An Insider’s Look at Prison’s Imprint

On the last day of Assistant Professor Robert Stewart’s “Courts and Sentencing” class each spring, he reveals a familiarity with the topic that’s more than academic: He has a felony record and served two years in prison.

“It’s easy to sensationalize because of TV shows, so it’s important to put a real human face on the experiences,” he says.

Today, the criminologist, at the University of Maryland since 2020, studies the social, political and economic effects of criminal legal involvement. He’s particularly interested in criminal records and how they are generated and distributed. This ranges from examining the pitfalls of background checks, which can hinder people from getting jobs or finding stable housing, to potential parenting consequences, such as being banned from volunteering at school, as well as the loss of voting rights, short- or long-term.

Stewart reveals what landed him in prison, why he shares his own criminal record and why policymakers should rethink taking away voting rights.

How did you become incarcerated?
I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota. Although I did well in school early on, I started getting into drinking and using drugs—and later selling drugs—when I was high school. It didn’t take long for things to escalate, and addiction became a major driving factor in my life. In my 20s, I was arrested a few times for low-level possession, but things eventually caught up to me, and I was arrested for serious drug possession and sales.

After I was found guilty, I just sat in my cell bawling my eyes out, convinced my life was over. But after a few days, a friend urged me to come out to eat. As I sat across from him staring at the tray in front me thinking about my upcoming sentencing hearing, he told me: “What’s going to happen will happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But what you can do is determine how you’ll go through it.” He was right, and that stuck with me over the 25 months I spent in prison.

How did you end up studying the consequences of criminal records?
I took a few college courses after high school, but I didn’t take it seriously and did terribly. But in prison, I had the opportunity to earn a few credits through an in-prison college program. I did pretty well, and so I enrolled in a community college after my release. I then started the application to transfer to the University of Minnesota, but when, on the last page, it asked if I had ever been convicted of crime, I was stunned and surprised.

Although I eventually submitted it (and jumped through several hoops before I was eventually accepted), that experience stuck with me. This inspired my dissertation project, in which I fielded an audit experiment to test whether criminal records can be a barrier to college. I found that applicants with records were three times as likely to be rejected.

Does your personal experience connect to your research?
I don’t believe my expertise comes from my lived experiences but rather from my doctoral training. However, my experiences do inform my research questions and interpretations, just like my colleagues’ experiences inform theirs.

For example, early in my graduate career, I was looking through a large sentencing dataset for one state. It included an indicator for whether the defendant requested prison rather than be given probation. Approximately 2% of defendants made this request. I mentioned it to my graduate advisor at the time, and he was perplexed why someone would choose to go to prison over probation.

But it made sense to me: After all, if you’re a person with a drug case facing one year in prison (which would be about eight months with good time) or three to four years on probation with the year over your head, why not just do the prison time and be done with it in a year rather than spend the next handful of years watching over your shoulder for your probation officer? After all, on probation you’ll probably accumulate some jail time anyway when you inevitably violate probation, so you’d be doing time but on the installment plan.

You’re relatively open about your conviction, such as putting it on your personal website and speaking about it on a podcast with author, legal scholar and prison reform advocate Reginald Dwayne Betts ’09. Why?
Representation is important. Our criminology department includes former Justice Department officials, federal prosecutors and police chiefs, which is great. But there is also a lot to learn from the experiences of people who have been subjected to these systems.

Students in our department go onto a wide range of careers from law enforcement and the law to the nonprofit and policy sectors. In our classes, we often talk about difficult subjects, and chances are there are students in our classes who have been affected by crime and the legal system, whether personally, through family, as victims, or as defendants. By talking about my own experience, I think it helps to recenter the idea that we’re not talking about abstract ideas; we’re talking about real people, with real families.

I recently co-authored an essay in which we describe the many barriers faced by students with criminal records, but also highlight the value added of incorporating their voices in criminology and other fields. Since it was published, I have been contacted by several students with criminal records who have expressed their relief that they were not alone. As a cis, white, hetero male from a middle-class background, my experience was certainly also formed in part by my privilege, so it is important to me that I leverage my voice and position to lift up the voices of those who have not been heard.

With the presidential election just months away, what do you want people to know about felons and voting rights?
The last decade has featured the largest expansion of voting rights, likely since Reconstruction. I joined the Sentencing Project in 2022, and we’ve estimated the total number of Americans who couldn’t vote because of a felony record has decreased by 25% since 2016 to 4.4 million in 2022.

However, policies vary significantly across states, and I’ve found there’s a lot of confusion about who can and can’t vote among not only impacted people but also among justice and election officials. We’ve seen this in action in recent high-profile examples of people who have been charged or convicted of registering or voting illegally in states like Texas, Tennessee and Florida.

I’ve been examining criminal cases of people who have been prosecuted for voting while ineligible in Minnesota. To be sure, the numbers are very, very small—in Minnesota, it’s less than a few hundred since 2012, or less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the millions of votes that had been cast in that period. What I’ve found is that—rather than some kind of organized voter fraud effort we might hear about on social media—the reality is most of these people didn’t realize they couldn’t register or vote. For some, they checked a registration box when they were renewing their license. For others, the only notification they had they couldn’t vote was in a stack of forms they had to sign when they started probation, often several years prior. And more often than not, these were people with low-level offenses, like writing a bad check, theft, or minor drug possession.

I’m just not sure what the goal is with these prosecutions. Voting is one of the most pro-social activities we have. After all, people vote because they care about their communities, and I believe we should encourage that.