(rain falling)
- [Officer] 19 and 29.
- I've spent more time in prison
than I did in the free world.
I came to jail when I was 17 years old.
So, it's like freedom, it's hard to visualize for me.
- I've been incarcerated for thirteen years
and from my experience, I can tell you,
prison is here to punish us.
It's here to warehouse us,
but it's not about rehabilitating.
It's not about creating productive beings.
It just isn't.
- This is my cell.
This is where I rest my head.
You have my sink,
my window.
You see, I don't have much of a view
of much out there.
(murmurs)
- [Officer] To the armory.
All inmates to the armory.
(ominous music)
- We're gonna start course work Monday morning.
This is a full-time, and long-term, and total commitment.
When that door closes, you're at Bard College.
(bell ringing)
- Several of you, have in the past, referenced things
like W.E.B. Du Bois Double Consciousness, right?
- A lot of the stuff I was reading,
I couldn't understand what it was.
You know, it would take me
two, three hours just to get past two pages.
- Anything, everything you believe,
or was taught to believe, none of that matters.
It's like all that is bull (bleep).
Now, I want you to read with like a fresh slate.
- So what else I have, you know?
So u1, a1, u2, a2, so u3, a3, and plus amount, u4 a4.
Okay?
- So you're selecting the terms.
- Mary Shelley with Frankenstein.
She kind of put a critique on women
and how they were like downcast, but Jane Austen
is somewhat given women some kind of power.
- College, it helps us become civic beings.
It helps us understand that we have
an interest in our community.
That our community is apart of us and we are a part of it.
- Now, just thinking about this quote from "A Song Myself."
I am vast.
I contain multitudes.
The individual is not just this set being.
His relationship to everyone else and everything else
in the world constitutes this oneness.
What I do today, may affect what someone
is capable of doing tomorrow, or vice versa.
- It causes you to look at the United States differently.
It causes you to look at politics differently.
- [Announcer] Attention, all inmates.
Line up on the white line
by the rec room for the count.
- It is balancing two identities.
Right?
You're a prisoner, and you're a student.
I don't want to say all of the officers,
and maybe not majority of them,
but quite a few of them,
don't see me as a student.
I'm a prisoner.
- We have to remember that there are a lot of people
who believe that what we do is wrong,
but over the course of years
that we have been doing this work,
that the politics have changed
at the local, state, and federal level.
- This is a once in lifetime,
once in a lifetime opportunity for me.
I don't care what you do, take the computers,
take the library, take everything.
- [Prisoner] They did.
As long as I have my books.
Exactly, they've done it before,
and what did you guys do?
- We wrote papers by hand.
- Harvard, tell me this.
How do you reduce class size in the face
of the current influx of undocumented children
in districts already suffering the effects
of overcrowded classrooms?
- So, we were split as a judging panel,
and the 2-1 split was in favor of Bard.
(crowd clapping)
- Because we're in prison, we're not animals.
These green color, they don't define who we are.
You know what defines us is our minds and our hearts.
That we have moralities, even in prison.
We have intelligent men, even in prison.
(foreign language)
- A friend of my forced me into the program.
It's probably the kindest, most loving thing,
anyone has ever done for me,
was force me to apply to this program.
- I came to prison when I was sixteen.
Right, I can't undo the twenty some odd years
that I've spent in here.
I would never, for the life of me,
want to see another sixteen year old kid
throw his life away.
- They made horrible decisions that ruined,
not only their lives, but multiple people's lives,
but a lot of them are trying to make up for it
as best that they can,
and they're trying to pay back to society.
- I'm going home.
(murmurs)
(calm music)
I want my life to be a testament
to the person's life I took.
(calm music)
That requires working to the best of my ability,
in making my life itself a symbolic, memorial to his.
That's the only way I will be able to redeem myself.
In my eyes, in my family's eyes, in society's eyes.
That's the only way.
(crying)
- I'm so happy.
(calm music)
- It changes your whole outlook on the world, period.
You know, knowing that this is not the end for you.
(buzzing sound) (calm music)