One woman was tutoring other former inmates in a post-prison program, helping them get better grades when a staff member urged her into another program that would help her with her own education. Another woman doubted whether she was capable of making it through school at all, after enduring the trauma of jail, but other formerly incarcerated students were sure she could do it because they believed in her like they believed in themselves.
The documentary “Rebound” follows the stories of Laura Murray and Isabella Quevedo and how they’ve navigated leaving prison and jail, and finding the kind of and resources needed to help them build a better life. A sizable chunk of that came by way of Project Rebound, a program through the California State University system offered locally at CSU San Marcos and San Diego State University, which provides academic and financial aid advising, counseling, mentoring, professional development, and other services.
“Project Rebound gave me a safe space. It just gave me a place to belong and effectively transferred my identity from that of a formerly incarcerated woman to that of a successful academic, you know?” says Murray, who’s currently earning her Ph.D. at North Carolina State University. “Who in the world could have ever thought that little old bank robber could do what she’s done and go as far as I’ve gone? I would have never thought that in a million years, and it was Project Rebound that opened up that portal for me.”
The film, which debuted in 2021, is being screened as part of UC San Diego’s Women’s History Month programming. “Women’s Experience of Incarceration: A Film Screening & Discussion” begins at 4 p.m. Thursday and includes the “Faces of Mass Incarceration” art exhibit, “Rebound,” and a discussion with formerly incarcerated people and students affected by incarceration.
Murray, who also teaches sociology at NC State and criminology at SDSU, is ed in conversation by Tamara Perkins, director of the film and an adjunct film professor, and Quevedo, who works as a planner at a transportation and engineering firm and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in urban studies at city planning at SDSU. They took some time to talk about their experiences as women in the criminal justice system, telling stories rooted in social justice, and hoping that their stories and their work encourage others to believe in themselves. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: Why did you want to be part of this film?
Quevedo: When I transferred from San Diego City College to San Diego State in 2019, it was by chance that I got into with Project Rebound. I was crying outside of class when someone approached me and I was like, “I’m failing, I’m never going to finish college.” He had known I was incarcerated because he had been, as well, and he said he knew someone at San Diego State who could help me. That was in the spring; by that fall, I met everyone at orientation and Laura came up to me right away and she said, “Take my number, you’re locked in for life.” Shortly thereafter, maybe like one or two meetings later, I was approached to tell my story. At the time, I was like, there’s not really much to tell. I was still under a lot of shock and under the impression that what happened to me really didn’t matter because when it happened, my family was like, ‘OK, just sweep it under the rug. Go to college, forget about it.’ Then, when I arrived at Project Rebound, everyone was like, ‘Are you OK? It sounds like a really horrific story that you endured.’ Eventually, I met Tamara and Jason (Ritchie, co-director of the film) and it was really easy to talk because I asked if I could just pretend like the camera wasn’t there. In the beginning of me telling my story, it was the beginning of not only the healing process, but reaching the breaking point, which I hadn’t reached yet.
Murray: Jason and I were in the first cohort (at Project Rebound) together, so it was a small group and we were all kind of close because we didn’t really know what was going on or anything. Most of us were fresh out, so we got really close really quick. Jason came up to me and told me that he had an idea for a film and it would be a commitment and all of this stuff. I really am not down for, like, any of that, but I also wanted to Jason because I consider him like my little brother. I know our chances aren’t really good when we come out and some people’s chances are worse than others. Jason had been down for like 17 years, so if this helped him in life, if this helped him succeed, I’ll forget about being filmed, you know what I mean? I’ll get over it and push through for my brother, so that’s how it began.
Q: Are you comfortable sharing a bit about your background before prison? And then what led to your incarceration?
Murray: (The first time) I was in a cartel and we all got charged with conspiracy, in the late ’90s. I ended up with 60 months in federal prison. I did OK when I got out; I was able to get a job and get trained as a hazmat tech and drive heavy equipment. I was doing great. I even bought my own house at the height of the market, like an idiot. I was so proud because I’m this single, White woman; then, the subprime mortgage crisis hit and they started trading my deed around like a trading card. I went through, like, five different lenders, it was crazy. Then, I was using my credit card to try and pay the debt. In the middle of that, I get laid off. They called eight of us in the office at this recycling center and laid us all off at once. After the first month, the younger guys in that group all got jobs; us women, we were over 40, so we didn’t fare so well.I got another job, but it paid $5 less an hour. Then, they started foreclosing on my house with astonishing swiftness and I was left to live in my car in Northern California. It was the height of summer, like 120 degrees. I didn’t have any money to get gas, to run the AC, and I would walk around in the stores. I wouldn’t shoplift, but I would just sit there and cry because I would look at food and I couldn’t have it, so it was just really sad. I finally just got to a state where my phone broke one day and I just grabbed a Burger King napkin and wrote on it “This is a bank robbery. Don’t make it a murder.” I didn’t have a gun.
