Purpose is to host a viewing of an episode of the documentary "College Behind Bars" about the Bard College Prison teaching program and a dinner and discussion around it. Here is an article about this documentary:

https://time.com/5737213/ken-burns-lynn-novick-college-prison-documentary/(link is external)

The documentary follows men and women in NY prisons as they work toward completing their college degree. The producer of the documentary says that the goal was for "people to acknowledge the amount of humanity and potential that we have locked away in this country and think about the ways in which we can make a more inclusive society for us all."

Prof. Merling has been teaching inside NJ prisons for the last years and Penn is piloting its own prison teaching program at the moment, so it very timely to share with our students some of what I find are the values of such a program.