Article by Audrey Amsellem

Sara Medwin’s (CC ’26) work in prison education began in high school, through a Maryland-based nonprofit that supports a large network of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers and artists. She helped host exhibitions and share their work, and much of her role was correspondence, staying in contact with artists and writers inside, letter by letter.

That correspondence was her first introduction to bridging access for people inside. It also exposed a gap impossible to miss. Alongside the manuscripts and drawings came a steady, recurring request: people wanted educational programming, and when it was offered at all, it was inconsistent. “In much of the correspondence I was receiving, people voiced the need for educational programming inside,” she says.

So when Sara was accepted to Columbia and learned about the Justice-in-Education Initiative, she knew almost immediately that she wanted to be part of it. She reached out to Mia Ruyter, who coordinated JIE programming on Rikers Island, before she had even set foot on campus, and has stayed involved in whatever way she could since. Now freshly graduated, she works as an executive assistant at Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison.

Learning What the Work Actually Looks Like

Her first experiences inside came through art workshops at the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s facility on Rikers, which she attended alongside Mia and a team of volunteers. “I was expecting a rigid structure,” she says. “What I noticed instead was the deliberate lack of one, and a real sense of community. I was moved by the way people were building connections.”

That balance has carried through the rest of her volunteering experience. Book club, which she has helped facilitate with Nancy Sall in the veterans unit at OBCC since 2023, runs on the same principle: enough structure to hold a conversation, with enough room for something more personal to happen within it.

Sara majored in English, and she is candid about what drew her back to book club semester after semester. It was not only the chance to sit with a group and pick apart language and literary idioms; it was the part of that experience she found missing in most classrooms. “People have a tendency to leave what is personal out of the conversation,” she says. “But this is why we read, because it resonates with us, because we can connect it to our lives.”

In book club, that connection is the point. The group reads a passage and people share stories: family memories, a spiritual experience from childhood, memories triggered by reading a war novel that lands differently for the veterans: “It is lovely that we’re able to collectively create that space,” she says. “I learn a lot from the participants we work with.” She describes her own role as a listener, someone comfortable asking questions and comfortable letting the conversation go where the group takes it. Nancy and her team of volunteers deliberately avoid imposing a shape on the discussion. Everyone arrives with a different background, but it’s the literature that everyone can share and hold in common.

During her senior year, she also served as a teaching assistant for Music Humanities, taught by Professor Audrey Amsellem at RMSC and OBCC, where she saw that same opportunity for connection in the college classroom. The works on the syllabus may not be familiar to everyone in the room, but her favorite part of the class was the student presentations, where students brought their own musical lives to it. Watching them present and dissect the songs they grew up with, using the terminology and analytical structure from the course, changed how she heard those songs herself: “You really see people connect with art forms that are familiar to them in a different way,” she says. “It moved me to think about the kinds of music I might take for granted.”

Her involvement has extended beyond the classroom as well. During her sophomore year, she worked with Mia and Columbia Law School to coordinate a symposium built around the work of Kenneth Reams, an artist and writer on death row. Titled Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides, the event paired a traveling exhibition of Reams’s work, organized with his legal team led by Professor Bernard Harcourt, with plenaries and panels that brought together formerly incarcerated artists and legal scholars.

Advice for Aspiring Volunteers

Sara is clear about the assumption she most wants new volunteers to drop: “Very often people hear about volunteering at Rikers and think you’re going in and bestowing knowledge on people,” she says. “It’s really a reciprocal exchange of information and experience.”

Her evidence is the connections themselves: over literature, over music, over an interest in a particular mode of expression or style of art. What brings people together, she says, is shared curiosity.

She points to a book club session on Nella Larsen’s Passing. Everyone had questions about the ending, and the group spent two full sessions debating it. “That’s the beauty of the perennial questions posed by a work of literature or a piece of music,” she says. “It allows us to bring our perspectives about the world to a discussion. The material allows us to connect.”

Her experience has also changed how she reads her own education. Volunteering for book club, she says, put her Columbia experience in perspective and refocused how she thinks about learning itself — how personal experience shapes the way any of us enter an educational space, and how works of art allow us to connect.

Article written by Audrey Amsellem, Associate Research Scholar at the Justice-in-Education Initiative.