In 2012, Rena Sard was sentenced to five years in prison at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. She was 47 years old. “I didn’t have five years of my life to waste. So, every chance that I had to do something that was productive, something that was going to help me become a better person, I grabbed it.” Sard enrolled in the Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP). GPEP is a program with Goucher College, a private university located north of the city of Baltimore. With GPEP, and programs like it, inmates can use their time in prison to make progress towards their first college degrees. But the work is not easy. For five years, Sard woke up at 4:30 each morning. She ate breakfast, did her job at the prison's mental health clinic, and then went to her college classes. Last January, Sard finished her sentence, and next spring she will finish her first Associate's degree. Officers tell her that she is a completely different person than the one who entered prison.
