As seen in the Washington Square News.
Jason Nicholas, 36, reminisces of his youth as he walks by hundreds of NYU undergraduates in Washington Square Park — some lounging on the fountain’s edge with a textbook, some playing Frisbee under the shade of a tree. Sitting down on a crooked park bench, he looks into the distance at the gleaming white arch and remembers why, for most of his 20s, the only view he had was through iron bars at a concrete wall.
That was 16 years ago. Nicholas and his friends had always expected trouble, just not at 1 a.m. on a frigid midweek night. Standing in the middle of the abandoned side street of a weapons contracting company lit only by a single street lamp, Nicholas found himself standing face-to-face with the crack dealers from whom he and his friends had been stealing. All Nicholas wanted was a little money and the dealers were just sitting on the drugs. But when the argument escalated, it wasn’t the money at stake — it was Nicholas’s life.
“He was facing the radiant street light,” Nicholas said. “We were standing about 30, 35 feet apart. They were like, ‘Don’t rob our people. Don’t rob us,’ and I said, ‘If you’re gonna sit there, we’re gonna take your shit.’ As soon as he spun around, I knew what he was doing. I happened to get mine quicker than he got his. He took eight steps and I shot him three times with a single-barrel pump [action shotgun].”
In one week, Nicholas will walk through that same gleaming white arch, purple gown flowing behind him, to take a diploma from NYU president John Sexton’s outstretched hand. But to Nicholas, it’s more than a diploma — it’s a validation of his attempts to put a life of unrest and 13 years in prison behind him.
“It means the world to me, man,” Nicholas said of graduation. “I made it. I made it through. I made it out the other side. If I even have any questions, I can always look at that diploma and say, ‘No, this isn’t me.’ The diploma represents what I’ve become. And I’m a lucky motherfucker.”
But Nicholas’s future hasn’t always been this bright. The Bronx native’s troubles began at a young age; when Nicholas was just 9 years old, his divorced mother overdosed on heroin. While his mother was undergoing treatment, Nicholas moved back to his birthplace of Yonkers to live with his maternal grandmother. The continual moving had a lasting effect, Nicholas said.
“The day that affected me the most was the day when she told me she should have had an abortion,” he said. “That’s been with me a long time and shaped a lot of what I did as a teen.”
Nicholas said he only made it as far as 10th grade before dropping out to work full time, soon returning to finish all but one credit needed to graduate. A single class short, Nicholas tried to enlist in the Marine Corps, but was rejected because he didn’t have a diploma.
Nicholas said he never went back to school.
“I decided to pursue my street studies,” he said.
For Nicholas, “street studies” included robbing drug dealers of their stashes and reselling them elsewhere, leading to that grisly face-off on March 3, 1990, when Nicholas shot a man in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Though the man got up and ran from the scene “so high on coke he ran around the corner and died,” Nicholas said he didn’t learn about the man’s death until a friend showed him an article in the paper. But the pressure was on, and by early April, Nicholas tried to leave the area to turn his life around, following a girl to South Hampton, N.Y. and earning his GED.
“I abandoned that ‘lifestyle,’ ” he said. “I hate using that word.” Nicholas reenlisted in the military, this time the Army Reserve, and after, ironically, completing training in field artillery, he traveled to Maine to share Thanksgiving with his grandmother. But time was ticking for Nicholas, and after he traveled back to Yonkers on Nov. 23 to go hiking with a friend — whose girlfriend’s detective father caught wind of his presence — the jig was up: Nicholas was arrested.
“It just so happens that he asked her of me,” he said. “They staked out [my friend's] house and were there when I showed up.”
For the trial on June 23, 1991, Nicholas’s former friends were granted immunity to eventually testify against him.
“None of them did a day,” he said. “I did all the time.”
Initially charged with myriad felonies and misdemeanors, including multiple counts of second-degree murder, Nicholas was convicted only of manslaughter and sentenced to the maximum penalty of five to 15 years. Combined with an extra one and one-third to four years for violating probation on an older charge, Nicholas said he faced up to 19 years in prison.
“It’s like war,” he said. “You’re always wondering where it’s gonna come from.”
Though locked up, Nicholas restarted the turnaround he began after the shooting, and as an inmate, he studied hard enough to earn him an associate’s degree from Medaille College in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1994, putting him within striking distance of a bachelor’s degree.
“Back then, prisoners could get TAP and Pell grants,” he said. “They eliminated federal funding when I was a semester short of graduating. It was fucking horrible.”
Nicholas also began serving as a jailhouse lawyer and struck back at the system that confined him by forming the “Prisoner’s Legal Defense Center in 1996 — a prisoner-run prisoner’s rights organization that kept him active.
