He got a college degree in prison. Now he’s off to a prestigious law school
Since leaving prison in December 2023, Benard McKinley, 39, has been busy preparing for huge next steps.
Between working and visits from friends and family, McKinley is getting ready for his first year of study at the prestigious Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, a historic achievement.
“Just months ago, I was still behind prison bars, and not knowing exactly how the future of going to law school would turn out. So to be home and know I’m going to law school … is an amazing feeling,” McKinley told the Guardian.
McKinley is the first person from Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program (NPEP) to be accepted into any law school, including Northwestern’s, which boasts a 4% acceptance rate.
The NPEP scheme grants bachelor’s degrees, among just a handful of programs in the US that offer a collagelevel education to incarcerated people. years in prison, finished his bachelor’s degree last year and applied for a place at the prestigious law school, all while incarcerated at the Stateville correctional center in northern Illinois.
McKinley and his classmates were the inaugural class of NPEP, one of four cohorts with 20 incarcerated students in the program overall.
Northwestern has stated that graduates in McKinley’s class are the first incarcerated students to receive a bachelor’s degree from a top 10 US university, as measured by rankings from US News & World report.
McKinley said he had always wanted to go to college. But the 39-year old’s mainstream education stopped abruptly when he received a criminal sentence while still a teenager.
“I was already passionate about trying to go to college, I just didn’t know how or when that would happen,” he said.
McKinley was sentenced when he was 19 to nearly 100 years in prison after being convicted of a gang-related murder.
While incarcerated, he began stud
ying the law with the aim of appealing his case as well as helping others serving time alongside him with their legal problems.
He first obtained his GED and paralegal diploma behind bars and was eager to continue his education. McKinley applied and was accepted into the highly competitive NPEP program, a rare opportunity to get a bachelor’s degree while incarcerated. In 2023, out of 400 people who applied, only 40 were accepted.
Northwestern University’s degree requirements were rigorous and McKinley studied intensely, taking classes on political science, thermodynamics and more, pushing through the Covid-19 pandemic in the process, like millions of other college students.
The NPEP experience proved transformative, he said. “It allowed me to reflect on who I thought I was, who I wanted to be, and where I wanted to go,” he said, adding that classes taught him how social ills, such as systemic racism, manifest in society.
He started applying for law school last year – taking the LSAT examination, writing application essays and collecting letters of recommendation, all while incarcerated.
McKinley wrote his application essay on his personal journey, detailing how he went from being incarcerated at the age of 19 to obtaining a degree from the prestigious university. Those handwritten essays were then typed out by NPEP tutors, many of whom wrote letters on McKinley’s behalf to the law school admissions committee.
He found the best time to study was late at night or “five, six in the morning”, but it was difficult in the prison environment.
“At the end of the day, prison still has a negative social dynamic and to be able to block all that out and focus can be challenging,” McKinley said.
McKinley was released from prison early into transitional housing, while his law school application was still pending.
In a rare case, his original sentence was successfully reduced to 25 years by the Illinois appellate court, which said that the judge who originally tried McKinley’s case did not take his young age into consideration or the efforts he had made to rehabilitate.
At Northwestern, graduating students walk under a famous arch that forms the university’s entry gate as part of a commencement tradition.
Early in 2024, McKinley was able to as well, and it was one of the first things he didafter being released, to mark his degree.
“That was an amazing feeling,” McKinley said. “To know that, no matter how my journey led up to getting to that point. I was still welcome to participate in that type of tradition.”
Soon after, McKinley heard he’d been accepted into law school.
Sheila Bedi, clinical law professor and director of the community justice clinic at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, said:
“He’s just an exceptional student on so many levels. He’s rigorous, disciplined, eager to learn, passionate about self-growth.” She added that other Northwestern law students were “thrilled” for McKinley to join the community. She is eager for more programs like NPEP.
“There are so many other Benards who could come home and could be contributing positively to their communities, but who are not provided that opportunity,” Bedi said.
McKinley hopes to become a civil rights lawyer and open his own legal aid clinic to help other marginalized communities.
Now the first person in his family to attend college, let alone law school, he is relishing the achievement while also feeling responsibility.
“It feels amazing. I’m definitely a positive role model for the future generation and my family. So you know, I have a job to do,” he said.
for thousands of years, releasing sargassum to float south and form the new belt.
The new belt also receives additional nutrients from the Sahara dust that frequently blows across the Atlantic, which itself could be exacerbated by climate impacts such as the expansion of deserts as temperatures rise. Some scientists also argue that warming oceans provide a more sargassumfriendly growing environment.
Experts tend to agree that the great Atlantic sargassum belt is here to stay – and that it is a global problem that needs a global response.
That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated to weigh 22m tonnes and much of the Caribbean saw its worstever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.
But broad international action has not materialised. Despite a growing patchwork of studies and projects across the region, various attempts by the UN and others to coordinate a Caribbean-wide response have been largely stalled by funding shortages, geopolitical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.
No Caribbean strategy is in place, and a region-wide warning and monitoring centre proposed in 2019 has not been established.
In 2022, the Saint Lucian sargassum researcher Dr Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village of Praslin Bay and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to the destruction of fisheries to corroding jewellery.
“It affects how I breathe, and I also think it affects the children and the way that they function, because sometimes they’re so moody and they cannot sit and do the activities because it’s so awful,” a teacher said in the Praslin Bay video. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”
In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including Saint Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat.
But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.
“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritise. And perhaps other things – like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools – might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”
Negligible investment from polluting countries
As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders have often complained about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they said, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts such as hurricanes, droughts and flooding.
They also said the cost of the sargassum crisis should be shouldered in part by the larger countries mostly responsible for it, but that accessing international climate financing for the purpose was not easy.
A lack of funding and regional coordination has also stymied efforts to monetise the seaweed by finding a large-scale sustainable use for it.
“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr Franziska Elmer, a researcher based in Mexico.
Sargassum and Cop28: invasion starts to garner attention
The 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by 2 December when Gustave-dit-Duflo stood at a podium 8,000 miles away during a side event at the Cop28 meeting in Dubai.
As dignitaries looked on, she issued a stark warning about sargassum. “It is a very invasive and aggressive phenomenon, and through all the Caribbean it affects tourism, and all the economies of the region are based on biodiversity and tourism,” she told those gathered at the French pavilion on the sidelines of the conference. “The Caribbean has a lot of hotspots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”
She said the French government wanted the issue to be discussed on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations conference on the oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.
“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island,” she said. “It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic. This is why all the countries that are impacted, we need to create an international coalition to be able to find means and ways to act.”
As countries work to establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.
Shortly after Cop28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about 5m metric tonnes, compared with a December average of about 2m. By February, the mass had increased to about 9m tonnes – the second-highest quantity ever recorded for the month.
In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.
This article, coordinated by the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism and produced by the BVI Beacon, RCI Group Guadeloupe, América Futura, El País América, Television Jamaica and the Virgin Islands Daily News, is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), and Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre) collaborated in this investigation. This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.