Law Professor and Prison Reformer
Inspired as a child by the story of a relative helping someone to defend their Constitutional rights, TM became a law professor who used her personal time to improve the country’s criminal justice system.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
TM was born at Fort Benning, Georgia, where her father was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, who served as a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. Her mother was an administrator at different times at several universities.
CHILDHOOD
Like many children of military families, TM grew up while her family moved their residence several times.
Through genealogical research, TM was able to confirm a family story that a relative had been a civil rights lawyer who had helped defend Rosa Parks, best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955 after she rejected the White bus driver’s order (!) to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section in favor of a White passenger, after the “White” section of the bus was filled.
Having a family member involved in such an historic event became a source of pride and inspiration for TM, who vowed – silently to herself – to carry on the tradition of helping others with less society respect when she grew up.
EDUCATION
Always a student who devoted herself to doing well in school, TM gained admission to Duke University, from which she graduated with a degree in psychology and went on to Harvard Law School before earning her final, formal degree: Master of Law from the University of Wisconsin.
LEGAL CAREER BEGINS, THEN EXPANDS
Law students graduating from well respected law schools often have the opportunity to commence their legal careers as law clerks to Federal Court judges. TM’s stellar academic record through all her different schools earned her a Federal Court clerkship in Florida, after which she was hired by a university’s law school to be a professor of law.
Later, TM joined a different law school faculty, serving as a professor for 9 years before becoming the first Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion at the University at Buffalo, part of the New York state university system (“SUNY”), ultimately promoted to be the state system’s Senior Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Chief Diversity Officer, where she instituted a program promoting tenure-track professorships for people of color across SUNY’s 64 campuses.
As a law professor for 19 years, TM made it a practice of having her students step outside the classroom and (literally) into the penal system to meet prisoners as a way to humanize incarcerated people. She reached a larger audience with two short film documentaries, most notably the 24 minute “Encountering Attica” which TM both produced and co-directed. The film was made for a university conference TM organized on the 40th anniversary of the prison uprising by inmates of the infamous Attica prison, which left 43 people dead.
“Encountering Attica” shows the interactions between three first-year law students and four men serving life sentences, including for murder. Putting students in conversation with inmates, TM found, fostered empathy among both groups. (TM was also an adviser to Attica inmates seeking parole.)
DOCUMENTARY FILM BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES
TM first took students to the prison in 2007. “Bringing a video camera into a prison is no small feat,” said TM.
Acclimating students was also a challenge. “For the average law student,” wrote TM later, “walking into any ‘correctional facility’ (‘prison’) is a shocking transition into a completely foreign culture in which common household objects are prized, seemingly innocuous activities are forbidden, technologies the public takes for granted are alien and the sight of a tree trunk, grass and flowers are distant memories. The video camera has the potential to remove some of the barriers between the prison and society.”
When TM showed her documentary film about the Attica prison during a panel discussion at the Glimmerglass summer opera festival near Cooperstown, New York, it sparked an idea: “Why not,” she thought, “bring an opera to the prison?”
The director of the opera festival had the same notion and joined the effort. TM helped persuade prison officials to grant permission and a year later, the Glimmerglass Opera Company took Verdi’s “Macbeth” to Attica. Opera there became an annual tradition, with TM each year sitting among a rapt audience of inmates to watch the production.
“It’s a culture we don’t see,” said an Attica inmate. “Ours is hostility and violence.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
Bringing the outside world behind prison walls – and then showing that outside world what life behind bars is like – was a central part of the criminal justice work done by TM.
In her work on criminal justice, TM was a member of an American Bar Association task force on protecting prisoners’ rights and served on the boards of the prison reform groups Prisoner Legal Services of New York and the Correctional Association of New York.
“For those inmates who will eventually be released back into society,” said TM, “it is important to both the newly released person – who has paid for his or her crime(s) by being removed from society – and to society – that the former convict have the opportunity to be rehabilitated by the time of their release, so society doesn’t have to lock them up again. It’s not being ‘soft’ on crime to give prisoners the opportunity to experience a culture where people respect each other, to set an example of living peacefully, before walking freely through the prison gate.”
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This career story is based on several sources, principally an obituary written by Annabelle Williams, published in The New York Times on 10/2/21 plus online research including Wikipedia.
