AUGUSTA, Maine — Sitting among a sea of students in black caps and gowns at the University of Maine commencement ceremony last May, Victoria Scott was tense.
Crowds make her anxious. A lot of things do.
“Some of you took a straight path,” one of the speakers was saying. “Others took a few scenic detours.”
For Scott, now 33, the word “detour” couldn’t begin to cover it.
She’d dropped out of school at age 16 and slipped into a life of drugs and violence. At 23, she got into a brutal fight with an ex’s friend and, afraid he was about to kill her, stabbed him to death. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Released early for good behavior, she was serving the final two years of her term in Rockland, living in her own apartment but under strict supervision.
The past eight years were dizzying for her to even think about. Here she was, four months out of prison and graduating from college, her brothers whooping and her father smiling, trying to picture the gift of a second-chance life. The kind of life that, years ago, she’d never been able to imagine for herself. And one she long feared she couldn’t possibly deserve.
In her old life, Scott never thought much about the future. When she tried, there wasn’t much to see: Just a “white trash” kid “from nowhere Maine that nobody cares about,” is how she put it.
And then, suddenly, everybody did care, for reasons she wishes she could undo.
Paying for that mistake landed her in a progressive, reform-focused prison run by a man who understood where she came from, and what she might do, if given one more chance.
In prison, Scott took college classes and participated in counseling and even got a job that let her work remotely. Slowly, she started to see who she could be.
By the time she was released in January of 2025, she had the necessities for a new beginning: her own apartment, money in a savings account, and a part-time job at an MIT institute focused on higher education in prison.
Scott was rebuilding what had fallen apart. But she also knew, sitting at commencement, that this was only the beginning. Because that’s the thing about starting a new life — the old one is never far away.
Growing up in Rockport, Maine, with asthma and scoliosis, Scott was what she called an “indoor kid,” the youngest of six in a rowdy blended family. Her father was a carpenter; her mother, beset by congestive heart failure and autoimmune disorders, volunteered in the schools and worked as a substitute teacher.
They didn’t have much money, but scraped together enough to send Scott and two of her siblings to a private Christian elementary school. Scott was a “unique” child, her mother said – “weird,” if you asked her brothers.
She was the bright little sister who researched her mother’s medical conditions and pressed the doctors to defend their diagnoses. “She was kind of merciless,” said her mother, Vicki Scott.
Her parents eventually learned she was on the autism spectrum.
In sixth grade, they moved Scott to public school. She got straight A’s, but was struggling inside. The environment was loud, bright, and overwhelming. Her anxiety flared, and she once flipped over a desk and cowered in the corner, students staring at her.
At home, her rough-and-tumble older brothers taught her to stand up for herself. The mindset, according to her brother Morgan, was, “Somebody’s always going to be out to get you, so be ready.”
Scott’s sister, a year ahead of her in school, struggled with her mental health and started bringing home boys who did drugs and hit her. Her parents were always dealing with her sister’s emergencies, they acknowledge today, so Scott tried the best she could to be the opposite: helpful, perfect, invisible.
She had once been chosen for a student ambassador program, which involved traveling overseas. But her parents were worried about her safety and didn’t let her go. Scott felt trapped, she said, “like a window to the world had instantly closed.”
Scott also suffered from panic attacks that could escalate into seizures. At 13, she tried to kill herself by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol. Before long, she was wrapped in what she calls a “warm blanket” of addictive prescriptions — Adderall for ADHD, benzodiazepines for anxiety, oxycodone for hip and back pain caused by the scoliosis. When she was stressed, she cut herself. “It was a pain I understood,” she said.
At 16, she dropped out.
“At some point,” she said, “I just gave up on everything.”
At times, her father, Ted, threatened to kick out Victoria and her sister, but her mother protested that they’d wind up on the street, or worse. So they stayed.
“When you’re in the midst of it, you think you’re doing the right thing,” her father said.
Victoria fell into a habit of dating men with drug habits and violent streaks. Once, she called the cops on an abusive boyfriend, even filling out the form to press charges. They’d been in a fight over him stealing her prescription drugs, she said, and he had dragged her down the street. But she never heard from the police, and that’s when she decided she’d never call them again.
“Nobody cared what happened to me,” she recalled.
She pushed her pain and rage further down, softening their edges with drugs. On a winter day in early 2017, it all exploded.
Scott was working as a property manager in Marblehead, cutting burlap to protect hedges for the winter, when she got a call from an ex-boyfriend’s mother. The woman, a widow undergoing cancer treatments, asked if Scott could help out for a few days.
It was at the mother’s house in Waldo, Maine, that Scott got into an argument with Edwin Littlefield, an Army veteran and a friend of Scott’s ex who also had been helping out around the house.
Scott would later testify that Littlefield was looking for prescription drugs; he got angry at her and yelled “I’m going to kill you.” The prosecutor told the jury that Littlefield was walking away when Scott attacked him, fueled by the vodka she’d been drinking earlier that day.
Scott testified that Littlefield started choking her. That’s when she remembered the knife in her pocket. She still wishes she hadn’t.
