. John J. Hammond, “Higher education = higher pay = higher social prestige = higher income = higher quality of life.”
so go forth, stay humble, and never stop learning.