‘A system that called itself justice’ took his future. UC Berkeley helped him take it back.

Charles Long couldn’t decide what to wear. 

He had doubted that he’d even make it to the final round of consideration as UC Berkeley’s top graduating senior. But there he was, in his University Village bedroom, staring at two options for his interview with the prize committee. To his left was a neatly pressed suit; to his right was a black hoodie.

The suit was the obvious option for past contenders for the University Medal, Long thought. But he also knew that, in many ways, he was unlike those finalists. 

At 43, Long was nearly double their age. Though he maintained his innocence, an arrest when he was 18 triggered a multi-year cycle in and out of jail. During short bouts of freedom, he was homeless in San Jose. Long was able to leave the state once his parole ended and, trying to start anew, he explored careers in Las Vegas as a massage therapist and as a computer repair technician. He was “surviving,” he said. But after his daughter was born, he wanted to do more. He wanted to set an example, which led him back to Berkeley. 

As a sociology and social welfare double major, Long vowed to show up authentically on campus rather than try to blend in with his peers. Through his studies of policing and violence, he’d come to view his closet filled with black shirts and hoodies as a statement of identity and pride; his trusted black hoodie became a tribute to Trayvon Martin.

“Everybody else gets to dress how they want, and it doesn’t put them in danger,” Long said, holding back tears. “So why can’t we?”

For his interview, Long chose the hoodie. That same day, the prize committee chose Long as this year’s University Medalist. 

Long already had the credentials of many top graduates: a 4.0 GPA, sterling letters of recommendation and numerous examples of community service. What set him apart, multiple professors and campus leaders said, was his ability to harness his childhood struggle, time incarcerated and experience as a nontraditional student to positively impact those around him — from peers in the classroom to people in juvenile hall and prison. 

In a letter of recommendation, Laleh Behbehanian, a continuing lecturer in the Department of Sociology, wrote that Long’s ability to blend theoretical, analytic and critical thinking placed him among the most outstanding students she’d encountered in her 23 years of teaching. 

“His contributions to class discussions, shaped by his own experiences being formerly incarcerated and growing up in the foster care system, had a profound impact on his peers in the class,” Behbehanian wrote. “Charles is a brilliant young scholar whose potential is unparalleled among his peers.”

Since his first days on campus, Long’s work as a mentor and teacher inside juvenile halls and San Quentin State Prison has shaped his sociology and social welfare research. Those experiences have inspired him to improve the carceral system from the outside and inside. 

“I once had my future taken from me by a system that called itself justice,” he wrote in his university medalist essay. “Berkeley gave me the credentials, credibility and restoration of spirit to return to those same systems — this time with tools, language and purpose.”

A difficult childhood and the power of knowledge

Long considers himself a child of the Bay Area — East Oakland or Milpitas if he had to choose — but he moved around so much that it’s hard to pin down where home really was. His childhood memories are punctuated by his father calling from prison and his mother visiting during breaks in her drug rehabilitation program. Even after he and his two younger siblings were put in foster care, Long was on the move; he repeatedly ran away, with a fuzzy blanket and a He-Man doll in tow. 

Long remembers moments of care from a social worker with a big red afro and Burt Reynolds mustache. “Do you know Bob Ross? He looked like Bob Ross,” Long said.

The man was one of the only adults who made him feel safe, outside of rare visits from his mother, who would take him to Lake Merritt or the Oakland Zoo.

When Long was five, he told his father on a prison phone call that he wanted to be a social worker. “He reminds me of this all the time to this day,” Long said. 

His father was released a few years later and found work as a custodian at California’s Great America, mopping bathrooms and sweeping popcorn. He could not support his family of six on that income and pursued the fast-growing world of desktop computers. He took courses, earned certificates and, by the time Long graduated high school, had gone from a minimum-wage theme park job to a six-figure income as a network administrator at a biotech startup in Fremont. 

“That just kind of showed me the power of education and how it can give you opportunities where maybe before there were none,” Long said. After completing rehab, his mother got a job at the U.S. Postal Service, where she has worked ever since; she now serves as the union steward for the city of Las Vegas. 

“They just showed me perseverance and that there are always second chances,” he said. Things were looking up — but a return to hard times wasn’t far off. 

Incarceration’s revolving door

In the summer of 2000, police officers stopped Long as he was leaving an area near where a fight had broken out in Milpitas. Believing he was one of the aggressors, they arrested him on suspicion of felony assault. “I thought they were going to let me go once they realized that I was not at the fight,” Long said. 

Weeks passed. Then months. Prosecutors eventually offered to release him if he pleaded guilty to a lesser assault charge. Long badly wanted to contest the case and defend his innocence, but he also feared it could backfire and land him a longer sentence for a crime he was adamant he did not commit. His father’s own experience with the legal system gave him added reason to be wary — rather than plead guilty and take a one-year jail sentence, his father fought the case, lost and was given a much longer prison term. 

Long took the plea deal and was sentenced to two years in prison and five years of parole. He’d just turned 18, and his experience with incarceration’s revolving door was just beginning.

While he was incarcerated, his family sold their Silicon Valley home and moved to Las Vegas. Without his support system to help him upon release, Long became homeless on the streets of San Jose. He stole clothes and food to survive and pooled what little cash he could gather with other homeless young people for a motel room on cold nights. When they couldn’t afford that, they rode the latest-running bus from San Jose to Palo Alto and back just to stay warm. 