It took the jury two and half hours to find her guilty of manslaughter. Scott fell apart when she was led out of the courtroom, emitting a howl so loud that her mother could hear it from inside.
Littlefield’s sister Bernadette declined to talk to the Globe about what happened. “We are still grieving,” she wrote in a Facebook message. “My family will never forgive her.”
Scott doesn’t expect them to. She isn’t sure she has the right to be forgiven.
“I wear a scar on my soul,” she said. “I’m never going to be comfortable with or OK that I ended someone’s life. It doesn’t make any of what I’ve done since then worth it. ”
Randall Liberty, commissioner of the Maine Department of Corrections, knows all about the complicated pasts that haunt people.
His mother got pregnant at 14 and married an abusive alcoholic who was in and out of prison. When Liberty got his first job at a jail, in his central Maine hometown, his father was there, too, serving time.
Liberty became the warden of Maine State Prison in 2015, shortly after a Frontline documentary depicted the devastating impact of solitary confinement there. He instituted reforms and expanded on them when he was put in charge of the entire state system in 2019. Among other changes, he introduced new addiction services and organic gardening, and he started an inmate debate team. During the pandemic, he let prisoners — he and others call them residents — take remote college classes and earn money in remote jobs.
What better way for people to use the time in prison, said Liberty, who just published a book about his reforms, than to address the issues that contributed to them being there in the first place: mental health disorders, learning disabilities, substance abuse, poverty.
“Our job is not to punish,” he said. “Our job is really to provide opportunities for individuals to heal and redeem and reset.”
Over his 44-year career, Liberty has seen how education can change the trajectory of lives. More than 30 percent of people re-offend within a year of release from prison, according to research on 18 states. But among those who leave the Maine system having earned at least an associate’s degree — there are now 160 residents taking college courses, out of 2,000 — less than 1 percent are back in custody within a year, he’s found.
It took time, and maybe a global pandemic, for Scott to see the opportunities she was afforded. Prison was too terrifying at first.
One night, Scott’s roommate was watching a movie in which a woman was being strangled by her attacker. Scott started hyperventilating. Another time, she huddled under a blanket to try and escape the memories, shrieking so loudly the guards had to put the unit in lockdown.
When COVID hit, closing the facility to visitors for two years, the isolation might have deepened Scott’s anxieties. Instead, it was when she felt doors start to open.
In January of 2021, Scott started taking courses offered by The Educational Justice Institute at MIT, hunching over a single laptop with four or five other women. The first class, Nonviolence as a Way of Life, triggered more panic attacks. But the instructor, Lee Perlman, who had been arrested when he was younger and could relate to her background, encouraged Scott to talk about her experience.
On her first paper, he wrote that her work was as good as any Ivy League students’ he’d taught. Two semesters later, Perlman asked her to be his teaching assistant.
“It touched something so deep in me of finally feeling good enough,” Scott said.
Scott joined the prison debate team, which took on MIT students — and won. (They argued against Supreme Court term limits.) She planted spinach and strawberries in raised beds she helped build. She earned her paralegal certificate and joined the Opportunity Scholars, a program for incarcerated college students.
She felt safe, for maybe the first time in her life, and she felt grateful. Through some cosmic act of grace, she was handed the means to start over. She knows few people are offered such an opportunity, so she did her best.
Liberty was “consistently impressed with Victoria’s determination, work ethic, and academic discipline,” he said. “It’s people like her that break those glass ceilings that allow others to follow.”
As part of the prison system’s remote work pilot program, she landed a paid fellowship from the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. She worked as a project manager and helped write a guide for remote work in prison. Making $25 an hour, she eventually saved up nearly $30,000.
Mara Sanchez, programs director for the Alliance, recognizes how that must look to the outside world: a woman whose prison term was taxpayer-funded leaving with thousands of dollars in the bank. Punishment is ingrained in our culture.
“We have this belief about deservedness: ‘People are in there for a reason and they’re bad people,’“ said Sanchez, who also cofounded Opportunity Scholars.
But rehabilitation is crucial, because most people in prison will be coming home one day, she said. “How do we want them to come out? Do we want them to come out worse off, having been punished and traumatized for years?”
The spending on education also pays off, according to RAND Corp. research. Every $1 spent leads to a $4-$5 reduction in incarceration costs in the first three years after release, due to a lowered risk of reincarceration.
Sanchez saw how Scott, whom she calls “unbelievably smart,” changed in prison; she’s seen it with others, as well. And she knows that the investment is worth it, that people are worth the chance. “There are so many other [Victorias],” she said. “We can absolutely replicate this.”
After nearly eight years behind bars, Scott was anxious about the pitfalls awaiting her outside. Shortly before she left, Laura Rodas, director of adult education at the Maine Department of Corrections, sent her a cautionary email.
“I know that sometimes folks who are rockstars/‘success stories’ feel a lot of pressure to never mess up – as though they are not allowed to struggle because they have to pave a pathway for others to come,” Rodas wrote. “I could envision you to be one of those people who deeply cares and feels the weight of expectation.”
