Adrien Cadwallader sat with half a dozen campus officials and nervously confessed the low points of his troubled history: the 20 arrests, the drug addiction, followed by the diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD.
He fought tears as he tried to explain to the gathering of official gatekeepers why he, a 33-year-old former cocaine dealer with violent impulses, deserved to sit in a college classroom of doe-eyed 20-somethings.
"I told them how difficult it is to live with the guilt for the things that I have done," said Cadwallader, recounting his admissions interview at the State University of New York campus in New Paltz, a working-class town in the middle of horse-farm country 90 miles north of Manhattan.
Cadwallader had taken classes while behind bars in the Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility near Saratoga Springs, and hoped upon his release that a college degree would get him off the path that had taken him in and out of prisons for eight years.
When he checked the box on the New Paltz application owning up to his felony record, the demands began. The school wanted letters from the prison psychologist, the prison superintendent and his parole officer, and his full criminal record. Cadwallader replied that Mt. McGregor did not have a psychologist and that he never interacted with the superintendent. He submitted letters from his current psychologist, psychiatrist and parole officer, and braced for the screening committee. There, he says, he was grilled about his record — including arrests for misdemeanors and for charges that had been dismissed.
"They kept asking me about my rap sheet," said Cadwallader. "It doesn’t tell my full story. Those things were done by a person that is no longer me."
"I felt like I was being set up to fail."
New Paltz turned him down, as did another state school, Dutchess Community College. New Paltz explained only that the admission process "is very competitive." Cadwallader has abandoned his college aspirations and is living on welfare.
Adrien Cadwallader is one of roughly 2,900 college hopefuls who apply each year to the 60 campuses within The State University of New York and check a box disclosing he or she has been convicted of a felony. He is unusual in one important respect: he stuck with the application process to the end. Most find the admission hurdles for ex-felons so daunting that they give up.
Read more at The Marshall Project: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/02/the-obstacle-course?ref=hp-2-111