“It sparks this kind of political activism,” he said. “Up until that time, all the focus was on getting out of jail.”
When the group was denied recognition, Nicholas fought the prison system for the right to keep his group active, and after five years, he negotiated a settlement that garnered a front page article in the New York Law Journal. In fact, Nicholas had become such a good jailhouse lawyer that he helped a fellow inmate get out of jail in 2003 after Gov. George Pataki applied political pressure to unfairly deny him parole because he had committed a violent offense.
“It sucks [to remain in jail after helping free another inmate],” Nicholas said. “But I knew I was getting out soon. A lot of my friends [in jail] had life on the back. I knew I had a date.”
Finally, on July 14, 2003, Nicholas reentered the world he had left more than a decade before. Still riding high from his success in the courtroom, Nicholas applied to three colleges: NYU and Columbia and Fordham universities. On the written recommendation of New York District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who called Nicholas “the best jailhouse lawyer” he’d ever seen, Nicholas was accepted at NYU and Fordham — securing a future for him outside the cell.
“It was like, ‘Someone has faith in me and someone has gone out on a limb for me,’ ” he said. “I felt such a responsibility to not let [Kaplan] down. Isn’t that what it takes? Sometimes you just need a little help.”
With help from a friend, Nicholas moved into an apartment on Sullivan Street and began his studies in the McGhee Division of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, NYU’s college for non-traditional students. Nicholas began to live a new kind of life, a collegiate one, complete with a fresh circle of friends and a new sense of personal security.
“Being in the neighborhood and going to class was like a dream come true,” he said. “[And] finding a new circle of friends was integral. I just happened to fall into an incredible group of friends.”
But Nicholas’s flame of activism burned on, and during the 2004 Republican National Convention, he was thrown back in jail in the middle of the semester for yelling, “Fuck Bush, no war” with a group of anarchist teenagers.
“The New York Times called me a ‘twisted pied piper,’ ” Nicholas said. “It slowed me down because they tried to [show I had] violate[d] my parole.”
After a month in jail, Nicholas returned to his classes, only to be rejected from two of them. The two professors who let him return to class, Andrew Ross of American studies and Sharon Friedman of the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, kept his academic dreams alive.
“They took a chance on me,” he said. “I’m thankful to NYU for it.”
Ruth Danon, Nicholas’s advisor and Master Teacher of Creative and Expository Writing in the program, said she’s watched him develop from his beginnings to become a serious student of literature who’s hungry for ideas.
“He has been a delightful — if at times challenging — student who has grown enormously in his time with us,” she said. “He has become a serious, committed writer, intellectually and aesthetically curious and consistently ambitious.”
Danon said Nicholas’s academic pursuits will let him break free of the mold in which society has cast him.
“Many of our students make a journey from one kind of prison or another to college graduation,” she said. “There is the prison of class or family expectations. There is the prison of life in an unfulfilling profession. There is the prison of thinking you can’t make it through college. McGhee is a path by which many people leave many kinds of prisons. Jason’s is more literal, that’s all.”
But Nicholas says prison still lingers, especially when it comes to the dating scene, when many women won’t give him a chance after he tells them he has done time.
“People still judge me,” he said. “It sucks, but now with the diploma, I can say, ‘Fuck you.’ Now I feel like I’ve proven myself.”
Nicholas said that despite the albatross he wears, it’s important to turn things around to “teach us about human nature.”
“Getting out was a beginning in a very real way, but there was unfinished business, and there was a period where I was tested,” he said. “Now I can say, ‘It’s truly time to move on; it’s truly a new beginning.’ ”
Now Nicholas, whose post-prison life was documented in a film called “Nick” by Selena Hsu in NYU’s 2005 School of Journalism Grad Film Festival, spends his extracurricular time managing his MySpace page. He posts weekly installments of an original manuscript “Scenes from a New Life” for over 900 visitors to read and writing his first novel about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a memoir written from the third-person perspective he had from prison, all under the username Nick718.
“I’m a prologue and two chapters into it,” he said. “It’s a 9-11 novel, but I’m retelling the story inside out.”
Now more than any other time in his life, Nicholas can envision himself walking through that lustrous ivory arch, taking that piece of paper as proof that he can overcome the worst life can offer him and that second chances are always an option. When he graduates, his life behind bars is a previous chapter, and only a prologue to his future in the world outside.
“Not everyone is fucked up,” he said. “If you give people the tools, we can do it. My best day will be at graduation — but it’s really yet to come.”