Police would routinely sweep homeless camps. Being associated with other people with criminal records, or merely living in an area of suspected drug use, were violations of his parole. Court records show he had more than a dozen encounters with police, many of which landed him back in jail.

“Once I got in the system,” Long said, “it was just so hard to get out.”

The day his parole ended in 2007, he decamped to Nevada to rejoin his family. It was time to escape the cycle. It was time to restart his life. 

‘I feel like this is my school.’ 

Long spent a decade in Las Vegas trying to make ends meet. He racked up trade school certificates in massage therapy, graphic design and computer support; he paid his bills and was getting by. But his mind often returned to Berkeley. When he was little, Berkeley’s campus was like Disneyland to him. He thought the campanile was the highest turret of the Disneyland castle he saw on TV.

With his young daughter as his biggest motivation, Long decided to write a new chapter in his life. “I don’t want to just tell her to chase her dreams,” he said. “I have to show her.”  

He enrolled at Moreno Valley College in Riverside County and earned associate degrees in psychology, sociology and social and behavioral studies during the COVID-19 pandemic. That set him up to transfer to Berkeley in the fall of 2022 at the age of 40. 

“I feel like this is my school,” Long said. “If I had a chance to go to any school, I wanted to go to this one, which just happens to be the number one public university in the world.” 

Early in his time at Berkeley, he enrolled in what would become his favorite class, the sociology of policing. Taught by Behbehanian, each lesson traces the historical development of policing from the colonial era through today, highlighting the ways law enforcement has been shaped by brutal punishments and racist, sexist policies. It was moving and enraging and real, Long said. 

Sociological terms like “double consciousness” and “the organic intellectual” put into words many of the things Long had observed. Thinkers Long calls his “ancestors,” like Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci, captured feelings on the page that seemed to transcend time. 

“Their words don’t feel distant to me; they feel like home, vocabulary that finally echoes what I’ve held in my mind and my soul,” Long wrote in his essay. “Through academia, I’ve learned to make sense of both the systems around me and the experiences that shaped me. But more importantly, I’ve learned to affect them.”

The best of us talk with youth. Charles has a gift for getting young people to talk with him.

Shani Shay, Underground Scholars

Long wrote a senior thesis for each of his majors, both examining different aspects of the criminal justice system. For sociology, he interviewed volunteers in a DeCal he facilitated, where students tutored incarcerated learners at San Quentin State Prison, to better understand how such experiences influenced the students’ capacity for empathy. Empathy is like a muscle, he said, and it atrophies if not regularly flexed. 

For social welfare, he mapped all degree-granting programs operating in prisons nationwide and evaluated how those programs stack up to out-of-custody education. The robust analysis is intended to influence state and federal policy for carceral education as well as ensure that incarcerated people know about available educational opportunities. 

“All of his work focuses on enhancing opportunities for others,” Jill Duerr Berrick, a distinguished professor in the School of Social Welfare, wrote in a letter of recommendation. “Long’s youth could have soured him; it could have bred pessimism and even rage. Instead, Long’s drive for excellence and engagement comes from a place of empathy and hope.”

‘Fulfilling my purpose’

When Long arrived at Berkeley, his five-year plan included mentoring incarcerated people in prison and students in juvenile hall. He figured that would all happen after he graduated. Almost immediately, he started doing both as part of Underground Scholars, a campus program that supports formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students.

Long joined the Teach in Prison program, which tutors incarcerated men at San Quentin, and became a leader in Incarceration to College, going into Bay Area juvenile halls to mentor justice-involved youth. He served over 900 hours as a fellow with College Corps, a California program that rewards community service. Both of his senior projects for sociology and social welfare stemmed from his connections and involvement in Underground Scholars. 

“It just makes me feel like I’m fulfilling my purpose,” Long said.

Shani Shay, director of Incarceration to College and assistant director of Underground Scholars, met Long on his first day at Stiles Hall, where the program is based. She said he has been a reliable presence and a particularly effective mentor, with an unmatched ability to create space for young people to be honest and believe in their own potential. 

“Many people come into juvenile halls and talk to youth,” she said. “The best of us talk with youth. Charles has a gift for getting young people to talk with him.”

Long has occasionally felt like the years he spent in jail cells and courtrooms or working to make ends meet were wasted time, years when he should have been in school. Lately, though, he’s reframed that argument. Those years were educational, he said; they taught him how to communicate, identify with others, recognize institutional failures and build relationships that could lead to something better. His experience has become one of his greatest assets — an instant rapport that can help steer young people toward education and successful careers.

“I don’t want to go through that stress again, no way,” he said. “I don’t want my freedom taken away, no way. But the lessons that I learned were really priceless.”

After graduation, Long plans to take a gap year in Africa and also apply to Ph.D. programs. In the long term, he hopes to improve opportunities for incarcerated people and develop an alternative sentencing program for justice-involved youth — one that offers hope, stability and access to resources they have long been denied.

“I want them to have all the resources that they need so that when they get out, they don’t have to come back,” Long said. “Every day is a new opportunity. Every minute is a new opportunity. Every second is an opportunity. Every thought that you have is a new opportunity to have a different thought. So nothing is set in stone.”