To that end, the president would assemble a diverse group of criminal justice experts — including corrections and law enforcement officials, former inmates and their families, defense lawyers, judges and inmate advocates — to develop a national program to create paths for trained volunteers and professionals to work inside prisons wherever safety allows.

Let Us In must be more than “tourism within walls”; for the volunteers to be able to go inside the walls to dispense their skills and knowledge, serious consideration must be given to training and safety.

Within two years, the organization could be spun off from the government, and a nonprofit corporation would take its place. Imagine former Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama as honorary chairmen. Eventually, the program would be financed by a combination of government grants and nonprofit contributions, much like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or Americorp’s Vista program.

I’ve already witnessed the power of such programs on a smaller scale. At Green Haven and Fishkill Correctional Facilities in New York, I watched theatrical performances by incarcerated men sponsored by Rehabilitation Through the Arts. At San Quentin State Prison in California, I met with the prison newspaper’s staff and attended a finance class led by a self-taught instructor serving a life sentence. While visiting the Osborne Association’s parenting program at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, N.Y., with a group of family court judges, I witnessed incarcerated men plead for visitation privileges with their children. “When I see you men taking these programs, I know you are serious,” said one judge.

I’ve met graduates and instructors from Bard and Bennington Colleges’ degree programs in prisons. And at my organization, The Marshall Project, two members of our staff received degrees from Mercy College while in prison through the Hudson Link Program for Higher Education in Prison, which provides college education in prison.

Several years ago, I was at San Quentin to participate in a series of TEDx talks. I invited an editor friend who lived nearby. He sat next to an incarcerated man who worked on San Quentin’s magazine, and he invited my friend to help as a volunteer. For the next two years, my friend went twice a week to San Quentin to help the staff publish their magazine. “This was a life-changing experience,” he told me.

As inspiring as these programs may be, they aren’t enough to meet the monumental need. Each year, 3,000 volunteers pass through the doors of San Quentin, in densely populated and liberal Marin County, offering everything from yoga to computer training to psychotherapy classes. But in many prisons around the country, particularly those in remote locales, volunteers can be hard to come by.