Ex-convict graduates NYU
As seen in the Washington Square News.
Jason Nicholas, 36, reminisces of his youth as he walks by hundreds of NYU undergraduates in Washington Square Park — some lounging on the fountain’s edge with a textbook, some playing Frisbee under the shade of a tree. Sitting down on a crooked park bench, he looks into the distance at the gleaming white arch and remembers why, for most of his 20s, the only view he had was through iron bars at a concrete wall.
That was 16 years ago. Nicholas and his friends had always expected trouble, just not at 1 a.m. on a frigid midweek night. Standing in the middle of the abandoned side street of a weapons contracting company lit only by a single street lamp, Nicholas found himself standing face-to-face with the crack dealers from whom he and his friends had been stealing. All Nicholas wanted was a little money and the dealers were just sitting on the drugs. But when the argument escalated, it wasn’t the money at stake — it was Nicholas’s life.
“He was facing the radiant street light,” Nicholas said. “We were standing about 30, 35 feet apart. They were like, ‘Don’t rob our people. Don’t rob us,’ and I said, ‘If you’re gonna sit there, we’re gonna take your shit.’ As soon as he spun around, I knew what he was doing. I happened to get mine quicker than he got his. He took eight steps and I shot him three times with a single-barrel pump [action shotgun].”
In one week, Nicholas will walk through that same gleaming white arch, purple gown flowing behind him, to take a diploma from NYU president John Sexton’s outstretched hand. But to Nicholas, it’s more than a diploma — it’s a validation of his attempts to put a life of unrest and 13 years in prison behind him.
“It means the world to me, man,” Nicholas said of graduation. “I made it. I made it through. I made it out the other side. If I even have any questions, I can always look at that diploma and say, ‘No, this isn’t me.’ The diploma represents what I’ve become. And I’m a lucky motherfucker.”
But Nicholas’s future hasn’t always been this bright. The Bronx native’s troubles began at a young age; when Nicholas was just 9 years old, his divorced mother overdosed on heroin. While his mother was undergoing treatment, Nicholas moved back to his birthplace of Yonkers to live with his maternal grandmother. The continual moving had a lasting effect, Nicholas said.
“The day that affected me the most was the day when she told me she should have had an abortion,” he said. “That’s been with me a long time and shaped a lot of what I did as a teen.”
Nicholas said he only made it as far as 10th grade before dropping out to work full time, soon returning to finish all but one credit needed to graduate. A single class short, Nicholas tried to enlist in the Marine Corps, but was rejected because he didn’t have a diploma.
Nicholas said he never went back to school.
“I decided to pursue my street studies,” he said.
For Nicholas, “street studies” included robbing drug dealers of their stashes and reselling them elsewhere, leading to that grisly face-off on March 3, 1990, when Nicholas shot a man in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Though the man got up and ran from the scene “so high on coke he ran around the corner and died,” Nicholas said he didn’t learn about the man’s death until a friend showed him an article in the paper. But the pressure was on, and by early April, Nicholas tried to leave the area to turn his life around, following a girl to South Hampton, N.Y. and earning his GED.
“I abandoned that ‘lifestyle,’ ” he said. “I hate using that word.” Nicholas reenlisted in the military, this time the Army Reserve, and after, ironically, completing training in field artillery, he traveled to Maine to share Thanksgiving with his grandmother. But time was ticking for Nicholas, and after he traveled back to Yonkers on Nov. 23 to go hiking with a friend — whose girlfriend’s detective father caught wind of his presence — the jig was up: Nicholas was arrested.
“It just so happens that he asked her of me,” he said. “They staked out [my friend's] house and were there when I showed up.”
For the trial on June 23, 1991, Nicholas’s former friends were granted immunity to eventually testify against him.
“None of them did a day,” he said. “I did all the time.”
Initially charged with myriad felonies and misdemeanors, including multiple counts of second-degree murder, Nicholas was convicted only of manslaughter and sentenced to the maximum penalty of five to 15 years. Combined with an extra one and one-third to four years for violating probation on an older charge, Nicholas said he faced up to 19 years in prison.
“It’s like war,” he said. “You’re always wondering where it’s gonna come from.”
Though locked up, Nicholas restarted the turnaround he began after the shooting, and as an inmate, he studied hard enough to earn him an associate’s degree from Medaille College in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1994, putting him within striking distance of a bachelor’s degree.
“Back then, prisoners could get TAP and Pell grants,” he said. “They eliminated federal funding when I was a semester short of graduating. It was fucking horrible.”
