Scenes from LIFTED’s graduation ceremony. Photos by Steve Zylius
UC Irvine’s LIFTED Class of 2026 earns degrees, rewrites the odds
For years, Joseph Johnson lived in what he describes as total silence. Not the silence of a prison cell, though he had that too, but the silence of a man who could not read. Could not write. Could not, as he puts it, think for himself. He was, by his own account, a passenger in his own life.
On Wednesday morning, he stood at a lectern inside the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility and delivered a commencement address — in cap and gown, to a room full of professors, deans, a state assemblyman, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter and 24 fellow UC Irvine graduates.
“The day I received my acceptance letter, the world shifted,” Johnson told the crowd about getting into UC Irvine’s LIFTED (Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees), the first in-prison bachelor's degree program offered by the University of California system. “For the first time in my life, the people I loved were not looking at me with pity and shame. They were looking at me with pride.”
But first, he earned his GED after two years of study and two associate’s degrees eight years later. Then came the acceptance letter.
“I went from a man who couldn't spell his own thoughts to a scholar,” he said, prompting his fellow graduate to respond with the UCI battle cry: Zot! Zot! Zot! The zotting became a refrain punctuating his speech.
“Be of value to your neighbors, your colleagues, and your future communities. Success is an individual metric. Value is a sociological one,” he continued. “Build social capital not just for networking, but for support. Lift as you climb. Zot! Zot! Zot! We are the men society labeled ‘the worst of the worst,’ yet here we are being poured into by world class professors who saw past our blue uniforms and into our souls… I started with nothing, no education, no literacy and no hope. Today, I have everything — a mind that works, a heart that hopes and a community that believes in redemption. Zot! Zot! Zot!”
A Voice Reclaimed
The second student speaker, Roman Galafate, took the stage with an equally compelling story and message.
Galafate began the LIFTED program without a voice. A diagnosis of throat cancer had made speaking — something most take for granted — temporarily impossible. He recovered. Then came a second diagnosis: colorectal cancer.
“There were moments when strength felt borrowed,” he told the audience. “Moments when continuing forward felt less like progress and more like defiance.”
He is now in full remission and he plans to pursue law and migration policy studies.
“Many of us didn’t study these things from a distance,” Galafate said. “Many of us studied them from the inside. And that lived experience is not a limitation. It is knowledge. It is perspective. It is insight.”
He drew laughter from the room when he described what a sociology education does to the mind over time.
“Suddenly everything became sociology,” he said. “A disagreement in the housing unit? Social structure. A rule that made absolutely no sense? Institutional power. Someone cutting in line? Deviance theory.”
A Class of Distinction
All 25 graduates received a bachelor of arts in sociology with 22 also completing a minor in English. Nine earned Latin Honors. Seven were nominated for Phi Beta Kappa. Four received the Order of Merit, awarded to the top 2% of social sciences undergraduates who best exemplify academic distinction, leadership and service.
The graduates applied and were admitted as junior-level transfer students under the same UC transfer requirements as any California resident, most through Southwestern College's Rising Scholars Program. They completed upper-division coursework taught by UCI faculty inside RJD.
Wednesday's ceremony, the 13th and final UCI commencement of the spring 2026 academic year, featured an address by California Assemblyman David Alvarez, chair of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Education Finance and a vocal champion of prison education investment, and keynote by Patrisse Cullors, artist, activist, New York Times bestselling author, and co-founder of Black Lives Matter.
Speaking directly to the graduates, Cullors said: “I see people who did something the odds said you wouldn’t do. You picked up a book in a place designed to make you feel like your mind didn’t matter. You studied when it would’ve been easier to sleep. You wrote papers, you argued ideas, you sat with hard texts in conditions most students at any university in this country would not last a week in. And, you finished. Some of you are the first person in your whole family to ever do this. Do you understand what that means? You just bent the line of your family tree in a different direction. Your kids, your nieces, your nephews — they’re going to grow up knowing it can be done because they watched you do it. Education is one of the few things in this world they cannot take back. … What you learned in here, the way you think now, the way you see now. That’s yours. It’s in you. It walks out whenever you walk out.”
Cullors shared that she knows what it’s like to have a loved one incarcerated. Her own father, brother, uncles and many other family members have been locked up.
“This degree has your name on it too,” she told the graduates’ families. “You believed in somebody when believing was expensive. You kept a light on.”
People are not “the worst day of their lives,” she added. “We are not the thing that was done to us and we are not only the thing we did. We are what we make next. Justice isn’t just tearing down what’s wrong — it’s building proof that something better was always possible.”
Alvarez shared his ongoing support for LIFTED as an example of public education dollars well spent.
“Individuals who walk through these doors leave better than they came in,” he said as he addressed the graduates. “Your success represents everyone who believes in a college education. And as a steward of state education funds who is responsible for determining where we spend billions of education dollars, this is an investment that is really, really worth it.”
Program Expansion
LIFTED launched in 2020 through a partnership between UCI and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, with the first cohort beginning coursework in fall 2022. That year, the state allocated $1.8 million over five years to support the program's growth.
That growth is accelerating. UCI has partnered with UC San Diego faculty to expand course offerings at RJD. UC Riverside is graduating its inaugural LIFTED cohort today at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco. UC Santa Barbara is launching its own program this fall at Corcoran State Prison.
Of the graduates from LIFTED's first two cohorts, eight have been released from prison. All, according to program leaders, are thriving
Keramet Reiter, professor of criminology, law and society and LIFTED faculty director, who has led the program since its founding, offered a broader reflection as the ceremony drew to a close.
“At a time when community feels thin and frayed across the world, our LIFTED students — and everyone across multiple state institutions who supports this program — remind me again and again of the transformative power of rebuilding community together,” she said.
After the graduates flipped their tassels from right to left, signifying the completion of their academic journey, half the graduates entertained guests with a special performance, titled “What is hip hop?”
“The transformative power of education, that’s the beat breaking through a locked door,” graduate Tory Watts rapped. “We took scraps and made symphonies. We took silence and made a movement. Every step is a testimony. Every dance is a rhythm your ancestors prayed for. Inclusiveness… Hip hop culture did not emerge from pain. It emerged from purpose.”
Proud family members expressed their gratitude for LIFTED, praising the program’s transformative power.
“I’ve loved every minute of his experience in this program,” said Cynthia White, Johnson’s mother. “Rather than fall deeper into the system, he lifted himself up with this degree and I’m so proud of him.”
— Mimi Ko Cruz and Heather Ashbach
Related
Watch the full ceremony on Vimeo
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