Beyond the Walls

When Northwestern senior Sela Breen was making a two-hour drive every week from her Evanston apartment to Sheridan Correctional Center, she wasn’t visiting family — she was attending a college class as part of NPEP.

That class, a journalism and documentary storytelling course, brought together Northwestern University journalism undergraduates and incarcerated undergraduates from Sheridan Correctional Center to collaborate on short films. The journalism students partnered with their incarcerated classmates to help the Sheridan students tell stories that extended beyond their sentence.

Breen’s introduction to the carceral system began a few years ago in 2021, when she left her hometown of Larchmont, New York, to begin her studies at Northwestern.

She was always interested in NPEP but never had time in her schedule to visit the correctional center, so she jumped at the chance to write about NPEP for North by Northwestern. While writing the story, she attended an NPEP community hour, where friends and supporters of the program gathered for monthly conversations and reflection. She noted that it was “easy” to care about what happens behind prison gates and that she knew there was a story to be told.

“People are human and should be treated as such,” she said. “You can try to ignore it, but being aware is a beneficial way to expand your worldview. There are people who can’t advocate for themselves, and the fact that no one really knows what’s going on behind prison walls is a sign that it’s not good.”

That compassion deepened during the journalism class, where her final project was to create a documentary about carceral injustice through the experiences of two NPEP students: Tevin Louis and myself. Filming that documentary — titled “It Starts With Us” — took her across Chicagoland to interview family members of her incarcerated classmates at Sheridan.

Weekly class focus groups helped Sela and her partner, Sandra Salib, plan how best to expose injustices in the system. After quick text exchanges with Sheridan students’ family members, they’d show up at homes with their gear and start recording. She visited Tevin Louis’s and my family members on the outside, gathering interviews and insight to help build a fuller narrative, one that pushed back against the stigma so often attached to incarceration.

“You see how much it has impacted [a family’s] life,” Breen said. “Some are not able to visit. It’s not like someone is shipped off to prison and you don’t have to worry about them. To have your child, sibling, or friend there and still be burdened with all the extra stuff is so unfair.”

The more she reported, the more invested she became. And the more injustice she encountered.

“The justice system is flawed, which I already knew — but now I know more,” she said. “I’m shocked hearing about wrongful convictions or people in prison for things they didn’t even do.”

In March, several of the films produced in the course that Breen was a part of were selected to screen at the AMDOC Film Festival, one of the nation’s most prominent showcases for documentary work.

Since becoming involved with NPEP, Breen has encouraged friends to take classes inside whenever the opportunity arises.

“This is my favorite thing I’ve done at Northwestern,” she said. “I told my friends on campus that whenever they see an NPEP course, they have to sign up. I’ve even encouraged my mom to get involved with prison volunteer work in New York — I know she’d love it.”

Even after the course was finished, Breen continued making the weekly trip to Sheridan to help with the Northwestern Insider. The drive, she admits, “worried” her parents, but she’s committed to using her storytelling skills to uplift the voices of those inside.

“As I look over my life so far, I think it’s really exciting to see how I translated my love for theatrical storytelling into a career in journalism, which is storytelling in its own right,” she said.

Although the stage looks different — its characters less romanticized, its costumes a reluctant shade of blue — her instinct to listen and document has stayed the same.

This time, she understands: the action continues long after the curtain is closed.