“Attended Some College”: How My PSR Erased My Story
- Andrew Bassaner
- Jan 1
- 14 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
How a Single Line Rewrote My Education, Character, and Sentence
Long before I ever saw my name typed in a Pre-Sentence Report, long before my life was reduced to bullet points and sterile paragraphs written by someone who met me once, my trajectory had already been bent—quietly, bureaucratically, and without my consent.
The PSR would later pretend my story began when I started making “choices.”
That’s convenient.
But my story actually began when adults made choices about me.
The First Decision That Wasn’t Mine
I don’t remember the surgeries on my eyes. I was two years old. What I remember instead is the aftermath: thick heavy glasses sitting crooked on a small face, the world always slightly distorted, always something I had to work a little harder to see clearly.
By the time I started first grade, the glasses were already part of me. They weren’t remarkable to me, but they were remarkable to adults. Especially the adults at the Catholic school I attended.
Catholic schools like to talk about discipline, rigor, and tradition. What they rarely talk about is how quickly tradition turns into assumption.
The assumption, in my case, was simple:This kid won’t read properly.
No testing. No extended observation. No patience.
Just a judgment call.
I was held back in first grade.
Not because I couldn’t keep up.Not because I struggled academically.Because my eyesight didn’t match their expectations.
That one decision—made quietly, confidently, and without malice—set my timeline back a year. And once you fall off the “normal” timeline, everything you do afterward is viewed through suspicion. Catch up too fast, and you’re “skipping.” Fall behind again, and you’re “failing.”
The PSR would never explain this. It would simply note that my educational path was “irregular.”
Irregular is a polite word for externally altered.
Gifted — and Already Out of Place
A few years later, the story flipped.
Testing showed I wasn’t just keeping up—I was far ahead. By fifth grade, I tested at levels that suggested I could skip directly into high school, even college-level coursework.
That sounds impressive when written in a report.
It feels different when you’re the kid living it.
Being “gifted” doesn’t mean you feel powerful. It means you feel out of place in a different way.
You answer questions too quickly.
You notice patterns other kids don’t.
You get bored and restless and then punished for it.
Adults see potential. Other kids see a target.
I began attending private school and administrators proposed aggressive academic acceleration. My mother declined—not out of concern for my performance, but out of concern for the social and developmental consequences of advancing too quickly. She wasn’t worried about academics. She was worried about everything else. Social isolation. Pressure. Bullying.
So my mother made a compromise with the school. Instead of pushing me several years ahead, they would let me skip one grade—moving me from what was essentially fifth-and-a-half grade into sixth-and-a-half.
In reality, it wasn’t a leap forward. It was a correction.
A partial undoing of the year I had lost because someone decided bad eyesight equaled limited ability.
But here’s where the PSR would later begin its quiet magic trick.
It would list this as: “Skipped grades.”
No explanation.
No context.
No mention of why I was behind in the first place.
Just a data point.
And once a data point exists, it can be interpreted however the reader wants.
The Part Where School Stops Being Safe
By middle school, the bullying wasn’t subtle anymore.
It wasn’t whispered insults or passive exclusion or classmates hiding my glasses while playing “keep away." It was physical. It was public. It was humiliating in the way only adolescent cruelty can be. It was brutal.
Eighth grade was the breaking point.
Graduation practice should have been ceremonial—lines of students, folding chairs scraping against gym floors, teachers barking instructions through microphones that screeched with feedback.
Instead, it became the moment I learned something important about institutions:
They love celebrating success.They hate confronting failure.
After graduation practice, I was jumped by a group of other students.
No poetic phrasing helps that sentence.
There’s no metaphor that makes it cleaner. It was violence, plain and simple.
I never attended my eighth-grade graduation.
Not because I didn’t care. Because school had become a place where celebration and danger occupied the same hallway.
The PSR would later omit this entirely.
Because violence that happens to you doesn’t fit neatly into narratives about who you are.
Ninth Grade — The Exit That Gets Misunderstood
By ninth grade, nothing had improved. If anything, the bullying had calcified. It wasn’t episodic anymore. It was structural.
I dropped out.
That sentence looks terrible in a PSR.
It didn’t just note that I dropped out of ninth grade. It went further—much further—than necessary to make its point.
The PSR explicitly listed my ninth-grade report card, class by class, line by line:
English: F
Algebra: F
Science: F
Social Studies: F
Physical Education: F
Every course I attended during that brief, unfinished year was cataloged individually, each failure spelled out in isolation.
There was no explanation that I left school early in the year.
No acknowledgment that these grades reflected withdrawal, not academic incapacity.
No context that the Fs were a function of absence, not effort.
The PSR didn’t say, “He dropped out mid-year.”
