NEWBERRY — Loneliness can live on the inside — but for folks like Donald, or Donnie, Rickner, education can ease it.
Rickner, who has been imprisoned since August of 2024, two months after his arrest, left behind fiancee Peggy Smedley. Smedley, from Traverse City, has been with Rickner since December of 2020.
The separation was bleak to the couple, with Rickner convicted of the manufacture and delivery of methamphetamine. His plea deal has a release date set for no sooner than September of 2028.
As Smedley tells it, the arrest came as a shock, from an incident before the two had gotten together, and happened in the midst of medical trouble, during which Rickner was helping to care for her.
“I was an emotional wreck, and it’s been difficult to say the least,” Smedley said. “Life threw us for a loop there for a while.”
Six months after his sentencing was when Smedley first came across Level, a program designed for inmates to learn practical and technical skills while on the inside, and happened to be supported by the facility where he was placed. She said that Rickner was thrilled to hear about something else for him to do while he was doing his time at Newberry Correctional Facility.
“He’s like, there’s nothing to do up here, other than read books,’” she said. “I might as well read something and learn something new that I’m not gonna know about.’ He’s one who always looked to learn new things, and he’s kind of a jack of all trades. He would love to start his own business when he gets out.”
Within just eight months of starting Level, Rickner has begun and/or completed How To Start Your Own Business, How The Internet Works, and Computer Science Without a Computer Volume 1, with hopes to complete more prior to the end of his sentence. These programs, specifically tailored to the limited resources available to inmates, provide them with skills and additional preparations for their transition back to life outside, and award them with certificates for each completed program.
The program is also designed to allow inmates to connect with their loved ones, who are often the sponsors who enrolled them in the first place. On top of the sponsors having access to the materials, it provides a source of new conversation.
“Some of the prisons don’t have programs or opportunities for people to learn things. So I think it’s a great way to learn different things and still be able to keep themselves positive and upbeat about getting home and their re-entry into society afterwards,” Smedley said. “We get to follow along on their journey, and we kinda get to learn what they learn.”
Smedley has since shared the program with other wives of inmates at Newberry and also has begun sponsoring his bunkmate at his request.
“I would tell everybody to check it out. Talking to your loved ones about it, it helps keep them positive, upbeat, gives them something to keep their minds right, and out of trouble,” she said.
According to co-founder Alex Wright, Level has served between 1,000 and 1,050 facilities nationwide, with 2,100 active learners and a total of 6,500 participants since its founding in 2020.
“Typically folks find us looking for the facility where their loved one is located, looking for specifically educational resources, or figuring out how to best support their loved ones,” said Sarah Pollock, project manager at Level. “They enroll with that one-time $25 enrollment fee, and that is really helping with distribution costs associated with sending our content, since it’s all physical.”
Pollock has been with Level since July of 2022 after a career pivot from working in government after searching for a more direct way to serve those imprisoned.
“What we’re providing is that this sponsor has an opportunity to connect with their loved ones, they can see all the content we’ve sent, and a repository of the digital copies of the certificates that their loved ones are earning,” she said.
The programs are designed with lack of supporting resources in mind, and the organization works specifically to find instructors who have previously been imprisoned or dealt with loved ones in a similar situation, who have been in the same shoes as the students.
“Sponsors are often really excited to see that we offer meditation. They are really concerned with having tools for mitigating and processing an incredibly stressful environment, Wright said. “And that meditation guide was written by a guy who has taught meditation for 50 years.Not all of it in prisons, but he spent a lot of time. We work really hard with all of the content creators that we work with to make sure that they have deep experience with the population that we’re serving. So, we often hire formerly incarcerated subject-matter experts and people to pair with our author and our content development team.”
“A lot of our guides are sort of narrative, and it starts with a story that more or less says at one point, ‘I was in your shoes.’ It builds people’s forward thinking that better things are available to them,” Wright said.
Pollock echoed that thought, noting that when students write, they’ll often reference specific stories from lessons, saying how deeply it resonated as a part of their learning.
This sort of education being available and accessible to inmates not only provides hope, but a fact-based better future. Wright notes that the standard incomes for those re-entering society after imprisonment often work against their odds, with increased rates of homelessness and unemployment.
“People who participate in educational programs while incarcerated are much more likely to have much better outcomes in terms of employment, and then employment is a huge driver toward not getting re-incarcerated,” Wright said. “The other thing I think that is a really big impact is, it’s a little bit of a different way of looking at the same thing, is simply believing and understanding that, that the future can be different than the past, and believing that a person can be on a pathway to a brighter future.”
Pollock agrees, noting how essential mindset is for both incarcerated individuals and their loved ones, and goes on to share how this story, while unique, is common to many participants of the programs.
“A lot of what [Smedley] speaks to is something that resonates with a lot of our other sponsors: wanting her loved one to be seen as a full human being, and herself and her relationship with him to be seen as a legitimate one who is loving and funny,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of sponsors who feel like a lot of their attention can be focused on things that are dark or challenging. They have to think about those things. But a lot of them really want people to know that they love their person, and while it may be challenging to support a person in a circumstance like this, they are doing it with an open heart and a lot of love.”
Learn more about Level at https://learnlevel.org/