Gerpha Gerlin is a graduate student at Northwestern University, currently seeking her doctorate in anthropology and her master’s degree in public health. She expects to graduate in 2026.
One of the reasons Gerlin chose Northwestern is because of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, where she is a member of the program’s wellness team. “I’ve in part designed my research, and the logistics around some of my fieldwork, to make it so that I’m still available locally to help out with NPEP,” Gerlin said. “ It’s that important to me.”
In an interview with NPEP, Gerlin shared why she joined NPEP, the impact the wellness team has had on students — and her own — mental health, and how she sees wellness efforts evolving within the program.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
When I was finalizing my decision among schools, I knew I wanted to go somewhere that had a prison education program. NPEP stood out to me because it centered around student involvement and leadership. I’m someone who would like to be a professor and work in academia, so I saw this opportunity to work with NPEP as a way to learn how to better my pedagogy with students across backgrounds and with varied interests and needs.
When I first began with NPEP, what I could see almost immediately was that NPEP students see this program as an opportunity to show others that they are more than their worst mistakes. They take that very seriously.
When they come into a space like the Purple Room at Stateville Correctional Center, there’s something different about this space compared to other areas of the prison: desks, books, some semblances of decorations, and the Northwestern logo and colors. Students can walk into this room and feel like they can be someone different in this place, someone that they might not be able to be in the chow hall, in the yard, or back in the cell house. I sometimes think of it as: “Maybe I can be the best me here.” That’s their approach to education and coming into the education building — it’s a tool for them to show their transformation and to help them be the best versions of themselves.
Cohort 3 students inside the Purple Room at Stateville Correctional Center. (photo credit: Monika Wnuk)
I started with NPEP as a tutor and then shifted to work with the wellness team. This initiative was dreamed up by Tay Rogers, a professor of philosophy, and Nikki Baim, a current law student. This developed during their time as students at Northwestern during the COVID-19 quarantine. Since then, we’ve grown to include graduate students across the university, from programs in psychology to law. We also try to provide wellness support at both Stateville and Logan prisons.
Working in wellness was important for me because it afforded me time to reflect on my own wellness needs and think about how that distress and struggle might be exacerbated in the face of incarceration. I think there’s some reluctance to acknowledge that incarcerated people have wellness concerns, so I wanted to help build and grow a resource that is often necessary and overlooked. Wellness is something that we all have to think about in a way that we might think about oral care; we’re born with teeth and have to maintain and care for them to stay healthy. Maintaining our emotional health should be thought of no differently.
Around the time I joined, there was a shift in the national narrative about talking about and thinking about mental health because of the pandemic. When everybody was faced with this shared disablement — whether they were incarcerated or not — they started to respond in ways that were more nuanced to their kind of wellness needs. For me, that included thinking about different learning styles, emotional needs, the identities and positionalities that we juggle, our backgrounds and lived experiences — all the things that make us, us, and all the things that influence who we are.
A key resource to bringing wellness to NPEP students has been our wellness packets, which we send to students each week. The type of resources that we’re including can vary, but the most obvious thing that goes in is a list of check-in questions or prompts. The check-in questions are important; it’s the front page of the wellness packet, and it’s one of the first things that we check when we get the scans back from students who have like filled it out.
We also include resources like yoga, stretching, or meditation poses. We’ll also include breathing exercises, too, not only as other means of reflection but as a way to accommodate those who can’t get up and do these other physical movements. For instance, those who might have a cellmate which makes it hard to move around a small cell, or those with mobility issues who can’t move around as easily.
We’ll include poetry, too, which many students have told me they enjoy. Our students are also writers and poets, so they love seeing the kind of work people are doing on the outside.
I’ve also put artwork in our wellness packets, whether it’s photography, a painting, or something visual. It’s nice to have something to look at that isn’t just like a bunch of words. When I visited Stateville and Logan for the first time, I realized just how devoid the environment is of any kind of positive or meaningful visual stimulation. In some of these cell houses, the windows are so high that someone who’s seven feet tall couldn’t see out of them. On top of the windows, there are bars. So even if you could have windows you could reach, you wouldn’t be able to interact with those outside things if you could.
Our wellness initiatives go beyond the wellness packet, too. We’ve provided bereavement support when folks have alerted us when one of our incarcerated colleagues has lost someone. We send holiday cards during the holidays and have every member of the team sign them. We’ve also raised funds to bring books in as resources during the holiday season. The holidays can be a difficult time, especially when you are incarcerated. We found that these resources help keep their spirits up.
People may not necessarily understand what purpose wellness check-ins serve because it’s not explicit or related to like a problem set or paper that a student might need help with. But I would argue that if someone, whether they’re incarcerated or not, is not in a positive mental space, the work that they’re doing is not going to be their best work. Though that’s not the main reason we do our wellness work, there’s a correlation between the way someone is feeling and if they’re going to put their best foot forward.
I’m working on and hoping for two things to evolve within NPEP. The first is my vision for a book club where students can talk about mental health concerns or issues through the lens of a story, whether that’s fiction, nonfiction, or maybe anthropological or public health-oriented academic monographs.
From left to right: Gerpha Gerlin, D.C. Crite, and Lyra Johnson. (photo credit: Monika Wnuk)
Part of how we plan to implement these, at least at Stateville, is by developing end-of-the-quarter community forums. Two NPEP students shared the idea with me, and so we’ve been working in each study hall to brainstorm an agenda and a potential guest speaker.
The other is holding group check-ins. Even though in many ways graduate students and tutors from Northwestern’s Evanston and Chicago campus identify as peers, in many other ways there are a lot of things for NPEP students that go on behind bars that, when I leave, I am just not a part of and can’t relate to. Group check-ins intend to help NPEP students learn to see each other as resources and not just think, “If I have a wellness concern, I have to go talk to a tutor.” These group check-ins can be more sustainable and help shift the narrative to, “If I have a wellness concern, and the wellness team has been helping me develop these positive coping skills, I can talk to my peer and we can help each other as assets and resources.”
In my going-on-three years with NPEP, I can say I’ve learned how to think, to feel more critically and creatively. I’ve been able to see my wellness journey be so influenced by my work with the team and, more recently, my work in teaching my own class.
One of the things I always tell NPEP students is that I’m getting something out of this, too. They impact me in such a formative and substantive way. When I was really struggling with my health, to the point where I was hospitalized, the support that I received from students across Stateville and Logan helped to remind me why my approach to wellness emphasizes reciprocity. It helped me feel like they saw me, which allowed us to relate and bond on a necessary emotional level. A human level.
I’m so excited to co-create ways to enhance students’ learning and growing journeys. A Northwestern student ID doesn’t equate to who or what you are as a student. We hold a lot of different identities and positionalities that we’re always juggling; it’s not like we just put one hat on and then take one hat off, right? Being more sensitive and understanding of that is probably the biggest and most obvious part of my time in NPEP thus far.