The qualities that get people into prison may not be so different from the ones that get them into college. Illustration by Anna Parini

The first day of his first semester at the University of California, Berkeley, Danny Murillo walked into the Cesar Chavez building and saw a white man with tattoos on his arms. Something about the man felt familiar. He could tell from the tattoos that the man was, like him, from Los Angeles, and he was around his own age, mid-thirties, but it was something else that he recognized. He went up to the man and said, “Damn, I feel old around all these youngsters.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I haven’t been in school for a long time.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I was on vacation.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I was in the Pelican Bay SHU.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.”

The Pelican Bay SHU—Security Housing Unit—is where California sends some of its most recalcitrant inmates. Both Murillo and the white man, Steven Czifra, had spent much of their lives in prison, including many years in solitary confinement, but by the time they met they were pretty sure they were never going back. Neither had finished high school—Czifra got sent to juvenile hall at twelve—but now they were undergraduates at U.C. Berkeley. They knew that although most people who had lived lives like theirs were still in prison, many were capable—given the right advice, incentives, and money—of making it to college and leaving prison forever. They started talking, and during the next few months they formed a plan to get those people out.

It was not such a long shot as it sounded, because the qualities that had got the two of them into the SHU were not so different from the ones that had got them into Berkeley. “I’ve always been somebody who went out and got what I wanted,” Murillo says. “Fifteen years old, I was selling crack cocaine and making close to fifteen hundred dollars an ounce. I was a very resourceful individual.” But what switch—what new thought, or new chance—had deflected Murillo and Czifra from one track to the other? The trick was to go back over their lives and figure out how they’d done it.

Murillo grew up in Norwalk, in southeast L.A. His older brother and sister were born in Mexico, but he was born in the United States, in 1979. For a while, his parents were living in Tijuana and his father had a permit to cross over the border and work in construction, and then they moved permanently. When he was growing up, his father beat his mother, and there was a lot of shooting in the neighborhood. The first time he was put in handcuffs, he was eight—he was carrying three spray cans, and a cop assumed that he had stolen them. He was determined to avoid gangs, because he was scared of getting shot, but then everyone he knew was doing it, it looked like it was just part of growing up, so he joined a gang at thirteen.

Not long afterward, he started selling crack. He liked getting high, but he liked money more than drugs. His father had a maniacal work ethic, and Murillo was the same way. He found someone in South Central who would sell him fifty-dollar rocks that he could sell for a hundred in Norwalk, and he plowed the profits back into the business. The first day of tenth grade, he got kicked out of school for fighting, and he never went back. By the time he was fifteen, he was making six thousand dollars a week. But then he was arrested for kidnapping, carjacking, and robbing a drug dealer. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to fifteen years. As a validated gang member, he was put in solitary confinement at High Desert State Prison, in Susanville, and ended up in the SHU at Pelican Bay. He was in solitary for five years, from 2005 to 2010.

Steven Czifra and his son. Czifra helped found a campus organization called the Underground Scholars Initiative, which supports current and prospective students who have been incarcerated. Photograph by Alessandra Sanguinetti / Magnum for The New Yorker

When he was still in juvenile hall, a friend who was in prison elsewhere sent him the “Mexica Handbook”—a tiny book, the size of a cell phone, about the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and the colonial plantations that had conscripted and subdued the native populations. Murillo began to understand that his people had a history, and he read that the Mayans were not primitives: they had astrologers and architects and high priests. After he read the “Mexica Handbook,” he decided to read whatever he could get his hands on. At first, he read the kind of genre fiction that was available in the SHU: Dean Koontz, James Patterson, Dan Brown. But one day when he was out in the yard—in solitary, the “yard” was a small concrete enclosure that had high walls but was open to the sky—a man on the other side of a wall told him that he should stop reading crap and get some good books from the prison library. After that, Murillo had many conversations with the man about books, although he never saw his face.

The man told him to start with Voltaire’s “Candide.” Murillo read it, and was amazed at how resonant it was—its depiction of the slave sounded very similar to what he’d heard about sweatshops. He came across a list of American novels with social-justice themes, and he read “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Grapes of Wrath.” He read “Don Quixote” and “Les Misérables.” He read about the Zapatistas, and about how the Spanish had pillaged Latin America.

When he first got to Pelican Bay, he became enthralled by a book called “The 48 Laws of Power”: “I was thinking, Yo, I’m gonna be a fucking smart-ass criminal. When I go home, I’m gonna set up this drug empire and I’m gonna fucking make bank.” But, as he read more deeply in the book, he began to hate it. He still wanted power, but he no longer wanted to get it by stomping on another guy’s neck. He read about Zen Buddhism, and that made him feel that he didn’t need money anymore. And, as he started reading more about the history of Latin America, he stopped believing that his life was a random card dealt to him by fate: he started to think about politics, and about how the way his life had unfolded was partly the consequence of systematic inequality.

He decided that he wanted to get out of prison and stay out. He had a big advantage—he wasn’t an addict—but he needed credentials to balance out his criminal record, so while still in prison he got his G.E.D. and started taking courses by mail. He had always had trouble with math, but he found an inmate on the same pod who agreed to tutor him: they worked for two hours after dinner nearly every day for nine months, yelling to each other back and forth from their cells. Though the man was the only white man on the tier—everyone else was Latino—the Latinos took care of him, they gave him soap or deodorant or coffee, because they knew he didn’t have family sending him any money from the outside, as most of them did.