ALLENTOWN, Pa. — When Adam Petyo was released from the Lehigh County Jail earlier this summer, he was in a good place, especially compared to many of his peers.
The 38-year-old Allentown man had a job at a local warehouse, a place to live and the support of his fiancée and family.
Others who are recently released from jail or prison struggle to find housing and work — some fall back into whatever led to their incarceration in the first place.
“I’m lucky I came home to a good situation,” said Petyo, who participated in Muhlenberg College’s Inside-Out Exchange Program last spring.
Through the program, Petyo took a course on mass incarceration at the Lehigh County Jail alongside traditional Muhlenberg students and other incarcerated students. The weekly class — the crux of the program — became a respite for Petyo that allowed him to start thinking about life after incarceration.
“It gave you hope at the end of the day,” he said.
Muhlenberg Inside-Out was recently named the recipient of a $1 million federal grant to improve re-entry for Allentonians like Petyo, offering them access to higher education and a sense of community once they’ve left incarceration.
Collaboration on re-entry initiatives
The grant will be shared with Promise Neighborhoods of the Greater Lehigh Valley and Lehigh Valley Technical Institute, said Kate Richmond, co-director of Muhlenberg Inside-Out. The three organizations will spend the next five years collaborating on re-entry initiatives in Allentown.
The spending breakdown for the $1 million has not yet been determined, Richmond said.
The grant is part of the $20 million in federal funding recently awarded to Allentown by the U.S. Economic Development Administration. Allentown is one of six locations throughout the U.S. and its territories that was selected to participate in the EDA’s Distressed Area Recompete Pilot Program, which focuses on connecting people to good jobs.
In Allentown, there are 38 local partners, including Muhlenberg Inside-Out, that will work to boost the local economy in under-resourced areas of the city, including the Franklin Park neighborhood, Center City and Allentown’s 1st and 6th wards.
With its grant money, Muhlenberg Inside-Out plans to scale the scope of its program, particularly when it comes to providing opportunities for the program’s alumni who’ve since left jail, said Richmond and co-Director Jess Denke.
Though the specifics haven’t yet been worked out, Muhlenberg Inside-Out will incentivize participation in higher education and create community connections for formerly incarcerated people.
“The emphasis for us is not necessarily on the problem of re-entry, but the great value that our returning students can add to our community,” said Denke, who is also the college’s community engagement librarian.
New focus on formerly incarcerated students
Richmond and Denke will be teaching a course on re-entry in the spring semester to Muhlenberg students and formerly incarcerated students, reimagining Muhlenberg Inside-Out’s already existing think tank that offers a space for the program’s alumni to meet.
The think tank will become less social and will instead take the shape of a regular college course with clear learning goals and projects, said Richmond, who is also a psychology professor at Muhlenberg and director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program.
Richmond said the think tank course will serve as a bridge between previous funding and the recent federal grant from the Recompete program.
"I think Allentown has a lot of resources, but what we’re finding is, the hubs of information are very decentralized."Jess Denke, Muhlenberg Inside-Out co-director and the college’s community engagement librarian
Denke said the course, which will be held outside the jail, aims to help formerly incarcerated students support each other through the re-entry process with the help of traditional Muhlenberg students and the program’s co-directors.
When former students have left jail in the past, they’ve often reached out to Denke and Richmond for assistance with housing, transportation or food, the co-directors said.
“I think Allentown has a lot of resources, but what we’re finding is, the hubs of information are very decentralized,” Denke said.
“We can’t do social work,” Richmond added. “That’s not our job, but we could teach a college class about how you create communities that can have more centralized information, where the networks are stronger, so that when someone gets out it’s not just one person.”
Richmond said people leaving incarceration have an “unbelievable” amount of trauma and the research is clear that those with “robust communities” do better with re-entering outside life. The think tank course aims to meet this need.
Richmond said the course will also cover best practices for re-entry, information literacy, civic engagement and interpersonal skills.
Expanded course offerings
The spring 2025 semester will mark the first time Muhlenberg Inside-Out will offer two courses since the program began in 2018.
In addition to the re-entry focused think tank course, there will also be a podcasting class offered at the Lehigh County Jail to the usual blended group of incarcerated students and traditional college students.
Muhlenberg Inside-Out plans to offer six courses per year by 2026 with the help of a previous $231,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, which was awarded in 2022. Through that grant, the program has been able to train additional faculty members and offer college credits to incarcerated students.
With the program’s growth, that will mean more students get to participate in what co-directors said is a “transformative” experience.
Past participants agree on Muhlenberg Inside-Out’s impact.
“There was a lot of vulnerability that I haven’t really experienced in any other classes I’ve been in,” said Darain Khan, 20, a senior Muhlenberg student who was in the program last spring.
"There was a lot of vulnerability that I haven’t really experienced in any other classes I’ve been in."Darain Khan, senior Muhlenberg College student and past Inside-Out participant
Khan, a psychology and philosophy major, said he learned about the ways incarcerated people are isolated from their families and friends on the outside.
The course covered “anything and everything relating to incarceration and its effects,” he added. That included topics like mental health, media and the legacy of slavery in the U.S.
Petyo, who was in the same cohort, enjoyed class debates about capitalism and prison reform, he said.
Though he was nervous to have class with the Muhlenberg students, Petyo said he and the other incarcerated students were welcomed without judgment.
This made him optimistic about life after jail.
“There is hope at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “Not everybody wants to just lock people away and throw away their keys.”