The morning of Scott’s release last January, after some seven years, was sunny and frigid.
Outside the Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center, Scott hugged the two still-incarcerated women who walked her out into the cold, the wind whipping through their hair. Then she sank down onto the sidewalk and sobbed.
Her father was there with her niece, Kyleigh, then 12. “We’ve waited a long time for this day,” he said. Kyleigh beamed. Then they all climbed into Ted’s Ford F-150 and drove away.
They went to IHOP for breakfast — Scott ordered an omelet topped with avocado — and then to Walmart. Scott piled groceries into a shopping cart: a three-pound roll of ground beef, a family pack of pork chops, a carton of 60 eggs. Protein was hard to come by in prison.
In the checkout line, she grew quiet and tense, then pushed her cart briskly toward the door, unable to get outside fast enough.
“One of my greatest fears about being out and about and taking up space in public places,” she said later, “is that someone will recognize me and that they’ll be afraid of me.”
That afternoon, Scott’s father pulled up in front of her new apartment in Rockland, rented and furnished with the savings from her remote job.
He had to talk the landlord into waiving a clause in the rental agreement that prohibited felons.
Scott walked in silently, taking in the freshly painted walls and unopened boxes of appliances.
The next morning, when she woke up alone, she didn’t recognize her surroundings and panicked. When she realized where she was, relieved, she cried even harder.
For the final two years of her sentence, Scott is part of Maine’s Supervised Community Confinement Program. She’s required to check in regularly with a probation officer, online and in person, and needs permission to leave the state. She isn’t allowed to drink or do drugs or have weapons.
Early on, the outside world didn’t seem real. Sometimes Scott felt like a “prison ghost,” hanging around the periphery, wondering if she was allowed to engage with other people.
But she has, haltingly. She fell in love, hard, soon after her release, until it all fell apart nearly as quickly. She also held on tight to the connections she made in prison, drawing attention to issues facing the incarcerated through speaking engagements, teaching online classes, and advocating to expand digital access in prison.
A month after her release, in February 2025, Scott spoke at the Maine State House, telling her story to a room full of legislators.
“I was paralyzed with no idea how to find my way out of the darkness that I felt myself in,” Scott told them. She spoke about her old life, and how prison, of all places, was where she found opportunities to become a better person.
“It’s funny how that when the walls closed in around me,” she said, “suddenly everything expanded.”
Two formerly incarcerated men were also there to testify about prison reform. They’d brought a scratched, peeling prison door with them, a door one of them actually served time behind. They haul it around the country — to Fenway Park, the Supreme Court, the Statue of Liberty — to spark conversations about incarceration.
One of the men, Brandon Brown, was the first person in the Maine prison system to earn a graduate degree, in 2020, while incarcerated for attempted murder.
Brown, now a PhD candidate working for the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, tried to convince the legislators how prison can change people for the better, how important second chances are for someone like him. Like Scott.
“There is wisdom in being somebody who has committed a horrible wrong and has reconciled with that wrong,” Brown said. His mission is to make sure “other people don’t make my mistake.”
In early December, Scott got her first look at the MIT campus, where she was helping Perlman run a summit on prison education.
Walking together toward his office, Scott marveled at the sights along the way: Frank Gehry’s eye-popping Stata building, a vending machine full of electronics, the famous Infinite Corridor hallway that seemed to go on forever.
Readjusting to the outside world takes time, said Perlman, who has been teaching incarcerated students for decades. Obstacles arrive like some kind of parade. Even those people who thrive inside can fall apart when they get out, he said, especially when trauma and addiction are involved.
Scott started going to trauma therapy and is taking classes at Colby College. She’s applied for criminal justice jobs. And she fell head over heels in love again, and recently got engaged.
Her father has seen her change. “If she had been acquitted back then,” he said, “I don’t know if that would have been enough of an upset to change her trajectory.”
Scott has had her share of struggles in the months since she was released. Flying to speak at conferences triggered panic attacks at first; she had only been on a plane once before. She’s been taking driving lessons, and was terrified when she was pulled over by the police — it turned out she was going too slowly.
None of it has been easy. Scott left prison with plans to apply for graduate school but hasn’t yet filled out the paperwork. And after more than a year of driving practice, she still doesn’t feel ready to take the test for her license.
It’s too much, too soon, is how she describes it. Perlman, who has been encouraging her to apply to MIT, has seen enough to know that failure, or at least the fear of it, always looms.
When Scott thinks about her future these days, she wants it to be purposeful. She wants it to be positive. Because the past — what she did to Littlefield — is always there, too.
“Nothing that I ever do will offset that,” she said. “The least I could do is do my best to make everything that occurred mean something.”
Scott has evolved from a girl who dropped out of school and numbed herself with drugs to a woman giving keynote speeches and trying to influence legislation for the better.
When she was in prison, she told her parents how unprotected she felt from violence and predatory people when she was growing up, how she felt she deserved the abuse she suffered. She told them she forgave them. She knew they did their best with what they had.
And then she said something she doesn’t dare ask of herself.
“I hope,” she told her parents, “that you can forgive me too.”
Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.