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A SHATTERED PAST

Dan Murphy’s life of crime can be traced back to 1971. A budding high school basketball star in Wisconsin, Murphy was the all-American kid looking to play the game at the collegiate level.

A series of car accidents changed all that – and ultimately changed his life. Slipped disks. Spinal injuries. A lip wound that took 268 stitches to sew up.
In 1985, a drunk driver crashed into Murphy. He spent six months in the hospital and almost a year at home.
“I can’t describe the pain,” he said.

“It was so bad that I was planning to commit suicide if I couldn’t find something to stop it.”

No medication worked. The pain was so intense that Murphy says he couldn’t sleep for more than an hour or two. A friend suggested that marijuana had helped his brother’s back pain.

“I told him no thanks, but he insisted and left a joint on my bed stand,” Murphy recalled. “Finally, at two in the morning, the pain was so bad I couldn’t stand it.
I thought, ‘What do I have to lose?’

“It was a miracle. I slept for six hours straight for the first time in 16 months. I woke up the next morning and thought it was a fluke. But I smoked the other half and the pain went away again.”

For the next seven years, Murphy says he smoked pot every day to eliminate his constant pain. Then his dealer went out of business.

Murphy figured he was pretty good at growing plants, so he went out into the Wisconsin countryside and planted a few seeds. Soon he had inch-high marijuana plants.

What he didn’t know was that a federal agent saw the seedlings and staked out the field. Soon Murphy’s life turned upside down.

“I was in my office one day and in jail the next. It was a nightmare,” he said. “I lost everything.”

His wife divorced him, leaving him with three shirts and four pairs of pants. His thriving real estate business was ruined. He was left virtually penniless, sentenced to 66 months in federal prison with no chance of parole.

Murphy didn’t think he would survive his first week in prison.
“I walked in there – I’m not kidding you – and I had a sensation like ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ I thought I had landed on Mars,” he says. “I did not know anything about the convict code. ”

It didn’t take long to learn. Murphy’s third day behind bars was almost his last.

“I was walking down the subwalk – and I don’t even remember doing this, but apparently I glanced off to the left as I was walking,” he recalled. “I get three steps and there is a guy behind me and he has me in a choke hold with a shiv [knife] in my ribs.

“And he says, ‘Look, [expletive], you ever look in my house again, I’ll kill you.’”

Somehow Murphy survived the next five-plus years in prison.

But it’s the transition from prison to the outside world that often takes its toll on paroled offenders. More than two-thirds of parolees ultimately return to prison.

Dan Murphy wonders why, in the days, weeks, and months after he was released, he didn’t commit a crime and return.

“The first two years I was out was an absolute period of insanity,” he says. “I’m very fortunate that I made it through that. You get programmed to live by the convict code in the joint, but you don’t get deprogrammed when you come back to society. I didn’t want to go walking into a room with a bunch of people. I didn’t know who was going to stick me. It sounds irrational, but that was my reality.”

Pot also caught up with Stephen Richards. Orphaned at a young age, Richards grew up in a children’s home. He graduated from high school and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.

Protests and counter culture were part of Richards’ everyday college experience, and he participated in both. He eventually dropped out and was later arrested. When he refused to cooperate with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), he was indicted on 10 counts of conspiracy to distribute marijuana.

Richards claims a friend and the DEA set him up. When he was arrested, he was not in possession of marijuana, nor did he actually sell it. Regardless, he was convicted. Despite appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was sentenced to nine years in the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary System.

All told, he spent 11 years in correctional custody and served time in eight Federal Bureau of Prisons institutions in six states.

Richards says, “You never forget the smell [in a prison],” he said. “You breathe that smell, the sweat and urine, the deeper you go into the prison and the cell blocks.”

Rick Jones says he was probably lucky. Arrested and convicted for possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute, Jones was incarcerated in
a maximum-security state correctional facility in Minnesota, sentenced to one year and one day.

“Minnesota is a relatively liberal state with relatively lenient penalties for marijuana convictions,” Jones says. “If I had been sentenced by a federal court, or in a different state, I might have been required to do more time.”

While serving his sentence, Jones kept a journal of extensive notes describing everyday interactions with other members of the prison community as well as observations of prison life.

After completing his sentence, Jones, who had a degree in sociology, found it difficult to be on the outside. No one would hire him. He limited his job search to entry-level positions at restaurants, factories, and moving companies. While ex-cons are forced to report their criminal status when applying for work, Jones found that it was his college degree that eliminated him from exactly the type of positions he was seeking.

“It’s amazing I went back to college at all,” he says. “I was close to going back to the old bag of dealing pot. The only reason I went to graduate school [at Mankato State University in Minnesota] was that I couldn’t get work.”

