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This story is published in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education. Subscribe to College Inside, an Open Campus newsletter on the future of postsecondary education in prison.
On the first day of class, professor Reiko Hillyer writes a quote from French philosopher Michel Foucault on the board: Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
The students in the room have a lot to say about that topic. The class includes undergraduates from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and incarcerated students—they’re meeting inside Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum-security prison, for a course on the history of crime and punishment in the United States. It’s part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an international organization that facilitates college courses taught inside prisons, with half the seats filled by incarcerated students and half by students from outside.
Hillyer, a historian at Lewis & Clark, has been teaching it since 2012 and wrote about the experience in the 2024 book A Wall Is Just a Wall, published by Duke University Press. A documentary about the class, Classroom 4, directed by her childhood friend Eden Wurmfeld, is now streaming on PBS. I spoke with Hillyer about what the Inside-Out model makes possible and what her incarcerated students said when they saw the film. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You open the class with a quote. What does that discussion reveal about what the Inside-Out model can do?
It’s the purest demonstration of what it means to bring together subjective lived experience and academic knowledge. Outside students from a liberal arts college are practiced in abstract analytical thinking—how institutions are made, what purpose they serve, for whom. Inside students have the wisdom of their own lives. In that........