Bard's Prison Initiative

Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, outlines in The New Republic the Bard Prison Initiative:

We have become accustomed by conventions most eloquently expressed in literature, for example in Dostoyevsky's House of the Dead, to believe that it is in circumstances of complete unfreedom and deprivation, particularly in incarceration, that the character of human nature is revealed. If that is indeed the case, it was plain in this ceremony, in which the families of the graduates were gathered alongside fellow inmates, prison guards, the superintendent of the prison, and New York State's Commissioner of Correctional Services, that the capacity for good is never erased.