Photography by Wesley Law
A Maryland senator was holding forth in a committee hearing. Ban the box? Prevent companies from learning that a job applicant was an ex-con? “What if there’s this bigtime drug dealer who now wants to work for a pharmaceutical company?” he expostulated. And then Stanley Andrisse stood up. A three-time drug felon from Ferguson with an MBA and a Ph.D. in physiology, he was doing a postdoc fellowship in endocrinology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine—and applying for jobs at pharmaceutical companies. Andrisse is smart and incredibly personable—and those are “transferable skills,” as he regularly reminds young drug dealers. Nowadays, people in power urge him to speak out. And as the Ban the Box movement gathers momentum, his voice is starting to carry.
At first, you just wanted to mentor young people, stay local and low-key.
Yeah, I went through several stages of “Man, I’m going to keep doing this,” even in rehab, so I can tell when people are bullshitting.
How?
I see me. Body language, swag… I see me.
Not the current you, though.
In prison, I saw people leave and come back, leave and come back. I realized, “I need to be a completely different person. I need to dress differently, talk differently, act differently.” And the thinking—I needed to change the way I saw things. How are you gonna feel when you bump into people you used to know and they say, “You think you’re better than us?” Once I could control my feelings, I could think, “That’s not me anymore.”
Why doesn’t prison change more people?
Because they go back to this little physical square they came up in and this imaginary square of who they can be. “You can’t be shit.” They get out, and a number of them end up getting killed. You carry those people with you.
Meanwhile, you’re fighting to distance yourself from the stigma. This is what a felon looks like [pointing to his face]. There are probably others in this restaurant right now [gesturing]. The word is another way to dehumanize you, keep you in your felon box.
But never entirely free of it.
I am forever going to have this scarlet letter on my back.
What’s the scarlet letter? Fear?
The scarlet letter is fear, it’s policy, it’s psychology. It imposes physical and nonphysical barriers. The thinking is that you have done this, so now you are susceptible, and you will do this for the rest of your life. I am a “career criminal.” I am a career scientist. But that is how society sees it.
Can you think of a time when you slammed into that box’s walls?
I still have that feeling! One company, I went through several rounds of interviews. We were laughing, I was hitting all their questions, they were going to pay to fly me out so I could meet some more bigwigs. Then they sent paperwork for my background check—and I got an email shortly afterward that they were no longer pursuing my application.
You even had trouble getting into school.
While I was in prison, I applied to a number of Ph.D. programs, and I was rejected by all but one. Mizzou, UMSL, UMKC, Wash. U. all rejected me—and I had to stay in Missouri, ’cause I was getting out on parole.
Why did Saint Louis University accept you?
There was a professor there—he’d written me a letter to get some scholarship. So before my sentencing, we were putting together this packet, and I slipped in the letter, because it said a bunch of good things about me. He calls me up and says, “What’s going on?” I didn’t know what to say. He said, “I’ve known you for a little bit now. We all make mistakes. I’m right here with you.”
What’s the lure of drug dealing?
The running theme is that it’s situational, and it definitely is that. People are in situations where they need to put food on the table. But also, a big part of it is this allure: money, cars, clothes, women. All of that comes along with the life.
You can’t be stupid and pull it off.
I’m at Johns Hopkins with the brightest of the brightest, and yet I can truly say I met some of the most intelligent people in prison. They just sometimes don’t believe in themselves.
What happened at the sentencing?
It was like an out-of-body experience. The prosecuting attorney paints this picture that I’m the leader of this drug ring, she’s pushing for 20 years to life. I’m barely 20 years old. I felt as if I was looking at myself sitting there frozen. My family was in the seats behind me, just listening to this dance. And my defense attorney was dancing, too, with his stack of papers. I was nothing more than a statistic, really, for both of them. At the end of the day it’s a strike on paper, win or lose.
And you lost.
They sentenced me as a prior and persistent career criminal, which bumped my minimum sentence up from five years to 10, and life was now in the picture. And now that I’m a prior and persistent career criminal, if I’m even caught with a dime bag of weed at any time for the rest of my life, I will be sentenced to 15 years to life, with no chance of parole.
That’s got to be scary.
I’d wake up in a cold sweat thinking, “What did I do last night?” Even though I wasn’t doing anything. I’d have these vivid dreams, and then I’d wake up and be checking my car, checking my clothes.
What was prison like?
A constant battle just to feel I was human. I was able to keep my mind on other places by reading, by contact with my family. The professor continued to send me articles, just to keep my mind somewhere else. That’s key.
What do you say to people who are now in that situation?
That this is not fatal. In the early days, I would have these terrible thoughts: My life is over. All the good is just out the door. I was engaged, I figured that was over, too. My mother just told me the other day that she cried every night.
And your father died while you were in prison.
His diabetes got worse and worse, and he lost his lower limbs piece by piece.
You grew up in Ferguson. Were you there during the protests after the shooting of Michael Brown?
I’d just moved to Baltimore the week before. I was telling people I was from St. Louis, a little part of town called Ferguson. It was nothing then. So [when the protests started], they were saying, ‘You are from Ferguson? Why are your people doing that?” Ferguson was the key to this whole movement that’s now taking place. And Baltimore was the second key. So I started asking them, “What’s up with your people?”
What’s been the reaction, now that you’ve gone so public with your story?
People in the Ph.D. program who didn’t know, it’s all been positive. But then again, how many people are going to come out and tell me directly if it’s negative?
It took you only four years to complete both your MBA and Ph.D.?
And I graduated at the top of my class. I’ve already used up eight of my lives. I’m tired of f—king up.
Was it tricky, applying to graduate schools from prison?
Yeah, you can only get five pieces of mail in any envelope, so I’d have friends receive the applications and break them down. The letter of acceptance got rejected; it was sent back to SLU. I got called to the assistant warden’s office, and they said they’d just gotten a call from SLU. I almost fell out. I was ecstatic: This is not the end. This is the beginning.
