Law enforcement is in Susan Dewey’s blood.
“I grew up in a family of police officers. My father worked undercover in narcotics during the war on drugs,” she said. ”He bought large amounts of cocaine as an undercover operative, and miraculously, didn’t get shot in the head in the process.”
Dewey, who teaches in the University of Wyoming’s Gender and Women’s Studies department, is the founder and director of Wyoming Pathways from Prison, a program that provides incarcerated people with the opportunity to take college classes and accumulate college credit while still in prison.
The program started in summer 2016 and since then has helped hundreds of inmates to work toward a college degree. In addition to providing education, the program has published a collection of imprisoned women’s writing and conducts interviews with incarcerated people to better understand the prison experience.
Dewey came to Wyoming from New York, because being offered a tenure-track position is like winning the lottery, she said. Though her reasons for coming to UW were pragmatic, she said she feels that UW has been a good place to work.
The Wyoming prison system is unique among the nation, Dewey said.
“There’s no other prison administration anywhere in the nation or in the world where I would have the sort of access to prisons that I’m so fortunate to have here in Wyoming. I’ll never leave our state for that reason alone,” she said.
In addition to her work with the Pathways from Prison program, Dewey also teaches classes about her area of expertise. One of her classes, Global Sex Work and Trafficking, draws on her experiences with women who are in or leaving prostitution.
“I envision my work as as the intersection of violence, addiction, poverty and incarceration,” she said, “and the way this paints a target on the back of many people.”
To Dewey, her job isn’t a just a way to get a paycheck. She describes her chosen profession as a calling; she’s known from a very young age that she wanted to help incarcerated people and help tell their stories.
“For me, though I’m not a religious person, this is a vocation,” she said. “It’s a tremendous honor to be able to produce knowledge about people who often don’t have a voice in society but also to be able to give back to these communities in a meaningful way.”
Dewey has been involved in writing a dozen books and over 100 journal articles and reports on the intersection of power, violence and incarceration. These books cover diverse topics such as the Miss India pageant, the lives of exotic dancers in upstate New York and the failings of the criminal justice system to help sex workers. Her work has been published in outlets like The Huffington Post, PBS and the Washington Post.
Her most recent book, co-authored with other members of the UW faculty, draws on the interviews the Pathways from Prison program has collected throughout the program’s history to tell the stories of incarcerated people in Wyoming. The book is set to come out in August.