I had worked really hard, working 60 to 80 hours a week, I’d been sober, and I still got put out on the street. I was like, ‘You know what? There’s something wrong with this place.’ I ended up relapsing in the midst of all of that and that’s what gave me the bravado to walk into a bank, into a few banks. I ended up with an eight-year sentence in state prison because the feds said they were too crowded.
After I had my little pity party, I looked around and I was like, ‘Why is this place full of Black women?’ I was serious, I wasn’t being sarcastic. I wasn’t trying to be naive, either. I realized the injustice that was there. Some people never had access to education. I worked as a teacher’s aide right when I got there because I love education and scored high on the test for basic adult education, which isn’t saying much. So, I got out of working in the kitchen and was a TA and got to help women get their GED. It was a really cool thing, but I also heard horror stories from roommates about how they stole a pair of boxers from JC Penney and got life, for a pair of boxers for her 16-year-old brother’s birthday because she was a second-striker. She’d been down for 33 years because of that. It was awful, but I saw all kinds of injustices and all kinds of people without access and it just really opened up my stupid eyes. I was just like, ‘Man, this place is jacked up.’ As (Fyodor) Dostoyevsky said, “if you want to know what a society is like, look in their prisons.” I did look inside of prisons and I saw what he was talking about. I saw how we morphed racism-we went from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and disenfranchisement upon reentry. It made me so mad.
Quevedo: I actually did not go to prison. My case is a little special. Unfortunately, I got involved in a domestic dispute and I was the one who was arrested. That was from an extremely abusive relationship that started when I was, like, 19 or 20 and this man was in his mid-20s. I had my son at 21 and tried to do the whole live-with-your-children’s-father thing and do all of that. I was horribly, wickedly verbally abused. A dispute ensued because we were having a custody battle. We finally did separate and there was a lot of animosity because my family and I were taking him to court to pay child , so that caused a huge rift. Another unfortunate thing that happened was that he and his new partner had a child shortly after. At the time, my son was 3. Their baby ed, unfortunately; it was very tragic and that created a boiling point where I went to go pick up my son and he wouldn’t give him back to me. I made quite the scene because I wanted my child back, of course. He wouldn’t answer the door. His partner called the cops because he finally opened the door after I had been banging and banging and banging, and an altercation ensued. This is a White man, I’m a Latina, so it naturally fell into place that I was the one who instigated everything. I was the one who got arrested, even though they found me with his knee on my neck, because I was tresing. I was just super young and naive. I met him about a year or two after high school. Prior to that, I’d never really got in trouble, I had no previous background with the criminal justice system. I grew up in the suburbs and had an extremely privileged life. I still do, to this day, but I was just undiagnosed mentally ill and I didn’t know that.
I was young, uneducated, unemployed, and found myself in the justice system and saw how blatant the showcase of power was. When I was initially arrested, they made me stay for the full three days, I could not post bail. Everything was a blur. I had an unplanned pregnancy, went into jail in September 2013 and in June 2014 I gave birth to my daughter. The year that I was pregnant, the DA wanted to charge me with three counts of felony assault when I hadn’t even had a parking ticket before. My family started panicking, everyone was like, ‘Your life is over. You’re not going to be able to do anything.’ I put my family in a lot of debt to hire a lawyer and take it to trial. It was a hung jury, it was inconclusive. The trial took place a month or two after I gave birth and at the conclusion of my trial, because it was a mistrial, the judge ordered me to sit in jail for 10 days.
