ix Introduction College inside prison creates new choices, new and alternative ways of being, that lie between the extremes of compliance and disobedience, between resistance and surrender. Sandy-haired Peter Bay sat across from me, silent and stiff, his face purged of expression. The flatness of his gaze offered no clue as to what he wanted to say or how much he felt was at stake. He was a white, working-class man in his mid-thirties who had dropped out of school in the ninth grade and had

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... leted the high-school equivalency exam in prison. He and I and the other interviewer sat face to face at the admissions interviews for the college we represented. We sat in a clinical, brightly lit classroom near the back of the hundred-acre, maximum-security prison compound. The tinny acoustics made each spoken exchange feel distant, although we sat directly across from each other on either side of a small table. Mr Bay had applied in each of the two previous years and had been rejected both times. He was in pursuit of something he wanted deeply, in an environment starved of opportunity. This was his third application in as many years, and it was not going well. Like many applicants, Mr Bay had worked his way from prison to prison across the state specifically to get himself to a location where he could apply to the college. For, although our college had built six different satellite campuses in prison, these were almost the only such places left after Congress eliminated college from America's prisons in the mid-1990s. Many men sweat heavily when writing their timed application essays, and x Introduction later, when they sit for their interview. They search, with little clue, for what they think "the college" wants to hear, and grapple with how honest to be about their ambitions, misgivings, and suspicions. Despite operating under such extraordinarily difficult conditions, most applicants speak profusely, generating a lively exchange in their interview with the college representative they're meeting, almost always for the first time. Mr Bay, however, barely spoke. He didn't sweat, he didn't confront, and he certainly didn't try to charm. His mouth was parched, and he tried to moisten his lips repeatedly without success. He spoke in heavy, awkward measures as if his words were being dislodged one at a time. When he did speak, I heard a mid-Atlantic, working-class white accent with a colonial-era twang that sounded a lot like that of my mother, who had grown up in a post-industrial shipping district along the Delaware River. As he halted and censored himself throughout the interview, he made, for the third year in a row, a very unconvincing case for admission. His stillness suggested an intense effort at self-control. I knew his face as well as his application file from the previous two years. Once again he was among a hundred men competing for fifteen spots in the incoming class of Bard College inside the Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, an hour's drive from the Bard campus. Yet again he had written a lackluster-in fact, a barely competentessay and, although among the forty to be chosen for an interview, he was once again on track to be denied. A huge floor fan whirred deafeningly in the far corner, drowning out our voices but barely moving the stale, heavy air. Noises from the prison yard ricocheted in through the armored windows and rattled around the bare walls and tiled floor. He took a breath. "I have never-" he broke off-"I have never wanted anything like this before." I waited for more, but that was all.