PROVIDENCE — Raised in a housing project in Providence, Meko Lincoln got caught up in the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic at a young age.
He was charged with cocaine possession, landing in the a state juvenile correctional facility at age 14 and the Adult Correctional Institutions at age 18. A repeat offender, he spent 17 years behind bars.
But while incarcerated, Lincoln began taking a prison correspondence program offered by the Roger Williams University Extension School in collaboration with the nonprofit Reentry Campus Program.
“Initially, it was to get good time and to just get out of my cell and just do something,” he said on the Rhode Island Report podcast. “Then I started getting more excited about the opportunity to ... improve my life.”
Lincoln said he came to realize he lacked a sense of self-worth and direction in life. He said James Monteiro, founder and executive director of the Reentry Campus Program, helped him realize that his life did have value and that education could improve his life and future earning potential.
In the past, he’d get out of prison, telling himself he didn’t want to use drugs and didn’t want be homeless any more, but he’d end up right back in a cell. Finally, Monteiro helped him focus less on what he didn’t want and more on what he wanted to find once he was outside the prison walls, he said.
Lincoln said he found education. “I found recovery. I found family. I found a whole brand new life,” he said.
Once released, he kept studying, earning an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, and then a master’s degree in community development from the Roger Williams University Extension School.
Today, Lincoln is the director of a reentry program at Amos House, a nonprofit social services agency that provides housing and reentry support for formerly incarcerated people and those struggling with substance abuse and mental health issues.
Lincoln, now 53 years old, choked up when asked what he would tell his 17-year-old self if he could speak to him today.
“He is going to go through a hell of a lot of struggle,” he said. “But that people love him, care for him, and he’s gonna be OK. ... Just be resilient. Be who you’re going to be. And that’s me, thank God, thank God.”
Lincoln said he is not proud of some of the things he did when he was younger. “But they weren’t who I was and never who I was,” he said. “I was still a young child who was born, who cried, who needed to be fed, a little child.”
Lincoln has a family now, including a 35-year-old daughter who used to visit him in prison and a 4-year-old son who came on stage with him to get one his academic degrees. “It’s a full circle moment,” he said.
Gena Bianco, dean of the Roger Williams University Extension School, said she began working at the university in 2013 and designed the prison correspondence program, so she has witnessed Lincoln’s entire academic journey. And she said that experience changed her “as an individual and as an educator and as a leader to understand that circumstances shouldn’t define you and they should give you opportunities.”
Bianco said Lincoln’s experience underscores the power of education.
“No one can take that away from anybody who earns their education regardless of where they earned it, behind the walls or out,” she said. “That allowed so many people such as Meko to understand that education provides for social mobility but (also) economic mobility.”
Such programs provide the “opportunity to be able to come out with not just the bag that they hand you” when you leave prison, but also educational credentials, Bianco said.
Lincoln said, “I walked out with hope.”
Bianco said Roger Williams University launched a “Pivot the Hustle” program in 2015 along with the state Department of Corrections. The program teaches minimum security inmates who are about to be released to use the skills they’d used for illegal purposes to succeed in more productive, meaningful ways, she said.
“Many of the students had the opportunity to realize that what may have landed them behind the the walls was actually a skillset that could have been successful, if done differently,” she said. “We use the example of a drug dealer. They were an entrepreneur. They ran a business — an illegitimate, illegal business."
But those were skills that “could be shifted into a meaningful entrepreneurship opportunity,” she said.
RWU’s Extension School received a $100,000 grant from the New England Prison Education Collaborative last year to expand the Pivot the Hustle program.
The grant will allow for the program, which is now offered in the minimum security and women’s prisons, to extend to more correctional facilities, Bianco said. And the program will be expanded to include mediation and an emphasis on family relationships and the reintroduction into society, she said.
Looking ahead to 2026, Bianco said she would like to see “continued funding at the state and federal level.” And Lincoln said he would like to see “every individual that’s incarcerated” have “the same access that every other student has.”
The Rhode Island Report podcast is produced by The Boston Globe Rhode Island with support from Roger Williams University. To get the latest episode each week, follow the Rhode Island Report podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcasting platforms, or listen in the player above.
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