On Both
Sides of the Law
 When
Jeff Smith entered Vassar with the class of 1974—the
first class to have men enrolled for all four years—“the
school was maybe 20 percent male,” he said. “The
odds, as they say, were in my favor. It was like dying
and going to heaven.”
Many men in the legendary class of ’74
probably felt that way, but Smith had more reasons than
most. He moved into Raymond House just two days after
leaving Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville,
New York, where he had spent three-and-a-half years. The
story of how he got there, and how he ultimately left
there to go to Vassar, is a tale of luck, both good and
bad, and a lot of irony.
Having grown up on Long Island, Smith started his college
career at Stony Brook University. “I really didn’t
want to go to college at that time,” he said. “I
got pushed into it by a guidance counselor.” After
studying physics and math for a year, it was clear he’d
been right—college wasn’t for him. “I
think my GPA was 1.0 or something,” he said, smiling.
“I didn’t fail everything, but it wasn’t
stellar.” He took a leave of absence, worked at
a handful of jobs, then moved to the Haight-Ashbury in
San Francisco and became a self-described “’60s
hippie.”
While living in San Francisco, he learned from a friend
on Long Island that there had been a drug raid at Stony
Brook, and that the police had been looking for him. He
went back to New York and turned himself in. “I
figured, what are they going to do?” he said. “They’re
going to slap my hand and send me on my way. It’s
just pot.”
According to the police, the informant in the drug raid
had been a friend of Smith’s in high school, someone
to whom he had given a little marijuana on two occasions.
(By law, giving someone drugs carries the same penalty
as a sale.) With the informant’s lead on a crime
committed two years earlier, Smith was arrested. Police
officers testified that Smith had sold the marijuana directly
to them. (Ironically, this worked in Smith’s favor—since
his high-school friend had been a minor, giving him drugs
would have been a more serious crime.)
As Smith puts it, he was the perfect target in the investigation.
Out of the 50 or so local residents and students who were
arrested, he was the only former student. Everyone else
arrested in the raid was permitted to plead guilty to
misdemeanors, even those with more serious violations
than Smith, who was charged with a felony. From Smith’s
perspective, the local officials who had instigated the
raid in an attempt to crack down on drug use at the university
could claim to have arrested a Stony Brook student, while
the university could claim that none of their current
students was convicted of serious offenses. “Wrong
place, wrong time, wrong guy,” said Smith.
While serving his time at Green Haven Correctional Facility,
the South Forty Corporation, an organization that provided
vocational services for people with criminal records,
was offering what they called “imaginal education”
for inmates. The philosophy was that people in prison
had distorted self-images, and needed to understand themselves
in order to make better decisions and avoid recidivism.
Smith took a speech course through the program, and was
able to obtain college credit for it through Dutchess
Community College. Inspired by this, Smith—the guy
with the abysmal GPA at Stony Brook—wrote a proposal
suggesting that all the courses given at Green Haven could
offer college credit and comprise a degree-granting program.
Dutchess approved, and Green Haven began offering associate
degrees.
Smith outside his law office in Midtown Manhattan
Among the classes Smith took was a psychology course
taught by Vassar Professor Judah Ronch, who was teaching
at Green Haven as an adjunct professor at Dutchess. In
this class, Smith decided to test out the theory behind
imaginal education. He developed a personality scale and
administered it to several target inmates. He then asked
other inmates to rate the targets using the same scale,
and studied the ways in which an inmate’s self-assessment
compared with the assessments of his peers. The discrepancies
he noticed supported the thesis that inmates have inaccurate
images of themselves; more important, the study won Ronch’s
admiration. In August 1972, with a handful of credits
transferred from Stony Brook (“from the few courses
I’d actually passed,” he said), Smith became
the first person to receive a degree from inside a New
York State prison.
Meanwhile, a number of forces began conspiring toward
Smith’s early release from prison. Earlier that
year, a student from Columbia University Law School who
was participating in a program that provided clinical
legal services at Green Haven visited Smith. The student
had been assigned to Smith’s case and was compelled,
despite firm warnings from her professor that she had
almost no chance of success, to apply for clemency for
Smith.
That summer, during a picnic at the prison, a New York
Times reporter interviewed Smith. A prominent feature
article ran August 18, 1972, and soon other papers and
television networks were clamoring for interviews with
Smith. A Long Island paper even ran his 10th-grade school
photo, with prison cell bars drawn over it. “This,”
said Smith, “was my lesson in the power of the press.”