It didn’t say, “Grades reflect non-attendance after withdrawal.”
Instead, it allowed the raw optics to speak for themselves.
A page of Fs does something psychologically powerful in a sentencing document.
It doesn’t just describe an outcome—it implies a character flaw.
It suggests inability, irresponsibility, disregard.
It quietly reinforces the narrative already being constructed: that this was someone who didn’t finish, didn’t apply himself, didn’t follow through.
By listing every class individually—by turning a partial ninth-grade transcript into a full-page exhibit—the PSR transformed a survival decision into evidence of deficiency.
It wasn’t informational.
It was illustrative.
And once those Fs were on the page, they didn’t need explanation. They did exactly what they were meant to do.
What the PSR wouldn’t say is this:
I dropped out with my father’s permission.
This wasn’t a teenage tantrum.
It was a family decision made under pressure.
It was an adult recognizing that forcing a kid to endure constant bullying and physical harm in the name of “normalcy” wasn’t noble—it was negligent
I was around sixteen.
And I didn’t sit at home.
I worked.
I installed car stereos and alarms. I learned how to talk to customers, how to solve problems, how to take responsibility when something didn’t work the first time. I learned that money came from competence, not from compliance.
None of this would matter later.
Because the PSR would freeze this moment into a single phrase:
“Dropped out of high school.”
Everything else—the context, the violence, the work—would vanish.
The Knock on the Door
The moment that changed my direction didn’t feel dramatic at the time.
A friend knocked on my door one afternoon. He was on his way to GED classes and needed pencils.
That’s it.
No motivational speech.
No epiphany soundtrack.
Just a knock, a casual question, and the quiet realization that someone else was moving forward.
I decided to go with him.
I didn’t just pass the GED. I scored in the top 5% nationwide.
That statistic would also be omitted in the PSR.
Because once the probation officer decided my story was about shortcuts, even excellence became suspect. The GED, instead of being evidence that I could perform at a high academic level, was framed as an “alternative.”
A softer path.
An implication—not stated outright, but suggested.
The Professor Who Saw What the File Wouldn’t
Junior college changed something fundamental.
For the first time in years, an authority figure saw me clearly.
My chemistry professor didn’t just see a student. He saw curiosity. Discipline. Capacity. Enough, at least, to put his reputation on the line.
He referred me for a laboratory position at the United States Department of Agriculture.
This wasn’t a casual referral. I was competing with candidates from elite universities. Ivy League résumés. Clean timelines. The kind of students PSRs love.
I had a GED.
I got the job.
And the PSR would later omit this entire employment history.
Becoming Dangerous to the Narrative
The United States Department of Agriculture job was never supposed to be mine.
On paper, I didn’t belong in the room.
That’s not insecurity talking—that’s just how institutional filters work. The federal government loves credentials, symmetry, predictability. Ivy League names glide through HR software like VIP passes. GEDs don’t.
And yet, there I was, walking into a USDA facility knowing exactly what I was up against.
The Interview They Never Expected
The interview wasn’t a quick formality. It was a slow, probing, almost theatrical process.
Dr. J. Fox Jr. met me in the front lobby of the Eastern Regional Research Center in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, where the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Division was housed. The building was quiet and functional, a working federal research facility rather than an academic setting, and it was immediately clear that this was a professional laboratory environment with real expectations and responsibilities.
Dr. Fox was an eccentric man impossible to forget. A bolo tie. A white Fu Manchu beard. Mostly bald, portly, with the faintly amused expression of someone who had seen every version of “brilliant” walk through his office and grow bored of it. He looked like a cross between a professor and a real-life version of Colonel Sanders, and he carried himself like someone who enjoyed testing people in ways résumés couldn’t prepare them for.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me show you around.”
We toured the building and all of the relevant laboratories on the second and third floors. Skunk-works, black countertops and stainless steel benches. Chemical smells that never fully leave your nose. Equipment humming quietly in the background.
He asked questions—not just about science, but about me.
How I learned. Why I took the path I did. What interested me.
I didn’t pretend to be something I wasn’t.
I didn’t posture.
I didn’t perform brilliance.
I listened.
At the end of the tour, we sat in his office. Two framed portraits hung behind his desk.
He leaned back in his chair, hands folded.
“You know,” he said, pointing backward toward the portraits, “I’ve interviewed a lot of very bright kids. Some of the smartest students from the so-called best schools in the country. I always ask them if they can identify these two people. Some get one … Nobody ever gets both.”
I looked at the portraits.
"Bob Vila ... Home improvement guy,” I said, pointing to the first. "Lord Baden-Powell ... the founder of the Boy Scouts,” pointing to the second.
He smiled. “You’re hired.”
Later—after I’d been working there for a while—he told me why.
It wasn’t the portraits.
