At 41 years old, Mary McCrary is starting over. After spending three years in prison, she's turning her life around by studying at one of the country's most prestigious Ivy League institutions: Princeton University in New Jersey .
"Some days, I cannot believe I'm here," the mom of three tells Inside Edition Digital.
Her childhood growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee , was unsettling. "Had some childhood trauma, that I went through and got addicted to drugs at a very early age," McCrary says without wanting to elaborate more on what happened to her when she was kid. At 16, she got pregnant and married. By 17, she had two baby boys. A third child, a girl, was born six years later.
"My only goal in life at the time was just survive and make sure my kids were fed. I did that with a drug addiction," she says. "You don't want to remember this stuff. Addiction leads to a terrible, terrible path and not dealing with the trauma that I went through – that's all you want to do is just numb those feelings."
In 2013, she was charged with aggravated burglary. Her grandmother had just died and her mom and sister moved into her grandmother's house. "I broke a window to make it look like somebody broke in the house and took a laptop," she says.
She says her mom called the police to report it.
"Looking back, I probably would've been dead if she didn't," she says. "Sometimes tough love is what we need."
In 2017, she was charged with a DUI, which violated the conditions of her parole from the aggravated burglary charge, and as a result she was sentenced to six years in prison.
"It was absolutely terrifying," she says. "Being alone with no purpose, feeling useless, worthless, and hopeless. And just you're literally stuck in this little box by yourself, especially when you first get there. Then you eventually get to where there's two people in a cell, but it's very lonely."
She found solace six months later. "I decided I didn't want to keep living like that," she says of getting sober. She found comfort through time spent at the chapel and she also signed up for a class about sexual trauma through the organization Shelter from the Storm. "I went through sort of the healing process where I could deal with things and overcome things," she says.
That class led her to take coding classes in prison and as a result in she learned JavaScript and how to code.
"I had some kind of goal and a purpose. That actually makes you feel like a human because you're doing something and you're going to accomplish something," she says.
She started taking classes at Nashville State Community College to earn an associate's degree in business.By the time she was released three years early in December 2023, she completed a whole semester.
McCrary got a job working at a cabinet-making company in January. And with the help of the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative, Tennessee Prison Outreach Ministry and Persevere,she applied to an internship at Princeton, and she got it.
The nine-week program started in June and includes courses on computational biology and psychology. As she takes courses from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, McCrary is living on campus in a dorm room. "It's an experience I feel like everybody should have at least once. And this is my first time experiencing, because I had children young, so I didn't go to college until now. There's challenges, but it's great," she says.
McCrary also recently saw the ocean for the first time and put her feet in the water.
"It's breathtaking," she says of the view from Point Pleasant Beach along the Jersey shore.
When the internship's over, she plans to continue her education and complete her associate's degree. She also has an idea for a business.It's called Mad Hatter Therapy.
"If you've ever been so stressed out and overwhelmed, you would come to Mad Hatter Therapy, take the baseball bat or golf club, whatever you have, and just let it all out," she says. "Then you'll take the stress mess, all those broken pieces into the creativity room where we're going to reconnect you back to yourself through using your childlike imagination, where you create your own masterpiece, your own unique work of art. And this gives you a tangible result with a positive outcome that no one's ever so broken that they can't be remade or restored."
She wants to create change to help other women.
"I'm so grateful, and just appreciate the second chance life has given me. And I'm just trying to make the most of it and be an example that things are possible and you can do it and just make a way for others."
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