After 17 years in prison, GCU online student helps others who feel lost reconnect

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published in the April issue of GCU Magazine, available in the purple bins on campus or digitally here.

Photos by Ralph Freso / GCU News

He presents as the stereotypical ex-convict – big, buff, bald, tattooed. But then George Nolan talks about leading a normal kid life on Long Island, going to church and playing baseball every weekend.

“If you watch a movie about America, that was my childhood,” he said.

“But I never felt any kind of connection with anyone, including my family and friends. I always felt out of place.”

He believed early on something was wrong with him. “I don’t know where it came from, but once I inherited that belief, I believed I was broken,” and he said it gave him permission to act broken.

Long before that self-reflection, long before his 17 years in prison and before becoming a marketing director and a Grand Canyon University undergraduate online student, he drank to feel better and got in bar fights.

In one of those fights, he said, his friend shot someone. As an accessory, he spent a few months in prison. His dreams of becoming a firefighter, like his father, were gone, any purpose lost. “My whole decision-making changed after that.”

After other low-level brushes with the law, he moved to Arizona, away from everyone he loved, to partake in drugs and alcohol to numb it all.

“It turned into a 3 ½-year prison sentence the first time. I went to basically a finishing school for criminals, and I am unskilled at criminal activity,” Nolan said.

Seven months after his release, he went in for another 7 ½ years. Then in 2016, before doing everything he could to try to get right – a job, reunion with a son – he returned to doing everything he could to get high, “that was my worship,” and his continued drug-selling earned a 10-year sentence.

Two years later, in one of the roughest “high-custody yards” in Arizona, it all broke for him. Nolan got in a vicious fight with an inmate, seriously hurting him.

“I walked out of there, and I am like, ‘Who the hell am I? I say I hate prison, but everything I’m doing is to stay in prison. … I was having some hard conversations with myself. I was realizing how lost I was.”

He had nightmares about the man he beat. It’s a period he now credits to God.

He began to get involved in peer support training in prison, trying to understand his past and help others with theirs.

“I can never change my story, it’s always going to be terrible, the way victims and the people I harmed feel about me," Nolan said. "I have no control over that, but my way of honoring them is by the way I act every single day.”

Nolan learned how to listen. Four years later, he came across a man in peer support. The man he nearly beat to death.

The man told him his act was a “bad call.” Nolan apologized. He asked him what he could do for him. The man wanted to get into a program for second chances.

“Let me make this right,” Nolan pleaded.

“Ten minutes later, they rolled him up to move and I told him, ‘You’re in.’”

In a class for the program, the men were asked to talk on anything positive.

“I came here,” the man said, “and I’ve had such a great experience. I got to see some of my friends, like George.”

“He called me his friend. It meant so much to me,” Nolan said.

It sparked a new purpose for Nolan. When he got out of prison in July 2024, he began working with others reentering civilian life and became marketing and outreach director for New Freedom, a Phoenix nonprofit that picks up people at the prison gates, gives them a place to stay, with classes, therapy and job training.

“I get to be a small part of somebody’s change.”

He especially likes to help men who were once in prison protective custody for drugs or sexual offenses and are at the bottom and “looked down upon.”

Nolan’s growth wasn’t over. He felt like he was finally doing it – all on his own. Then a mentor invited him to North Phoenix Baptist Church.

“I walked into that North Phoenix and man …” he said, his voice breaking, “I felt like I was home.” He gave his life to Christ – and soon after met Dr. Tim Griffin, GCU’s pastor and dean of students.

He enrolled in courses, working toward a bachelor’s degree in applied business management, expecting to finish later this year.

Griffin said Nolan has a following around the church campus. “He’s doing good work with those in the prison system and trying to help parolees find a new direction in life. It’s a very important ministry.”

This spring, he brought his story to campus.

With his grant from SAFE Project’s Collegiate Recovery Leadership Academy, Nolan visits campuses to share the difficulties prisoners face once released.

“You walk out of prison, and you got 250 bucks and a pair of socks,” he said, describing the simulation that takes them through steps of getting an ID, bus pass, and a job, while that money runs out.

“It’s a vulnerable population. We’re not known for our coping skills,” Nolan said. “… But whatever the world is saying about us is nothing compared to the way we talk to ourselves. This isn't a victim mindset. We just haven't been around people who are going to help build us up.”

They haven’t known people like George Nolan. But as he walked through the New Freedom facility, bumping fists, some were starting to know him.

Nolan said he’s happy there are prisons; he knows people personally who need to be there. But others have made bad choices, “that have struggled with their demons and come out on the other side – they should not be ostracized.”

For the first time since he was a kid, he feels connected, part of something bigger than himself. He was quick to restart his therapy, even with a house, a new truck and an engagement to marry.

He’s trying to remember gratitude for every moment in the free world.

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