The initial panic, the dehumanization of having to show up and go through that booking process, all of that did wane when I was in there because, like Laura mentioned, you’re just absolutely floored by what you see in there. I feel like I saw what I wasn’t supposed to see. One of the main things that happened, from the moment I got on the bus, was everyone was like, “What are you doing here? Why are you here?” That kind of broke my heart because I was like, “Man, you guys don’t belong here, either.” They asked me why I was in and I told them for a domestic dispute. They were so funny, they were like, “Oh, you beat the (expletive) out of your baby daddy, nice.” They were just very encouraging; I saw an outpouring of care and comion for me. I was someone who had a lawyer and had my family-I had everything, so I knew I would be OK. I one lady was in because she was smoking a blunt in the park and that blew me away because the rich kids in my neighborhood did that all the time. So, I started making the connection and asking myself what was going on. The women I encountered utilized sex work as their means of survival and I don’t think I had ever understood that aspect until I sat at a table with a group of women and listened. To this day, it stays with me because they were trying to survive. There was no concept of like, ‘You can get a job or fill out an application,’ these girls were on survival mode. Some of them didn’t have much literacy or practical skills, but they were wildly imaginative and very intelligent, very comionate. People would listen to my little story and they would have empathy; then, they would tell me their story and I was like, “Oh my God, I shouldn’t be complaining to you.”
Murray: The cartel work was from the mid-’90s to the end of the ’90s. I worked for the cartel for about four years. That was really perilous-I was kidnapped by a competing dealer and taken across the border and dumped off, and I had to find my way back. It took me, like, three days; I had to eat cactus, it was ridiculous. I got shot at; I went through a lot. I traumatized myself by being in this cartel, but I was also a heroin addict, so I was kind of between a rock and a hard place, the way I saw it.I ended up with almost 60 months in federal prison. I signed up for a drug program when I got out, so I was allowed to go to a halfway house for a year. If you successfully completed that without the marshals showing up with their box of chains, then you could go home with an ankle monitor on for, like, six months and complete the program. If you messed up with a dirty drug test or not getting back by curfew, or something like that, you went straight back to federal prison and did the rest of your time. I managed to figure it out, I got a job.
Q: How did you learn about Project Rebound and what are some of the ways in which it helped your transition, that maybe you didn’t realize you’d need?
Murray: I was in a first-year program violent offenders were eligible for, and we had a chance to go and try to do something. You couldn’t carry a phone, you couldn’t carry cash, there was an in-house parole officer, and it was an extremely strict program. They had an education guy, an employment guy, two parole agents, you were searched coming in and out of the program, you were constantly drug tested; that’s where I really started to hear about Project Rebound. The education person caught me helping someone write a report on (Franz) Kafka, the one about the cockroach (“The Metamorphosis”). I was helping her and we got into trouble. The next day, the education person called us both into the office to ask what we were doing and the girl said I was tutoring her. They said, “But you have a tutor” and she’s like, “No, I don’t like that tutor.” I was tutoring six other people and they were like, “My God, that’s why they have the grades they have.” That’s when she said she was going to call a guy at Project Rebound.
I had kind of sat in that program being a knucklehead, like I was in prison, and she said, “What if I tell you that you have a chance to go back to school? I can make that happen, but you can’t be an idiot. You can’t get in trouble anymore for having cookies in your room or an extra cup of coffee.” I was like, ‘Man, forget their rules,’ I really didn’t give a (expletive) about that, but then I started to care about it. People started coming in from prison and they were like, “Hey, bank robber, can you please tutor me?” and people started asking me to tutor them. So, I was like, “OK, if you still want to do it, I’m down.”
I started going to Mesa College. I had to skip lunch because I had to eat at the prison program, but this professor found out, so every Tuesday and Thursday there was a little brown bag with a orange and some nuts and a thing of juice. Like, out of the blue she just gave me the because she found out that I lived in this program. That professor is still at Mesa College and we still have dinner when I fly into San Diego; she’s the best. Then, I kept telling Mesa College I was going to San Diego State. The coordinator at the time, when he found out I was taking 15 units, he said I might want to slow down. Slow down? I was 50-something years old, I couldn’t even see the color of my Kool-Aid anymore, so I needed to hurry up. It turned out, I kept getting straight As and was spending, like, 18 hours at the school because there were resources there, I could eat there, I was safe there, as opposed to living on 49th and Imperial where I was living.
