Formerly incarcerated student reflects on activism and academia
Early in his studies at Berkeley, English major Steve Czifra was invited to do support work for California prisoners' hunger strike against the use of solitary confinement. For Czifra, who had spent eight years of his life alone in a cell, it was a moment of truth, he writes.
October 19, 2015
Steve Czifra at a rally in Oakland
Early in his undergraduate career at Berkeley, English major Steve Czifra was invited to do support work for a hunger strike by California prisoners protesting the widespread use of solitary confinement in the prison system. A formerly incarcerated student who himself had spent eight years alone in a cell — and was now, against great odds, at Berkeley — he felt conflicted.
“I realized I could do myself a favor and focus on the job of being an English undergraduate,” since “…studying great works of art was a dream,” Czifra writes on the Berkeley English blog. “Advocating for prisoners, on the other hand, was not pleasant and did nothing to facilitate my own plans of becoming a literary scholar.”
English students at Berkeley, he says, “hunkered over the same texts — the Aeneid, Odyssey and The Inferno, Richard II and Paradise Lost — … that I had pored over in a very different setting, a cloister without the salve of promised redemption, a California solitary-confinement cell.”
Czifra equivocated about whether to lend his energies to the protest “for a few minutes. Less, probably,” he writes.
Later he won a Chancellor’s Award for Civic Engagement honoring his work supporting the strikers. Read Steve Czifra’s piece, on the dual call of activism and academia, on the Berkeley English blog.