It wasn’t long after Dirk van Velzen began his 15-year sentence in 1999 that he decided he wanted to use his time in prison to get a college degree.
Incarcerated for a string of commercial burglaries, van Velzen initially thought he could use a federal Pell grant to fund his studies, but was disappointed to learn that people in prison were barred from receiving grants in 1994 after a bill written by then-Sen. Joe Biden passed through Congress. (The ban was finally lifted in 2020.)
Determined to get a college degree, Washington’s van Velzen wrote hundreds of letters to churches and organizations for help paying for school — to no avail. Finally, in 2001, his father agreed to foot the bill for his distance learning courses at Penn State, which he completed on paper through the mail. He graduated with honors. But along the way, he came to realize that in his family he was always expected and encouraged to get a higher education; other people he served time with were not. Further, even if people had the will, they often lacked the resources to make it possible.
He said that in prison, “there’s a lot of people that are … just as smart as you, just as hardworking as you. And they would take that opportunity if they had one. But not everyone has that opportunity.”
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