Student

Editor's note: This story is part of a series of profiles of notable fall 2020 graduates.

Ever since she was very young, Alexis Klemm was fascinated by the study of the mind and human actions. That captivation first came from watching TV dramas such as “Law & Order” and “Criminal Minds.” Then, as a middle and high school student, she began taking courses in psychology, forensic sciences and sociology.

Christopher Rearley spent his life beating the odds. He was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age 6 and was permanently using a wheelchair by 11. By the time he started college at 18, his doctors, knowing that his breathing capacity was only 20% of normal, said he would live only months, a year at most.

That prediction didn’t hold up. He started community college, then came to Arizona State University, defying his doctors’ prognosis.

Last Saturday, about halfway through Part 1 of the ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy’s two-part Impact Arizona lecture series titled “Race, Crisis and the Future of Democracy,” which was organized in the aftermath of the May 25 police-involved killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, the New York Times sent its subscribers a news alert that yet another black man, 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks of Atlanta, had died at the hands of law enforcement.

The logistical challenges of teaching a class inside a state prison are complicated enough during a typical semester, let alone one that includes a pandemic.

This spring, an Arizona State University professor and a doctoral student were instructing 10 students based at the Downtown Phoenix campus, plus 10 more who happen to be men serving criminal sentences at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Florence.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series of profiles of notable spring 2020 graduates.

Genevieve McKenzie remembers the spring of her freshman year, when she questioned whether she made the right decision to major in criminology and criminal justice.

But even more vivid in her memory is the day those doubts disappeared. It was the day she sat face-to-face in an Arizona prison with an incarcerated man dressed in an orange jumpsuit.

Karla Chicuate was intellectually acquainted with the morally evil practice of grooming, abducting and selling human beings for labor or sexual exploitation when she traveled in January to west Africa.

After all, she had been working as an educator with the city of Tempe’s Sexual Relationship and Violence Department for about a year and a half when her 10-day excursion began, and she intentionally chose the assignment to work with women and children who had endured human trafficking.

Subscribe to Student