Nicholas also began serving as a jailhouse lawyer and struck back at the system that confined him by forming the “Prisoner’s Legal Defense Center in 1996 — a prisoner-run prisoner’s rights organization that kept him active.
“It sparks this kind of political activism,” he said. “Up until that time, all the focus was on getting out of jail.”
When the group was denied recognition, Nicholas fought the prison system for the right to keep his group active, and after five years, he negotiated a settlement that garnered a front page article in the New York Law Journal. In fact, Nicholas had become such a good jailhouse lawyer that he helped a fellow inmate get out of jail in 2003 after Gov. George Pataki applied political pressure to unfairly deny him parole because he had committed a violent offense.
“It sucks [to remain in jail after helping free another inmate],” Nicholas said. “But I knew I was getting out soon. A lot of my friends [in jail] had life on the back. I knew I had a date.”
Finally, on July 14, 2003, Nicholas reentered the world he had left more than a decade before. Still riding high from his success in the courtroom, Nicholas applied to three colleges: NYU and Columbia and Fordham universities. On the written recommendation of New York District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who called Nicholas “the best jailhouse lawyer” he’d ever seen, Nicholas was accepted at NYU and Fordham — securing a future for him outside the cell.
“It was like, ‘Someone has faith in me and someone has gone out on a limb for me,’ ” he said. “I felt such a responsibility to not let [Kaplan] down. Isn’t that what it takes? Sometimes you just need a little help.”
With help from a friend, Nicholas moved into an apartment on Sullivan Street and began his studies in the McGhee Division of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, NYU’s college for non-traditional students. Nicholas began to live a new kind of life, a collegiate one, complete with a fresh circle of friends and a new sense of personal security.
“Being in the neighborhood and going to class was like a dream come true,” he said. “[And] finding a new circle of friends was integral. I just happened to fall into an incredible group of friends.”
But Nicholas’s flame of activism burned on, and during the 2004 Republican National Convention, he was thrown back in jail in the middle of the semester for yelling, “Fuck Bush, no war” with a group of anarchist teenagers.
“The New York Times called me a ‘twisted pied piper,’ ” Nicholas said. “It slowed me down because they tried to [show I had] violate[d] my parole.”
After a month in jail, Nicholas returned to his classes, only to be rejected from two of them. The two professors who let him return to class, Andrew Ross of American studies and Sharon Friedman of the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, kept his academic dreams alive.
“They took a chance on me,” he said. “I’m thankful to NYU for it.”
Ruth Danon, Nicholas’s advisor and Master Teacher of Creative and Expository Writing in the program, said she’s watched him develop from his beginnings to become a serious student of literature who’s hungry for ideas.
“He has been a delightful — if at times challenging — student who has grown enormously in his time with us,” she said. “He has become a serious, committed writer, intellectually and aesthetically curious and consistently ambitious.”
Danon said Nicholas’s academic pursuits will let him break free of the mold in which society has cast him.
“Many of our students make a journey from one kind of prison or another to college graduation,” she said. “There is the prison of class or family expectations. There is the prison of life in an unfulfilling profession. There is the prison of thinking you can’t make it through college. McGhee is a path by which many people leave many kinds of prisons. Jason’s is more literal, that’s all.”
But Nicholas says prison still lingers, especially when it comes to the dating scene, when many women won’t give him a chance after he tells them he has done time.
“People still judge me,” he said. “It sucks, but now with the diploma, I can say, ‘Fuck you.’ Now I feel like I’ve proven myself.”
Nicholas said that despite the albatross he wears, it’s important to turn things around to “teach us about human nature.”
“Getting out was a beginning in a very real way, but there was unfinished business, and there was a period where I was tested,” he said. “Now I can say, ‘It’s truly time to move on; it’s truly a new beginning.’ ”
Now Nicholas, whose post-prison life was documented in a film called “Nick” by Selena Hsu in NYU’s 2005 School of Journalism Grad Film Festival, spends his extracurricular time managing his MySpace page. He posts weekly installments of an original manuscript “Scenes from a New Life” for over 900 visitors to read and writing his first novel about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a memoir written from the third-person perspective he had from prison, all under the username Nick718.
“I’m a prologue and two chapters into it,” he said. “It’s a 9-11 novel, but I’m retelling the story inside out.”
Now more than any other time in his life, Nicholas can envision himself walking through that lustrous ivory arch, taking that piece of paper as proof that he can overcome the worst life can offer him and that second chances are always an option. When he graduates, his life behind bars is a previous chapter, and only a prologue to his future in the world outside.
“Not everyone is fucked up,” he said. “If you give people the tools, we can do it. My best day will be at graduation — but it’s really yet to come.”