By Andre Anderson

Writer/Reporter

The bad dream is over, at least I think it is. I wake up on the morning of my release still wiping sleep from my eyes, performing a quiet systems check to confirm that this is real. The room is dim, the air stale, the same as every other morning for years, yet something is different. In a few hours, I will walk out of this place. After everything, after the violence, the confusion, the years of waiting for someone to see what was true all along, I am supposed to simply gather my belongings and leave. It feels impossible.

It feels like yesterday that I woke up in a bed surrounded by police with guns drawn on me on August 19, 2014, and heard the words that would fracture my life, “You are being arrested for murder.” After that, everything blurred. The courtroom, the trial, the verdict – guilty – spoke with a finality that made my ears ring. I remember standing tall in a packed courtroom, waiting for vindication, and instead receiving a sentence that felt like a second death. Eighteen years, and for something I did not do.

Now, on the other side of it, I am supposed to feel free. But freedom is not a switch that flips. It is a slow, uneven thaw. The hesitation I feel is not a lack of excitement; it is disbelief that release can repair anything. Trauma does not dissolve at the gate. It clings to the skin, settles in the bones, and follows you into every new room. I try to forget, but forgetting is not a skill I possess. The memories remain – the violence, the silence, the abandonment – and I am left to figure out how to carry them without letting them crush me.

The truth is that I leave prison just as confused as I was the night I was arrested. Trauma does not make sense. It does not obey logic or time. It is a wound that refuses to close, a story that refuses to end. For years, I tried to hide the scars, to pretend they were not there. Now I try to show them, to speak them aloud, to expose them to the light in hopes that they lose their power. But even that is a kind of guesswork. I have no medical training for this kind of injury.

What does an eighteen‑year sentence feel like for a crime you did not commit? I could try to explain the pain, but pain is not easily translated. Instead, I speak of running, because running became the only language I had left. During my years at Lino Lakes, I ran 53 ultramarathons. I hit a 600‑mile month. I ran 50 kilometers a day for a week. I logged over 4,000 miles a year for the last four years. My personal best was 56 miles in 11 hours. These numbers are not accomplishments; they are measurements of pain. They are the pressure release valve that kept me alive.

Running was the one place where the system could not reach me. It was the only space where I could choose my own suffering, where I could decide when to stop and when to keep going. In a world designed to immobilize me, running became my rebellion. It was the unwritten language of my resilience – a vocabulary of grit, a grammar of freedom. Ask a runner why they run, and you will often get silence or a smile. Not because there is no answer, but because the answer is too vast for words. It lives in burning lungs, pounding heart, aching muscles that refuse to quit. It is a truth lived, not spoken.

The worst part of running is the moment before you begin, the hesitation and the tug‑of‑war between comfort and challenge. But once the first step is taken, something shifts. Running becomes less about motion and more about momentum. It becomes a way of remembering who you are when everything else has been stripped away. In prison, running was the only place where I could feel the horizon, even if it was only in my mind.

But running alone could not carry me into the world I was about to reenter. As my lawyer told me after I lost at trial, “Nothing personal, Andre. You received a designation as ‘non‑compliant,’ and the court will now levy a tax on you for this. That tax will come in the form of time in prison. This is just business. You win some, you lose some.” I remember staring at him, trying to understand how a human life could be reduced to a business transaction. Now, on the morning of my release, I sign papers quietly in my caseworker’s office, gather my clothes and bedding, and prepare to walk out alone. Nothing personal.

Doing time is an odd experience. Getting released is even odder. Both are lonely. Both are disorienting. And both force you to confront the question: Who am I now?

For many returning citizens, the answer is shaped by the narrow pathways society offers – minimum‑wage jobs, unstable housing, a constant state of precarity. But I knew that if I followed the script written for me, I would lose myself again. I needed something that offered not just survival, but belonging. Not just employment, but purpose.

Academic reentry became that pathway.

Higher education is often framed as a privilege, but for justice‑impacted people, it is something more fundamental: a chance to reclaim agency. A chance to imagine a future not defined by the state. A chance to belong to a community that values ideas, curiosity, and growth. Public land‑grant universities have an obligation to serve all publics, including those who have been pushed to the margins. For me, joining the academy after incarceration was not just an opportunity; it was a form of liberation I had never been afforded before.

Reentry is a profound challenge. Housing, transportation, employment – these are real needs. But they are second‑order needs. Beneath them lies something deeper, the need for belonging and purpose. A minimum‑wage job cannot meet these needs. A university can. A university is a community, and it functions as one. It provides agency, relation, and space, all requisites for a healthy life if one chooses to engage. Within this community, belonging begins to form through each bond, each conversation, each moment of recognition. For a returning citizen, this environment offers a rare gift; a place to let your guard down.

Academic reentry is not a service provision or a transactional handoff of goods. It is an invitation extended from principle, without prerequisite, from day one. It shifts the focus from avoiding re‑incarceration to fostering true integration and success. If our best measure of success is whether someone returns to prison within three years, we will never understand the problem, let alone imagine the solution. Yet in college, we are taught to do exactly that; imagine solutions to complex problems.

Education unstopped my ears. It allowed me to hear myself again. With each book I read, each class I took, each conversation I had, I began to imagine possibilities that had been foreclosed by the system. I began to see a future that was not defined by my past. I began to belong.

Running taught me resilience. Education taught me purpose. Together, they formed the architecture of my reentry, a structure strong enough to hold the weight of everything I had endured.

When I walked out of prison that morning, I asked myself, “Writing about what?” I did not yet know how to make sense of the years I had lost, the pain I had carried, the silence I had survived. I did not know how to translate trauma into language.

Now I understand.

I am writing about the distance between who the system said I was and who I became anyway. I am writing about the quiet, stubborn resilience of putting one foot in front of the other. I am writing about the power of belonging, the necessity of purpose, and the radical possibility of academic reentry. I am writing about the long road out of a place designed to break you and the communities that help you rebuild.

I am writing because the story is not over. It is still being lived, one step at a time.