In the fall of 1999, Tanzerious was enrolled as a freshman at Northeastern University, receiving a 5-year tuition grant through Northeastern's "Ticket to Success" scholarship program. An article profiling his freshman year summed up his hectic schedule that fall: up early to help get his son ready for daycare, then catching a bus from Dorchester, to Northeastern University where he took classes all morning. He then worked for several hours in the afternoon, would spend evenings caring for his son, followed by late-night study sessions at the Snell Library. He also spent one weekend a month receiving training in accounting and as a part of his scholarship provided tutoring mentorship twice a week for high school students. By the spring of his freshman year, he had been accepted into the Carpenter’s Apprenticeship Program with Local 67, and he was waiting for the results of his fireman exam. His life was abruptly interrupted when he was arrested and charged with a murder he did not commit, and sentenced to life without parole.

 

Tanzerious currently works full-time as a Peer Support Specialist. He serves as the Senior Facilitator to the Alternative to Violence Project, as Chairman of Mending Souls (a peer support recovery group), as Liaison of both the Prison Yoga Project and also the Read to Me Father’s Literacy Program and Parenting Group for Incarcerated Fathers. He is an Inner Circle Keeper for restorative justice processes to address conflict among prisoners and to bring together people who are currently incarcerated with community members from outside the wall; some of whom have experienced violent harm and some of whom have inflicted violent harm. Tanzerious was selected to represent OCC as a part of the Massachusetts Commission of Legislators to speak on racial inequities within the prison industrial complex. He has organized Black studies and cultural programming, and has led campaigns to improve visiting conditions within prisons, and is involved in state and nation-wide efforts to raise the juvenile age to twenty-one years old. Tanzerious is the founder and lead organizer of YESTERDAY’S FUTURE. In the more than twenty years since he's served as a leader while incarcerated, Tanzerious has worked alongside his co-defendant to overturn their conviction and inhumane sentence, and free themselves.