It was that I didn’t walk in acting like I already knew everything.
He told me most of the Ivy League candidates were unbearable. Brilliant, yes—but rigid. Certain. Untouchable. They didn’t want to be taught. They wanted to be confirmed.
“You,” he said, “were teachable.”
That word never appears in a PSR.
The Crime of Being Non-Traditional
I worked at the USDA while continuing school. Real lab work. Real responsibility. The kind of environment where mistakes matter.
At the same time, I worked other jobs. Including a kiosk job in the mall—one of those small islands of retail where you’re alone, unmonitored, responsible for everything.
I chose that job deliberately.
Mall stores were filled with busywork—refolding clothes that were already folded, rearranging racks to look productive. At the kiosk, if there were no customers, no one hovered. No one invented tasks. I could pull out flashcards. Study. Learn.
It was efficient. Strategic.
The PSR would later read this as fragmentation.
Multiple jobs. Multiple schools. No clean line.
But what it really was: survival logistics.
At the time, Beaver College had a stated policy against admitting students without a four-year high school diploma. A friend of mine who was already attending the school encouraged me to apply anyway and she managed to secure a face-to-face meeting with the dean.
As with my interview at the United States Department of Agriculture, that in-person meeting proved critical. I interviewed well, and the conversation allowed the administration to assess me directly rather than relying solely on a paper record that did not fully reflect my abilities or trajectory.
Despite the GED policy, I was granted conditional acceptance, which I satisfied through my coursework and placement scores, demonstrating that I could perform at the required academic level.
I would later be accepted to the London School of Economics through the study-abroad-program at Beaver College, further reinforcing that when evaluated within a traditional academic framework—and based on performance rather than labels—I met the standards of highly selective institutions.
That detail disappears entirely in the PSR.
Because once a narrative is chosen, contradictory evidence becomes inconvenient.
Almost There — And Then Life Intervened
By the time I reached my senior year, I had done the work.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Credits completed.
Coursework finished.
Dual major in psychology and political science.
Nearly 160 credits—far more than required.
And then my father got sick.
Terminally sick.
The kind of illness that doesn’t politely wait for your calendar to clear.
The kind that consumes every mental resource you have.
The kind that turns time into something you count obsessively and never have enough of.
I was present. I showed up. I did what sons do when time is running out.
The senior thesis—the final paper—didn’t get finished.
I walked at graduation.
Turned the tassel.
Stood in line like everyone else.
But the degree wasn’t conferred.
And this is where the PSR performs its most damaging sleight of hand.
It doesn’t say: “Completed all coursework; thesis unfinished due to father’s terminal illness.”
It says: “Attended Some College”
Three words.
Three words that erase grief, responsibility, caregiving, and context.
Three words that complete the pattern the PSR wants the judge to see.
Weaponizing the Timeline
This is how PSRs work when they want to reduce you.
They don’t lie outright. They compress.
Held back → skipped → dropped out → GED → some college.
When written like that, it sounds like avoidance.
When lived, it was adaptation.
But judges don’t live your life. They read a file.
And once the file frames you as someone who “doesn’t finish,” everything else starts to look intentional—even when it wasn’t.
The PSR had now built its case.
Not with accusations.
With implication.
When a Life Becomes a Liability
By the time my Pre-Sentence Report was finished, my life had been reduced to something that looked orderly.
Chronological. Professional. Neutral.
That’s the danger.
A PSR doesn’t read like an accusation. It reads like a résumé written by someone who doesn’t like you—but knows better than to say that out loud. Every sentence is technically true. Every sentence is also incomplete in a way that matters.
And incompleteness is where the weaponization happens.
The Illusion of Objectivity
The probation officer met me once.
Once.
A finite window of time in which they were supposed to assess a human being whose life had unfolded over decades—across family systems, schools, workplaces, crises, grief, and survival decisions.
They weren’t hostile. That’s important to say. They weren’t cruel. They didn’t raise their voice or try to intimidate me.
They were calm. Polite. Professional.
Which made it worse.
Because calm professionalism is how narratives slip through unquestioned. It creates the illusion of objectivity.
When a PSR says something calmly, judges assume it’s true in the way that matters.
And the PSR said, in effect:
This is a person who does not follow through.
Not explicitly. Never explicitly.
But the pattern was there, stitched together with administrative precision.
How Meaning Is Removed Without Deleting Facts
The PSR didn’t say I was lazy.
It didn’t say I was irresponsible.
It didn’t say I lacked discipline.
It didn’t have to.
Instead, it listed:
Held back early in school
Skipped grades
Dropped out of high school (failed every class)
Obtained GED
Some college
Each item alone is neutral.
Together, they form a character sketch.
And once that sketch exists, every other part of your life gets interpreted through it.
