This article is a part of the Inside & Connected series, which shares ideas, interviews, and projects that affect prison-based education, students, and educators.
Janos Toevs tracked down JSTOR in a Colorado prison in 2021. He used it to reach the professor whose paper changed him in solitary. Now that JSTOR is on the tablets inside Colorado, the conversation they started is happening all around him.
Janos Toevs
I had been doing research in prison for years before I found out about JSTOR. My work was well researched and properly cited—or at least as properly cited as I could make it under the circumstances. I relied on friends on the outside to look things up for me, usually on Wikipedia, and then send me the relevant pages in prison by mail. I would check the references and then use the prison’s interlibrary loan program to request the books or have friends mail me the articles.
Not exactly efficient, but it allowed me to become a researcher, which has changed me as a person.
One of the papers I found the old-fashioned way was a paper by Raymond Paternoster and Shawn Bushway entitled “Desistance and the “Feared Self”: Toward an Identity Theory of Criminal Desistance. Their application of ideas from developmental psychology to the desistance process became part of how I transitioned from being a long-term solitary-confinement prisoner—Administrative Segregation, or ADSEG — into someone who believed he might have more to contribute. The paper was not a road map. It did not tell me exactly how to get from one identity to the other. It was more like a beacon. It gave me a direction, and it gave me hope.
I first heard the word “JSTOR” in 2021 while virtually attending the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison, sponsored by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. At the time, I was a paraprofessional for a Computer Information Systems class taught by Mr. Eric Reed. After a thirty-year career in the private sector securing computer systems and credit-card information, Mr. Reed decided that he wanted to teach skills that could help incarcerated people successfully reenter society. During one of the conference sessions, someone asked a presenter what he used for research. His answer was simply, “JSTOR.” My immediate reaction was: What the hell is JSTOR, and how do I get it?
Mr. Reed found out what it was, and then discovered to our surprise that the Colorado Department of Corrections already had JSTOR. It was available on the Chromebooks issued to college students. We did not know about it because our Computer Information Systems class was not part of the college program.
Because I was a paraprofessional who helped different students with different subjects, I was able to get access to one of those Chromebooks and begin exploring JSTOR. I already knew something about database research. I am a jailhouse lawyer who uses LexisNexis in the law library, Once I understood what JSTOR contained, I knew how to start digging.
My first major JSTOR project involved game theory. I was fascinated by one of the founders of the field of game theory, Nobel Prize winning economist John Nash (subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind). I eventually started exploring the concept of signaling as a solution to the principal agent problem. I unexpectedly saw that name again: Bushway on a paper about signaling.1 What the hell? How did the same guy write papers on identity change and signaling.
I obviously could not reach out to some academic I had never met and say, “Hey, man, I read one of your papers, it changed my life, and everything I do now is connected to it.” That is more than a bit much.
What I could do was follow the same approved process I ordinarily used when an academic paper interested me. I could ask a third party—in this case, Colorado T.E.N.T.—to contact the author through approved channels and say, essentially:
“This guy read your paper. He thinks your work is extremely important, and he would like to begin a correspondence with you.”
Shawn Bushway
I received that email. The email told me that the team at TENT had built curriculum based on the Bushway Apel paper, and they asked me for feedback. It was extremely well done, and I was impressed at how well they understood and then applied research to their context.
I asked if I could speak to the main author, and I was told it would be a bit complicated….. because he was in prison. Eventually, I got on Janos’s phone list, and we started talking on a weekly basis. Relatively early on, he said “I’ve read most of your papers”. I have over 100 peer reviewed papers, and my own family hasn’t read most of my papers. I thought he was lying. He wasn’t. The JSTOR fairy had been delivering my papers to Colorado State prisons for years, and Janos had been reading them. I had never even considered that JSTOR was available in prisons.
It took me a while to get over the shock that this person in Colorado prison was reading my papers more carefully than any graduate student. Janos and I proceeded to have very detailed conversations about my work, including its strengths and weaknesses as a body of work. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that my academic paper on identity theory and desistance would resonate on a personal level to someone in AD SEG. Finding out that my research made a difference at a personal level was one of the more meaningful moments in my career.
Ultimately, Janos and I decided to write a paper together on signaling in prison. Janos had the JSTOR fairy working overtime, and he made a number of key observations that allowed us to apply the standard principal agent machinery to the prison context. We ultimately presented the paper together (with Janos on Zoom) at a prestigious workshop at the University of Wisconsin Madison in June 2025. A fun highlight: a famous economist from UChicago challenged us about a paper from 1976 that he felt undercut our argument. Janos had read the paper on JSTOR, and rebutted the challenge, to the delight of his ten colleagues who were rooting him on off camera.
After that conference, well-known economist Carolyn Heinrich, an expert on incentives, agreed to join our team, and we now have a well-developed paper that is under review at the same journal that published Bushway and Apel in 2012. The paper is a real achievement – and it wouldn’t have been possible without JSTOR. We needed someone like Janos who understood both the prison context and the literature on principal agent problems to develop a coherent model.
Janos Toevs
In 2026, one of the greatest things imaginable happened: JSTOR appeared as an app tile directly on our prison tablets. I began telling people around me, “You do not understand what this is. This is the greatest research tool in the history of research tools. There are college professors who would be envious of us having this kind of access.”
At first, I probably sounded like an overly excited JSTOR salesman. But people began using it. Now, quite a few of us use it, and it has elevated the general level of conversation around me. I have literally heard one incarcerated person tell another, “No. Go read this article on JSTOR, and then we will talk about it.”
That is cool as hell. JSTOR has not merely given us access to information. It has changed what we can reasonably expect from one another. Instead of arguing from vague impressions or asking someone else to explain an entire subject, a person can locate the article, read the research, and return prepared for a serious conversation.
As someone who studies signaling, I also recognize that we are using JSTOR as a signal of academic seriousness. It helps us distinguish between someone who is willing to do the reading himself and someone who wants the material explained to him without doing the work. The point is not that everyone must already understand the research. The signal is whether someone is willing to engage with it—to search, read, struggle with the material, and then participate in the conversation.
My working relationship with Shawn has now reached the point where Shawn can tell me what he is thinking, describe where a project needs to go, and then tell me that I am the person who can get it there. Often, I can immediately identify the researchers, papers, and connections. When I cannot, I can go back to JSTOR and find them.
That is not a small thing. JSTOR has allowed me to participate in a genuine, high level scholarly conversation from inside a medium-security prison. It has helped me move from curiosity, to theory, to research, to collaboration. It has allowed me to test what I think I see against what other people have already studied. It has also allowed me to contribute something that is difficult to produce from either side alone: a conversation between formal research and 37 years of direct observation.
¹ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2012.00786.x
