Policy circles tend to predicate the purpose of education singularly on reducing recidivism and increasing post-release employment opportunities. According to that line of logic, then, investing time and resources in individuals who will not be released is a waste. If the purpose of education for incarcerated individuals is instead understood as something that exists beyond social and vocational utility, then prisons take on new meaning. Perhaps prison educators and policymakers would more fully consider how such spaces serve as intellectual communities that restore human dignity within an institution built on the premise of taking that dignity away. In a recently published article for the Harvard Educational Review, I argue that providing education to incarcerated individuals should not be based on a myopic conception of efficacy; instead people in prison deserve education because the collective project of learning is and should be understood as a human right. The community of learners that Lance and his classmates have built has nothing to do with whether or not they will one day be released. (The names of the inmates referenced throughout this essay are the same pseudonyms I used in the aforementioned article.)

In one of our workshops the class reads an excerpt of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel, The Namesake, a story that centers around the protagonist’s—Gogol’s—struggle to assimilate into “traditional” American culture as a first-generation Bengali immigrant. The novel, a fluid meditation on family and identity, found resonance with a group of men whose lives have, in many ways, come to be defined by the cages in which they’re kept. While Gogol’s existential struggle stems from straddling cultural bifurcations, Darryl’s stems from an effort to define himself beyond the criminal caricature the world has imposed on him. “Sometimes you get so caught up in how the rest of the world sees you,” he once remarked, “that you start to believe it.” The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular, but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth. That an American-born black man who has spent decades in prison can see himself in the tale of a first-generation, Ivy-League Bengali immigrant speaks to how art, at its best, renders borders of difference obsolete.

That morning, moved by the book’s reflections on family, Darryl, serving his 43rd year in prison, wrote an essay. He described the despair of having the small moments—the ones that so often shape the contours of an individual’s relationships with loved ones—stripped away. An excerpt reads: