“You’re remarkably well adjusted for someone who just got out of prison,” the staff member at the community center told Nathan Miksch. She didn’t know Miksch well, but did know it had been only a few months since he had been paroled after 20 years behind bars.

Miksch felt what she said was true, and when he thought about why, he realized that he had stopped feeling like a prisoner about a year after he started studying for his college degree.

“I was free three years before I walked out the door because my mind had been set free,” he said recently. “I started to feel like I was part of the world, which I know sounds silly, but that’s really the effect that the program had on me.”

In 2018, Miksch was one of the first men at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord to sign up for the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College of Civic Life (TUPIT). He earned an associate degree in the liberal arts, and this spring, at age 50, he became the first TUPIT student to complete his bachelor’s degree on campus after his release. On May 18, he’ll participate in the Commencement on the Medford/Somerville campus with the other members of the Tufts Class of 2025.

For most of his life, “the idea of going to college was as far-fetched to me as being Spider-Man,” Miksch said.  “That I’m about to be the first TUPIT student to graduate on the Tufts campus? That’s huge to me. I’m so proud of this program. I’m so proud of the work I’ve done.”

When he was 16, Miksch dropped out of school and left home after coming out to his family as gay. “It was something that my Southern, very right-wing-thinking family wanted no part of,” he said.

The scars of physical and sexual abuse in his youth led him to drugs and alcohol. While taking methamphetamine in 2003, he killed a man who had raped him the night before and was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

His substance use continued while he was in prison, and for a long time he thought he would die there—and maybe even deserved to. But after several years of therapy, he allowed himself to think about a future. When he read that the TUPIT program would be offering college classes inside MCI-Concord, he applied. 

While he had a GED and knew he was smart, he was nervous, particularly about speaking in front of others during class discussions. 

“There was a time in my life when I felt like I had to be someone different with every person around me, to be what that person wanted me to be, in order to be accepted,” he said. “I never spoke up. I never gave my opinion about things.” 

As the only gay man in the TUPIT cohort, he felt especially vulnerable. For the first month of classes, he said, “every time I raised my hand to speak, I was sweating and near tears.”

He credits Hilary Binda, TUPIT director, with creating an environment where every student could speak their mind about what they were studying. “It still blows my mind how well taken care of I was in that space,” he said. 

He marvels at the community that developed in his cohort. He remembers one day when a fellow student offhandedly used the phrase “no homo” in class to signal that he didn’t intend his comments to sound like he was gay. 

“I was so used to that in the hyper-masculine prison culture, it didn’t even register,” Miksch said. But later he heard that other students had pulled the man aside after class, asking, “After all the things we’ve been learning in here, how could you say something like that?” When the student sought out Miksch and apologized, he was stunned. 

When Miksch was first up for parole, he was denied by the board. “By the time I saw them again, three years of slow, steady transformation through the TUPIT experience had gone by,” he said. “The ability to look people in the eye and speak from the heart and believe the things I was saying—the parole board certainly saw it.”

A few months after he was released in June of 2023, Miksch applied for a job with a substance-use recovery-support center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, called STEPRox. The role was a big one—assistant director—but Miksch was undaunted.

“Tufts gave me a lot of belief that I had something to offer the world, and I saw this job opportunity as a way to get started,” he said.

The center director was impressed by Miksch but wasn’t sure if he was ready so soon after prison, so took him on as a volunteer and then a recovery coach. In less than a year, he moved into the assistant director position. 

Someday, Miksch would like to create a recovery program that addresses what he sees as a hole in the care for the gay community, particularly for those who routinely use drugs like ecstasy and meth as part of sex. 

“That was the life that I was trapped in before my arrest,” he said. “There just isn’t a lot of specialized training out there for the specific issues that LGBTQI-plus folks are dealing with.”

Once he was settled in his job, Miksch continued taking college courses, this time through the Tufts Education Reentry Network (MyTERN), a TUPIT program on the Medford/Somerville campus for formerly incarcerated men and women. He completed three courses and a capstone project to fulfill his bachelor’s in civic studies. 

For his capstone thesis, he wrote about TUPIT and the healing power of education in prison, dedicating the paper to students on the inside. 

“So this is for you: my brothers and sisters who are still behind the wall, the ones who are wondering if all the hard work, all the trauma they are working through with every reading they do, with every essay they write, with every uncomfortable discussion in the classroom, is worth the pain and sacrifice, if it’s actually leading somewhere,” he wrote. “It is.”