The Gangster’s Scholar: Richmond’s Shanice Robinson on Loving a Man Serving Life

This story is part of The California Report Magazine’s series about resilient Californians, and what lessons they may have for the rest of us.

Shanice Robinson grew up in Richmond, where she first met her future husband, Joe “Fatter” Blacknell.

“I didn’t even like my husband growing up,” she recalled. “I thought that he was just like a very obnoxious, flamboyant person.”

Years later, while Blacknell was incarcerated and serving multiple life sentences, their lives converged again — this time bound by the shared grief over losing loved ones. Their marriage, carried across prison walls and sustained through letters and short visits, has led Robinson to question the boundaries society draws around love and redemption.

In April, Robinson released her memoir — The Gangster’s Scholar: Love Behind Bars — which details her experience and practical insight around stigmas surrounding prison culture and the critical role families play in the rehabilitation process.

An educator, author and mother, Robinson earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from San Francisco State University while raising two children and navigating unstable housing, financial strain and a long-distance marriage with an incarcerated spouse.

Today, as Senior Director of Culture and Social Justice at SF State, she teaches in university classrooms and inside correctional facilities. Her work focuses on dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline and amplifying the voices of Black students and incarcerated people — a mission shaped as much by her scholarship as by the life she leads at home.

Robinson spoke with The California Report Magazine’s Vanessa Rancaño as part of our series on resilience. Below are excerpts from their conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. For the full interview, listen to the audio linked at the top of this story.

On becoming a scholar and a mother

My mom and dad worked really hard to provide a decent life for me. My dad’s a retired police officer, my mom’s a retired teacher, but they set aside money for me to go to school.

Everything they worked really hard to prevent me from becoming a walking statistic, I became that unintentionally, unconsciously, because I was making poor life choices as a young adult, and that culminated into me having two young kids.

My mom and dad said, “It’s either you go to school and you finish or we’re gonna put you out.” When I had my kids, that gave me a sense of life purpose and a greater motivation to finish school.

On meeting her husband and confronting his experience

His dad passed away, and I learned about it through an article that popped up on my newsfeed. Once I saw it, I instantly called my mom, and then I reached out to him, and I said, “Hey, I heard about your dad — just want to offer my condolences.

I was able to go visit him, and we just stayed connected. I feel like we were bonded through grief because I also was going through losing my grandmother the year before. And I feel grief is what kind of brought us back together full circle.

I went to private school, but Joe didn’t have that opportunity. And because there was a lack of intervention from the school side, not only did he have diagnosed learning disabilities, but he had undiagnosed mental health issues.

Prison or jail, in general, doesn’t help people. I think that we need some trauma-informed, restorative approaches to support people who are struggling with PTSD, struggling with abandonment issues, trust issues, child neglect. That’s where I utilize my resilience to help him. It’s almost like having to re-raise a child because I’m teaching him things that I feel like he should have learned from his family, and that’s what sometimes makes the relationship hard.

On maintaining love while apart

Because we were friends first, it’s easy for him and I to adapt to our circumstances. If I’m on my way to work, we use that as an opportunity to talk, to joke, he’s able to video call me, and I’m able to see him three days a week.

I think what keeps us really close is we treat our marriage like any other marriage. Some people have stigmatized prison relationships, but love is love, and our marriage isn’t any less valid than someone who’s having a traditional marriage.

On visiting days, we treat it like a date. There’s board games, there’s puzzles, we can take pictures, watch movies, and we just try to humanize that experience as much as possible.

[Joe] was like, “Why don’t you record my voice and you put it in a Build-a-Bear? So when you miss me, you can just hold on to the Build-a-Bear.” I go to sleep with my bear, especially like when I’m really sad and I just need to hear his voice.

On the weight of judgment

It’s really hurtful when people don’t give me a chance to show who I am as a person outside of my husband. I’m an individual, but now that I’m married to him, I feel like I live in the shadow of his headline — I live the shadow of his life sentence.

And I feel it’s unfair to me to not be able to be who I truly am as a full person. And that’s part of who I am, being married to this man.

It’s also hard to try to be there and support him while I feel my character is being assassinated just for loving this person.

On resilience as part of the Black experience

As a Black person, we are born with a bull’s-eye on our back. We often have to code-switch and shift our identities just to coexist and adapt to what the mainstream society says we have to be.

I would say resilience to me is not about the absence of struggle, it’s having the audacity to dream beyond it.

Finding hope in the most unlikely of places, I think that that’s super important. To be able to teach within the carceral system, I utilize my lived experience that’s rooted in love, rooted in loss, but also rooted in resilience to empower other people looking for that sense of hope.

I actually got the idea to do that through my husband. He told me, “Since you love doing all this research and obviously you like helping me, why don’t you use your superpower to help people beyond me?”

On her husband’s resilience

Seeing him have so much resilience, even from where he is, [he is] not letting life get him down. He’s in a GED program and doing a lot of self-help programs. He wants to mentor children who are also system-impacted through Juvenile Hall, so they can learn from his lived experience, so that way they won’t make the same life choices that he’s made. I think it’s super cool that he is trying to use himself as a resource to say, “don’t do this.”

On how to love from behind bars

I would encourage people to focus on things that are tangible. While you can’t be Superman or Superwoman to change the circumstances of individuals, speak life into them through positive affirmations.

Write nice letters for them so they can hold it near and dear to them, so when they’re thinking of you, they can pull out that letter, they can put out that card or look at those pictures.

Me and my husband, we have matching necklaces with our pictures in a locket. And so when we’re together, he has the other half of the heart. I have his face, he has mine. We put it together, and that way, we still have a piece of each other.

Don’t give up hope, pray, because there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. There’s always new laws, there’s always organizations that are trying to help people.