Angel T. Tueros

Angel T. Tueros, a graduate of Bard College’s Bard Prison Initiative, was born in New York City’s West Harlem and raised in the Dominican Republic until he was 18-years-old.

At the age of 22, Angel encountered the criminal justice system for the first time. After refusing an eight-year plea agreement, he was sentenced to 25-years-to-life. Upon entering prison, Angel expected to be treated with respect and dignity, but this wasn’t the case. Angel recalls “the guards often verbally abused me and groped me under the guise of a pat frisk.” It was this treatment and the fact that he was so far from his family that quickly shattered these expectations. “I had to find ways to cling to my humanity,” he remembers. “It was hard trying to remain human and grow in the midst of madness.”

Angel lived through this madness for 24 and a half years. He found comfort in his faith, Nelson Mandela’s book Long Walk to Freedom, and knowing that his family was out there waiting for his return. Angel internalized a harrowing quote from Mandela: “prison is designed to break your spirit and crush your resolve.” However, he also acknowledged the bright sides of his incarceration, saying “I found that my interactions with people from the community—like my college professors—to be extremely beneficial to my rehabilitation; they made me feel human.” And although Angel’s spirit and resolve proved durable, the problem is that these interactions with members from the community aren’t available to all or even most of the prison population - something the Douglass Project was founded to change.