Ex-convict to speak on post-prison life

By Marc Thomas

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UK students attending a speaking engagement on campus probably assume that the person talking to them has a clean criminal record. Ryan Rivard is a different story.

Rivard, an ex-convict, is one of the guest speakers scheduled to participate in “Barred For Life: A Conversation about Mass Incarceration” on Wednesday evening inside Presentation U, located in the basement of the W. T. Young Library.

The event, hosted by the Social Enterprise and Innovation/Certified Nonprofit Professional program, aims to highlight the difficulties convicts face when they leave prison.

Rachael Deel, the Marketing and Public Relations Director for Transformative Learning in Undergraduate Education, said the event would highlight a non-profit organization’s work rehabilitating inmates in the Lexington area and across Kentucky.

“Barred For Life” will feature two graduate students from the Department of Sociology and the non-profit organization Mission Behind Bars and Beyond, as well as former offender Rivard, Deel said.

“It kind of accomplishes a number of things — not only highlighting the non-profit but engaging our campus in a conversation that is … timely and controversial,” Deel said.

Mission Behind Bars and Beyond focuses on rehabilitating people released from Kentucky correctional facilities before, during and after their stay, according to the organization’s website.

Todd Stoltzfus, the director of CNP, hopes the event will make the audience aware of the difficulties former offenders face after incarceration.

“We want to raise the issues that are behind the large prison population that we have (within the U.S.),” he said. “And the difficulties … when people get out of prison, how hard it is to … transition to civilian life and get the training they need, especially when they have something on their record that makes it hard for them to get the job.”

Deel said that students are probably unaware of the effect that the transition process has on the community.

“The narrative is always more complicated than what they’ve probably been exposed to through the media, so having a variety of perspectives talk about this topic is really fruitful for undergraduate students,” Deel said.