As a result of this exposure, committees were formed to
help get Smith released from jail.
In addition to the attention, the article informed Ronch
of Smith’s pending clemency petition, which inspired
the professor to return to Green Haven and encourage Smith
to attend Vassar after his release. “I told him
I’d love to go to Vassar,” said Smith, “but
somebody would have to pay, and first I have to get the
hell out of jail.” Ronch arranged an interview for
Smith, and the admission office was impressed enough that
they offered him a full scholarship and petitioned Governor
Rockefeller in support of his clemency petition. (Smith
later learned that the joke at the governor’s office
was if they received one more letter about his clemency,
they’d commute his sentence to life.) In the end,
the governor did commute Smith’s sentence; that
winter, he was made eligible for parole immediately, having
served half of his minimum sentence of seven years. This
was an unusual move, considering most governors reserve
commutations for life sentences or the death penalty—and
ironic, considering that at the time, Rockefeller was
trying to push what are now known as the Rockefeller Drug
Laws. These laws, still in place today, require mandatory
minimums even for first-time offenders.
Two days after leaving jail, Smith moved into Raymond
House. He referred to Vassar as “just like prison,
but better”—he was amused by the similarities
between the two institutions. “Somebody took care
of your room, your board, somebody scheduled your life,”
he said. “When you stop to think about it, a lot
of the things that give people problems in life at that
start-up stage—where do I get my food, where do
I get to live, what do I do with my days...the kind of
control that parents provide for children, and guards
provide for inmates are what colleges provide for students.”
At Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP, Smith
specializes in class-action suits.
Comparisons to prison life aside, Smith loved Vassar.
He fondly recalls a visit to the Clearwater Festival with
two friends, where they chipped in a couple of dollars
for a raffle ticket and ended up winning a sailboat, which
they sailed in Sunset Lake until it overturned. “The
freedom of sailing stuck with me,” said Smith, “and
I keep a sailboat today that I sail in the Hudson.”
After Vassar, Smith went on to a four-year, joint-degree
program in public policy at Princeton and law at Yale.
He worked on Wall Street for a while, but ultimately decided
he didn’t like working for corporate America. Today
he is a senior partner at a New York City law firm, where
he represents investors in class-action suits. “Now
I sue corporate America,” he said. “I wouldn’t
want to be putting them in jail, but it’s more fun
to attack them than to defend them.”
When asked if his time in prison influenced his career
decisions, Smith responded, “not in any sense that
it was a help.” He is certain he would eventually
have returned to college, and would most likely have gone
to law school. However, the experience in part introduced
him to problems he tries to help solve today. Since leaving
law school he has been on the board of The Osborne Association,
into which South Forty is now merged, and he is currently
chairman. In this capacity, Smith works to develop innovative
approaches to the problems caused by drug use and incarceration.
Smith feels strongly that drug use is a sociological
problem, not a criminal one. “Drug prohibition and
the ‘War on Drugs’ as legal tactics have done
more harm to minority communities across the country than
anything since the Jim Crow laws.” He continued:
“It’s not going to be magic. But we could
take half of what we spend trying to interdict drugs,
prevent drug use, and lock people up, and use that money
for education and treatment programs, the way we’re
trying to do now with tobacco and alcohol education. We’d
have much more cost-effective and better ways of dealing
with the problem. We could use the rest of the money for
other social improvements. I think in the long run—maybe
in the short run—it would be a substantial improvement.”
Smith is particularly interested in developing programs
that work toward strengthening families. “One of
the last areas of social service to think about family-based
solutions to social problems is criminal justice,”
he said. “We tend to treat each criminal problem
as an individual problem, not a family problem; but the
family suffers as much as or more than the offender. Kids
are completely deprived, particularly the boys, of a needed
role model.” The Osborne Association views the relationship
between prisoners and their children as an issue of children’s
rights, and, to that end, they offer parenting programs
that aim to connect incarcerated fathers with their children.
Though his time in prison may have helped to spark his
interest in criminal justice, he does not credit that
experience with shaping his direction in life. “I
think the things I’ve done are in spite of the prison
experience rather than as a result,” he said. “There
are very few good things that come out of prison. Most
people come out in much worse straits than when they went
in, in terms of attitude, prospects, and what’s
available to them. It’s only taking a different
approach that’s going to change that.”
—Bronwen Pardes ’95
Bronwen Pardes ’95 is a sexual-health educator
living in New York City.
|
