Mayor Brandon Johnson meets with men in prison working toward Northwestern University degrees

For the past three weeks, Northwestern University student Anthony Ehlers has been painting a portrait of Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Ehlers has been working on the painting, which depicts the mayor signing an executive order concerning the National Guard, in anticipation of Johnson’s visit on Sunday to Sheridan Correctional Center, where Ehlers is incarcerated.

“He’s here on a Sunday when he usually is at church with his family; that’s pretty meaningful,” Ehlers said. “He knows we can’t vote, so he’s not stumping for votes; He’s really talking about issues that affect us.”

More than 100 people gathered in Sheridan’s gymnasium, about 70 miles southwest of Chicago. Students of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, which offers undergraduate degrees to men incarcerated at Sheridan, their families and professors had the opportunity to speak with the mayor.

In 2023, their initial graduating class became the first group of incarcerated students to earn a bachelor’s degree from a top university. Northwestern also offers a bachelor’s degree program at the largest women’s prison in the state, Logan Correctional Center.

“I'm here to learn and ensure that my responsibility as a leader of the city in Chicago, that you all know that you will always be front and center in all of the decisions that I make,” Johnson said to the crowd.

In a fireside chat-style program, student Nikolas Gacho spoke about how he was expelled three times with little support from the five different schools he attended. Giovanni Rios told Johnson how every day he had had to split two loaves of bread with numerous family members for a meal. Hugo Ocon raised concerns over federal immigration raids across the city.

Following their personal statements, the students, now all graduates or graduates-to-be of Northwestern University, moved on to questions. They asked what Johnson’s administration is doing to strengthen public schools, enact compassionate immigration policy and support incarcerated people, as about 40% of people in Illinois prisons are sentenced in Cook County.

In his response, Johnson discussed his family’s own experience with the prison system, the necessity of educational investments, and the city’s Director of Reentry Joseph Mapp, who is tasked with providing Chicagoans leaving prison with access to housing, mental health support and job training.

“People who are closest to the danger, are closest to the solutions. We have to center our work around the people who have experienced these failed systems,” Johnson said.

For student Darvin Henderson, the mayor’s visit was “magical.”

“I didn’t come from a place where we meet people like that, like the mayor. … I didn’t even grow up around that,” Henderson said. “Those opportunities never even was available. And look, I’m in prison. People would think I’m at the bottom. And yet I’m meeting – rubbing elbows with people that’s at the top!”

As student Taki Peacock hopes to make his eventual release as easy as possible, he was interested to learn about the Office of Reentry.

“Leaving incarceration, where basically you’ve been taken care of your whole incarceration whether it be family members or the system itself taking care of you to having to go into society and provide for yourself completely, that’s a frightening perspective,” Peacock said.

Ian Valencia, a Northwestern senior incarcerated at Sheridan, has been locked up half his life, since he was 17.

The visit of a sitting Chicago mayor to a state prison – perhaps the first of its kind, according to Northwestern students – is symbolically important, Valencia said.

“It’s helping give me a more hopeful look on what’s possible, if more people get involved in trying to change what prison is supposed to be like,” he said.

Earlier in the week, students found out their family members could join the event.

It gave Rob Cunningham the opportunity to see her son Demetrius Cunningham play the keyboard for the first time. Cunningham bought Demetrius keyboard instructional books, who while in prison taught himself how to play using only a piece of cardboard. Cunningham said it was amazing to see Demetrius playing for the crowd.

Student Anthony Harris Jr.’s father drove eight hours from Memphis with less than a week’s notice to attend the event. It had been about a year and a half since father and son had seen each other. Anthony Harris Sr. said seeing the changes NPEP brings to students’ lives is a “blessing.”

William Shafiq Peeples, formerly on death row before Illinois abolished capital punishment, is serving a life sentence for murder. Peeples said he hopes the visit helped the mayor understand the value of educating people in prison – even those, like himself, who will never be released.

“So I understand when some people hear about the program and they say, ‘You’re giving all this education to a murderer.’ I think talking to him today will help him be able to explain to them why this is necessary,” Peeples said. “Education transforms human beings.”

This story is a collaboration between WBEZ and WTTW News.