Meet the scientists building a prison-to-STEM pipeline

In a Missouri courtroom in 2008, Stanley Andrisse realized that he wasn’t seen as human. The case being fought that day centered around a drug trafficking charge—Andrisse’s third felony conviction. Not long ago, he was a college student churning through sweat-soaked undergraduate years funded by a football scholarship at Lindenwood University. Now, he was facing a bifurcated future, one path leading to a burgeoning career and the other stopping at gray, cinder block walls. 

He wasn’t sure which he was headed for. Growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, Andrisse started building a reputation as early as middle school, and adults around him solidified it. He was smart, and frequently in trouble, mostly for small infractions like talking out of turn or sagging his pants—transgressions Black boys seemed to be penalized for far more often than white ones. Over time, they added up to harsh penalties. Detention graduated to school suspensions, and eventually, teachers expected trouble from Andrisse while peers celebrated his fearless rule breaking.

Andrisse was aware of both reputations as he grew older. School felt like a place packed with critics eager to point out flaws, so he focused on areas where he excelled: sports and social status. He was arrested for the first time at age 14, and he dipped in and out of the juvenile and adult legal systems until his third felony conviction in his early 20s. 

Sitting in the courtroom, Andrisse knew that he had chosen to break the law, but it felt like the road from middle school detention to prison had been paved for him—and the other kids, mostly Black and working class, who regularly appeared in those places—long before he sold drugs. When he heard the punishment he could potentially face, he was shocked: 20 years to life. 

Andrisse recalls the defense arguing that he was a promising, but off-track, biology major, one who had recently completed a research fellowship studying cancer cell growth at St. Louis University, while the prosecution painted him as a career criminal who would return to the legal system again and again. The sentence was 10 years—half of his life, and what felt like his entire future. Andrisse asked if he could give his mother one last hug, but a bailiff shackled his hands and feet and pulled him away. 

“That point was really like the door slamming in my face in the realization that I was no longer considered a human,” Andrisse says. “I was seen as a criminal, less than an animal, someone who deserves to be in a cage, and those experiences and types of things just continually happen in incarceration.” 

Now an endocrinologist scientist and assistant professor of physiology at Howard University, Andrisse is part of a growing number of academics and activists who are fighting barriers that prevent formerly incarcerated people from entering the sciences. That work requires dismantling forces that tell students that they’re not cut out for science, bolstering STEM education within prisons and eliminating embedded racial biases, and removing obstacles that block students from continuing their education after incarceration. 

Despite the challenges, a few have broken through and gone public with their stories, and they’re changing science itself—not just conceptions of who can be a scientist, but how entire research fields are studied. Their stories and extremely small numbers illustrate the profound difficulties formerly incarcerated people face and provide glimpses of how much untapped scientific potential languishes in prisons. 

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