It’s here that our story takes a decidedly Iowa State turn.
Figuring he was still unemployable even with a master’s degree, Rick Jones moved to Ames and entered the doctoral program in sociology.

“I was scared to death,” he said. “If I hadn’t met Ron Simons [professor of sociology] and others there, I don’t think I could have made it.”

Criminology was far from Jones’ mind when he first entered Iowa State. Although he didn’t want to do prison research, Simons convinced him to do something with his experience. Jones completed his dissertation by conducting research at the state women’s prison in Mitchellville.

Jones was an excellent student at Iowa State, graduating with nearly a 4.0 grade point average in 1986. But job offers still weren’t coming his way.
“All of the faculty were supportive and continued to reassure me that I was on track and that my criminal conviction would not be an issue in the future,” he said. “But I learned that being an ex-con is perceived negatively by many people, even in a relatively liberal discipline like sociology.”

Eventually Jones found a job at Pittsburg (Kansas) State University and later at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Although not embarrassed by his past, Jones guards his criminal experience tightly.

“The stigma of doing time is still very powerful,” he says. “People treat you differently.”

In his Marquette classes, Jones lectures on the social reality of crime and punishment – what he calls his “anti-criminal-justice” course.

“One day I came in and gave myself as an example. I didn’t know what to expect from the students, but they weren’t appalled or shocked,” he said. “At the end of the semester, in the student evaluations, they talked about how important it was for me to share my experiences with them.”

If Rick Jones is reluctant to talk about his past, Steve Richards, the ’60s protestor, shouts his story from the rooftops. He could be the poster boy of ex-cons talking about their experiences.

“It is part of our social responsibility that we break the stereotype of the ex-con,” he says. “Most people think convicts are poor, uneducated, and tattooed. There are hundreds of thousands of middle-class Americans who have been in or are in prison.”

Richards completed his bachelor’s degree during his incarceration. After his release, he entered the master’s program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. That’s where he met Rick Jones.

It was a fluke that the two ever met. Richards had talked to an author about his experiences. She knew Jones and got the two together.

Jones served as Richards’ mentor during graduate school and later put him in touch with Ron Simons at Iowa State. Simons had an assistantship available, and soon the Department of Sociology had its second ex-con in the program.

Since graduating from Iowa State with a Ph.D. in 1992, Richards has been on the faculty at three universities: Northern Iowa, Northern Kentucky, and now the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he is an associate professor.

He is a prominent spokesperson on the subject of convict criminology, appearing on CNBC, Fox News, and MSNBC and in the New York Times. He co-authored a book, Convict Criminology, featuring autobiographic chapters by “professors with a past.”

Dan Murphy’s route from prison to a Ph.D. at Iowa State also came through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His academic adviser had also advised Steve Richards and Rick Jones. Like the others, Murphy found himself being introduced to ISU’s Ron Simons.
“[The sociology faculty at ISU] really enabled me to accomplish and succeed at my goal,” he said. “Ron Simons is one of the most compassionate, kind, and understanding human beings I know. He really touched my life.”

Simons gives all the credit to his three students.
“I found all three to be very serious students, given what they had gone through,” said Simons, who is now on the faculty at the University of Georgia. “They were determined not to waste this opportunity they had.
“The fact is that these guys had a lot going for them before they went into prison. They just needed to survive that experience and resume their lives.”

After graduating from Iowa State in 2004, Murphy taught at Montana State before taking a job at Appalachian State in North Carolina. His dissertation research focused on post-traumatic stress symptoms after prison.

It’s a subject in which he is well versed. While at Montana State, he set up a tour to go to a prison.
“About a week before this was to take place, I started having panic attacks and sweat-drenched nightmares,” he said. “I basically couldn’t go. I had to make arrangements with a colleague of mine to fill my spot because I couldn’t go back.”

But Murphy thinks it’s important that he continues his work with prisons.

“I can talk from both sides of the razor wire,” Murphy said. “I’ve lived it, and now I’ve got the academic credentials.”

“Criminal justice is a science, [but it’s] a naïve science,” Jones said. “Many don’t know the reality – being arrested, going to trial, prison, and parole. It gives us a different, in-depth look at the system.”
Their pasts also encourage them to help others. Jones mentored Richards. Richards mentored Murphy. And now all three are helping other ex-cons make the transition from prison to college.

“It was just a stellar thing that Iowa State did when you think about the impact, the number of people that have been re-trained,” Murphy said. “It’s remarkable to think that three people coming from prison wind up leaving Iowa State with Ph.D.s.”

About the Writer | Dave Gieseke is the public relations manager for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.