Inside the Westville Correctional Facility, Holy Cross College offers incarcerated men the opportunity to earn a college degree.

We first launched classes in 2013, and since then we've helped over 300 students, and we've conferred almost 150 AA's and almost 50 bachelor's degrees.

To pull that off, I have to bring out 55 or more courses every year, and it's in fields like philosophy, theology, math, science, history, English writing, social science.

And the fine arts.

We even have a film production class which is quite popular.

To be a student again, it was very interesting because it was a complete change up from what we were used to while being incarcerated.

I was pretty much at school from 7.30 in the morning until about five o'clock.

Night every day.

It was like what you would imagine a philosopher hall to be.

We go learn all these ideas in class, we debate them with the professor, we debate them ourselves, and then we come back to the dorm, read the material, and debate them again.

It seems like most of the guys that were enrolled in the college, including myself, were really striving to do something.

We're trying to accomplish something.

We're try to prove our worth and prove that we were not the people that the courts and the judges said we were.

They're in class three, four, five times a week for three hour blocks.

So the professors teach for three hours.

It's often interrupted by chow or by count.

This is when the facility counts every individual under their care.

It became this place that I yearned for, those three hours blocks that we had, because this was a place to where everybody left ego, pride at the door and only came with the heart and hunger for healthy discussions that prompted growth.

Outside of the sort of nine to five, five days a week of college, they're doing standard undergrad study.

Most of them are pulling all-nighters on occasion for that late term paper or you know working a few hours in the dorm to finish up homework for the next class.

Oh wow, it was studying, my typical day was studying and reading just about every waking hour.

It was ridiculous.

There is a kind of a saying in prison that there are no friendships, that everyone is just in survival mode, everything is quid pro quo.

In the classroom, they first learn to be classmates, and then even colleagues, and then, even community, and they might not say it, but we can see friendship actually.

The guys knew that they needed each other to grow their ideas.

So we became sort of soundboards for each other.

One of the friends that I made while in there, the very day I was released, he dropped off a package of clothes and hygiene and like everything, he said, hey, here man, let me help you get started.

The program holds a graduation ceremony at the Westville Correctional Facility.

It also allows students who are on release to walk on the Holy Cross College.

Something like 40% to 60% of released people end up going back to prison.

Education lowers recidivism significantly.

And people who get bachelor's degree, their reciditivism rate is under 10%.

It gave me the power to act.

It made me believe in myself enough to act on my ideas and voice them to the world.

I keep them caged up in my head, and I have a whole lot to give to the worlds still.

Regardless of what the past is, that's probably the single most important thing that it gave me.

A lot of the times I had started things and never finished them and this program taught me a lot about carrying through, pushing forward and It gave me a drive.

I think back about one of the families that I met at one of our reunions.

When the wife walked up to me with her children in her arms and around her and said thank you for bringing their father and my husband home.

And that's really what it's all about, is that we can build a better world together one person at a time.

My mom, she came to my graduation, she literally cried.

I think all of my family was so happy to see something positive come out of the time that I had lost, basically.

Michael Sprague, known to many in the program as Mario, has begun graduate work in programming at Columbia University.

He currently works on training AI systems.

I am an AI technical specialist, and what that entails is interacting with artificial intelligence models.

I go through and I analyze the feedback that they give.

I go though code responses, and I look for flaws.

I look for hallucinations, I test the boundaries of the system.

Mario was incredibly gifted academically, especially around math.

And he requested linear algebra after he knocked out other courses, the highest math courses we had to offer.

And he kept learning.

We got permission to bring out an offline version of Python called Anaconda.

And he spent the next year teaching himself how to code.

So that when he was released, he was already able to work as a coder.

Tommy Shannon has worn many hats since graduating from the program.

He works with the St.

Joseph County Adult Probation Team, serves as the Writing Center Director at Holy Cross College, and is the founder of a non-profit called Life After Conviction.

MCI teaches us to help ourselves.

And so I just began planning about like, okay, what's the next phase of this thing?

What value is this thing.

Sure, I just walked across the stage.

I just spent four years getting this degree.

Is this just something, a picture that sits on the shelf like my anger management certification?

Or is this something with more value?

And so for me, I just, my next mission just became unlocking the value of this degree that I had just earned.

Tommy began writing a book in prison about how to grow as a person in spite of your conviction, how to change your mentality, how to have a positive growth mindset.

And he came to me with a bold idea.

He said, what if I came in as a guest speaker back to prison to give a presentation about the book?

And I said, whoa.

Are you sure you wanna do that?

That kind of makes me nervous.

And he said, I do because they need it.

They need that encouragement.

So last fall, he came and visited the new class of first year students.

Everybody got a copy of the book and he told a little bit about his story and he inspired a lot of people that day.

Since graduating, Michael Cheney has returned to a career as a welder and fabricator.

He is currently working on a book about reforms to the justice system.

After release, oh wow, life has just been phenomenal.

Not only the material benefits of getting out, getting a good job, putting those earnings to positive use, but it's the idea that I'm looking at the world through a different lens now.

I'm happy and content with who I am in the world, and I'm finally living a life that I am proud of.

Yeah, I remember meeting Michael and he was precocious, eager, he had the gift of gab, he loved to learn.

Every professor would talk about how enthusiastic he was.

Over the course of several semesters, we saw him go from kind of being wildly interested in learning to becoming very disciplined and is thinking.

Disciplined in his writing.

This program changed the way I view myself because it opened my eyes to things about myself that I didn't even know existed.

Just through the readings and the writings, it caused me to explore different thoughts and different ideas that I held to be a truth.

And some of them turned out not to be so truthful.

So to be able to have the space and the encouragement to do that soul searching.

I think was definitely good.

What I've heard repeatedly from the men are the words that every single one of us wants to hear.

Thank you for believing in me.

Thank you, for giving me a chance because today I do believe that I can have life and have it abundantly.