Entrepreneurship becomes instability.Adaptability becomes inconsistency.Resilience becomes manipulation.
This is the quiet violence of bureaucratic storytelling.
Sentencing Is Not Just About Crime
People think sentencing is about the offense.
It isn’t.
Sentencing is about who the court thinks you are.
The offense establishes exposure. The PSR establishes identity.
Judges are human.
They don’t just sentence statutes—they sentence stories.
They sentence the person they believe is standing in front of them.
And by the time I stood there, the person in the file was not the person who lived my life.
The file didn’t know about eye surgeries at two years old.
It didn’t know about being held back because adults assumed disability where there was none.
It didn’t know about a mother trying to balance acceleration with safety.
It didn’t know about being jumped after eighth-grade graduation practice.
It didn’t know about leaving ninth grade because school had become physically unsafe.
It didn’t know about installing car stereos to survive.
It didn’t know about a friend knocking on my door asking for pencils.
It didn’t know what it means to score in the top 5% nationally after being told, implicitly and explicitly, that you don’t belong.
It didn’t know about working two jobs through college because no one was subsidizing the struggle.
It didn’t know about walking into a USDA interview against Ivy League candidates and winning—not because of pedigree, but because of humility and teachability.
It didn’t know about sitting with a dying father while a senior thesis sat unfinished—not because of indifference, but because time had suddenly become finite.
The file didn’t know any of that.
And more importantly—it didn’t care.
The Moment You Realize the Story Has Been Set
There is a specific moment every defendant experiences, though few can name it. It’s the moment you realize the room has already decided who you are.
Not in anger.
Not in hostility.
In assumption.
You can feel it in the way questions are framed. In what’s clarified—and what isn’t. In which explanations are accepted and which are politely acknowledged and then ignored.
I understood then that I wasn’t being sentenced solely for what I had done.
I was being sentenced for what the system believed I represented.
A person who “cuts corners.”
A person who “doesn’t finish.”
A person who “navigates around structure instead of through it.”
None of those labels were said aloud.
They were simply… present.
Why PSRs Are More Dangerous Than People Realize
Most defendants focus all their energy on the charge.
They obsess over statutes, guidelines, enhancements, numbers.
They treat the PSR like background noise.
That’s a mistake.
The PSR is the document that teaches the judge how to feel about you.
It’s where empathy is either created—or quietly blocked.
And once empathy is blocked, severity feels justified.
Because punishment doesn’t feel cruel when the person receiving it is framed as fundamentally flawed.
The Long Shadow After Sentencing
The PSR doesn’t stop mattering after the gavel comes down.
It follows you.
It shapes:
Bureau of Prisons classification
Program eligibility
Reentry decisions
How officers view you
How institutions interpret your behavior
Whether you sleep on the top or bottom bunk
It becomes a permanent lens.
And if that lens was ground down incorrectly at the beginning—if context was stripped, if survival was mistaken for strategy—you spend years paying for that misunderstanding.
Why This Story Matters Beyond Me
I tell this story not because it’s unique.
I tell it because it’s common.
The federal system is filled with people whose lives were non-linear for reasons that had nothing to do with moral failure—and everything to do with circumstance.
But the system rewards linearity. Predictability. Compliance.
Anything else is framed as risk.
And the PSR is the tool that does that framing.
Reclaiming the Narrative
The most dangerous thing you can do in federal court is assume the system will “figure it out.”
It won’t.
If you don’t explain your story fully, someone else will explain it for you—and they will explain it in a way that serves efficiency, not truth.
The PSR is not your biography.
It is a prosecution-adjacent document that pretends neutrality while shaping outcome.
Understanding that is not paranoia.
It’s literacy.
And once you learn how the story is built—how meaning is removed, how context is erased, how chronology becomes character—you can finally see the system clearly.
That clarity doesn’t erase consequences.
But it does explain them.
And sometimes, understanding why something happened is the only justice that’s left.
Next Steps
This is also where working with a federal prison advisor can help bridge the gap between legal theory and real-world consequences.
→ read federal prison advisor
If you’re still trying to understand what’s ahead, these guides go deeper into the parts of the federal process that most people misunderstand:
The Pre-Sentence Investigation Report (PSR)
The PSR quietly shapes sentencing outcomes, prison designation, and programming. This guide explains why it matters and how defendants get hurt by treating it casually.
What to Expect at Federal Sentencing
Sentencing often feels predetermined because most of the decisions are made earlier. This guide explains what actually happens on sentencing day and why preparation matters more than persuasion.
My Story — Why I Chose to Fight
For personal context, this piece explains how I navigated the federal system myself and what that experience taught me about pressure, preparation, and decision-making.
If you want one-on-one guidance based on your specific situation, you can
