NEW YORK – On a recent Friday night, a student and I were playing dead on the cold linoleum floor of a prison. The woman standing over us was proudly proclaiming the coldblooded murder of her no-good husband and his mistress.

As professor at Columbia University, I’ve asked lots of students to act out this 2,500-year-old scene from Aeschylus’ “Oresteia.” That night, surrounded by women who have spent years in prison, the power of those words increased ten-fold.

My incarcerated students differ radically from the ones at Columbia. When I walk into a tidy, well-equipped classroom on Morningside campus, I know my undergrads have spent years preparing for academic achievement, supported by family and teachers. Trained to ask hard questions, they consider diverse perspectives and then expect to get to the bottom of things.

When a correctional officer escorts me into a prison room equipped with rickety tables, tangled Venetian blinds and no chalk, I know my incarcerated students have been locked away for years – sometimes for decades – with virtually no opportunity for intellectual stimulation. The culture they inhabit punishes people for asking questions. Solitary confinement is often the reward for any form of precocity.

As one woman explained, “If you ask too many questions in here, you’ll be punished for having the wrong attitude.” The lesson is to keep your head down.

My main goal as a teacher in prison has been to create a space comfortable enough for exploration and insight. The circumstance does not make that easy. With a heating system so loud we can barely hear ourselves think and a correctional officer randomly peering through a window in the classroom wall, it’s easy to be distracted.

Understanding ambiguity

At the conclusion of Clytemnestra’s speech that Friday night, a thrilled listener showed us her goose bumps before offering a cuttingly smart evaluation of the queen’s motivations for the murders. Another student who had seemed trapped in her own uncertainties about the play’s violence, announced her admiration for Clytemnestra’s self-satisfied confession.

The classroom seemed to glow with excitement.

Things didn’t work out so well for Clytemnestra. After dying at the hands of her irresolute son, she returns as a ghost to argue unsuccessfully for revenge. The “Oresteia” ends with an insecure compromise between forms of justice. Although my Columbia undergrads find this conclusion unsettling, the play’s ambiguity seems just right to my incarcerated students, all of whom have intensely experienced life’s vagaries and horrors.

As one woman said, to unanimous approval, “People expect things in life to be clear, but they’re not. That’s the point.”

These women’s intellectual courage and uncanny insight have created a magical space of moral and literary exploration. Despite the oppressive confines of the prison itself, they flourish before my eyes.

Education deprivation

There are about 2.2 million people in a correctional facility in the United States, which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. Although more than 50 percent of prisons offer high school diplomas or GEDs, most prisons offer little if any post-secondary education.

Things have not always been this bad. In the 1980s, when the prison population was below 400,000, our incarcerated citizens were educated through state and federal funding. But the 1990s brought an abrupt end to government support. When President Bill Clinton signed into law the Crime Bill in 1994, he eliminated incarcerated people’s eligibility for federal Pell grants and sentenced a generation of incarcerated Americans to educational deprivation.

Nationwide, more than 350 college programs in prisons were shut down that year. Many states jumped on the tough-on-crime bandwagon and slashed state funded prison educational programs. In New York, for example, no state funds can be used to support secondary-education in prison. Before 1994, there were 70 publicly funded post-secondary prison programs in the state. Now there are none. In many states across the country, college instruction has fallen primarily to volunteers.

The need to volunteer has become increasingly clear to a growing number of professors. If our job as educators is to nurture intellectual growth and contribute to a thoughtful future for our country, what could be more obvious than to help those who are educationally underserved?

Learning counts

I am the first professor at Columbia to volunteer in a brand new initiative sponsored by Columbia’s Center for Justice. The main goal of the Justice-in-Education Initiative is to provide education to currently and formerly incarcerated people. Collaborating extensively with community partners, my colleagues’ commitment is to develop programs that support faculty and students in providing educational opportunities to this underserved population. The success of my experience is just the beginning.

There are hundreds of thousands of students just like mine scattered across the country eager to be educated and keen to join the ranks of active participants in our democracy.

As a society, we owe them (and ourselves) that chance. A National Institute of Justice study has found that 76.6 percent of formerly incarcerated people return to prison within five years of release. According to research by the Rand Institute, recidivism goes down by 43 percent when inmates are offered education.

Those who leave prison with a college degree are much more likely to gain employment, be role models for their own children (50 percent of incarcerated adults have children) and become active members of their communities. Some of my students are quite clear about the desire to motivate their children: “the conversation changes when you’re educating yourself.”

The pleasures I’ve found teaching in prison are among the richest I’ve ever had. But the pleasure I find in this pedagogical delight is matched by the pain of recognition that their intellectual exploration will cease without volunteers like me.

We must not allow so many members of our community to languish in prison without the chance for intellectual development. We must find it in ourselves to educate all Americans.

Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.