Quevedo: I learned about Project Rebound from another Rebounder named Cesar. We had a gender, queer, or critical race theory class at City College and that’s when my mind was being blown with everything. After being released from jail and accidentally getting pregnant, I operated off of shame and guilt, so I would just throw myself into school trying to better myself. My family, even though they helped me and they were so ive, I was missing the emotional , so I was having a hard time. I didn’t know I had PTSD, so I would have moments where I was just not able to sleep, or I would have flashbacks reading about critical race theory or learning gender theory. I was sitting outside of class and thinking I was going to fail because I just couldn’t keep up. Cesar came by and asked what was up, and I said I was never going to go to college, never going to be something because I just couldn’t do it. He told me to get in with Dan Stacy (who was assistant director at the time), so I called Dan and they took care of my application, getting me a campus ID.
When I finally met Laura and everyone else, they would tell me that what happened to me was really bad. I think Project Rebound allowed me to be OK with being sad and hurt and experiencing the sheer injustice because, I think I’m still like this today where I always felt like my story was invalid because of my privilege, but they would say that every perspective of someone going into the criminal justice system is valid. So, Project Rebound helped me just face what happened. I was able to get emotional and encouragement, things I didn’t have at home because people were rightfully mad at me. I got mental health help, I got diagnosed and saw a specialist. I found out I have a mood disorder, severe ADHD, very prominent PTSD. Project Rebound really helped me to humanize myself again. Dan said it best when he was giving a speech on the people who’d graduated and he told me that when he first met me, I was apologizing for just existing, but now I had come so far.
Q: How have your experiences and your work helped shape your perspective around restorative justice?
Perkins: I kind of got into this because of my experience as a survivor of gun violence. I had four experiences with guns, so I had so many questions about it. When Laura and Isabella and I talk, I feel like so many kids just got left behind or kicked when, instead, they just needed to be loved. We’ve just destroyed so many children who grow up and become adults. When I knew the superintendent of juvenile hall in the Bay Area, my nephew got arrested at 14 and it put him on a path that is directly related to being incarcerated. He’s 30 now, he’s Black. I have a multiracial family and this is something that happens all the time. I mean, I broke into a house when I was a kid, but the officer drove me home and took me to my parents. My nephew did something so minor, but was charged with a misdemeanor and had to spend a whole summer incarcerated. There are so many children like that and it’s horrible.
I’m so grateful that Laura and Isabella are doing well and, in their own ways, are fighting for others and making things better in the community. In this situation, it’s most important having formerly incarcerated people leading the effort, being compensated, being ed to do the work because they understand it. There’s a different way that someone who’s had a similar experience as you can both hold you able and really see you and you. They’re all culture bearers and the folks who need to be held up in continuing that work.
Q: What do you hope people come to learn or understand as a result of watching the film?
Perkins: We are all responsible for the way that we are treating our most vulnerable people, and we need to be aware of that. We can’t have a blind eye, we need to be aware of that and be able. Lift up and see people for who they are. You shouldn’t be judged by your worst moment. I really hope (in watching the film) people feel like they know somebody who’s had this experience, if they don’t already have that in their family; if they do, I hope that they find camaraderie in this. I hope that they find some hope in seeing the amazing work that Isabella and Laura are doing, even in just getting these degrees to be in places where they can be part of the change, and understanding that they can do it, too.
Murray: It’s been interesting because I travel a lot, I go to criminology and sociology conferences, and I just love being able to network. So, I’ve had somebody (at a conference) from Michigan come up to me and say that their professor showed “Rebound” in a class. That really lifted my spirits, I was so happy. Then, this guy, a newer cohort member of Project Rebound, got a hold of me as soon as he got in and said he watched the film in the day room of the prison and said that was why he was at San Diego State now, because of the documentary. That makes me feel so good. I wanted to inspire my tribe, my people, you know what I mean? When I left, I told those women I would be back for them and I meant it. I really meant that. So, this is my way of coming back for them, using my insight and my education to help the people that I left behind.
Quevedo: How do I not make this sound cheesy? I want them to watch the movie and be like, ‘OK, I can do that.’ I just want to encourage the women who watch it, the mothers, to go to school. Before I went to school, I was like, ‘I’m a single mom, I’m the lowest of the low in society. Society does not recognize me as a woman, as someone worthy of anything.’ Have you ever read a comment section? So, I hope that women can watch this and not only be encouraged, but feel a sense of relief that there is something like this. I know that deep down, as women, we know that we can do it, but there’s often that lack of care and empathy that doesn’t allow us to go for it. I just want them to know that they can go to school; you don’t have to be smart to go to school, you just have to work hard. There’s another way out.
For the men who watch it, I would hope that they can gain a little sense of humanity toward women, that they can humanize women any chance they get.
