Thomas E. Miles on getting a liberal education in prison:
Brightness dawned over us. Our hearts and minds — our very souls — were bathed in “all the Light” Locke wrote about. It showed, too. It showed in our faces, in our comportment, in our demeanor, in our vocabulary, in our writing. Indeed, it showed in the mirror when we looked at ourselves.
This is why the professors came. They came to shed light on us: light that allowed the discernment of the new, resurrected image of each of us, formed by each new, additional bit of us, placed just so in a mosaic that made us once more visible to others, to one another, to ourselves. We were no longer shadow people, no longer hollow, condemned specters. We became men again. That is the point, and that is why college in prison is worth the bother.
I often wonder how things might have gone for my father, a highly intelligent but self-destructive and immensely cynical man, if an opportunity like this — or, altnernatively, Christian prison ministry — had been available to him when he was imprisoned. (He was a two-time felon.)