For every 100,000 people in America, 716 are incarcerated. Despite the US having 5 percent of the global population, it holds 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. Furthermore, more than 70 percent of people in prison are illiterate. However, across the country nonprofits are working towards improving literacy in prisons, teaching in prisons, and changing the public opinion of what a “prisoner” is. Here are two of those programs.

One of the prisoners sat down in the corner with a book in front of him, open, on the floor. He sat like that for ten, fifteen minutes. The volunteers were perplexed.

“Do you want to record?” they asked him.

“Yeah, I do want to record,” the inmate said. “I do want to record. This… this was the last book I ever read.”

The program “Staying In Closer Touch” travels to prisons all over Michigan, and records incarcerated parents and grandparents reading a bedtime story to send to their children or grandchildren, some of whom they haven’t seen for years.

An important aspect of the program – since it is run through the Children’s Literacy Network – is literacy training, and fostering the love to read in children who might not normally get a lot of attention or access to literature. However, given the circumstances, it often creates an intimacy that can be powerful to watch.

“Often, I’ll hit ‘off’ and they’ll start crying,” said Karen Smyte, a volunteer at Staying in Closer Touch who goes into the prisons to record. “Because it’s the absence, it’s almost immediate that you feel the absence, the fact that they aren’t there. And it’s such a gift because you’re giving them an almost presence – the book, the voice, the child can imagine. But it hurts because of course they’re not there.”

One in ten children in Michigan has a parent who is currently in prison. The percentage of children with any incarcerated relative – uncle, aunt, cousin, brother, grandparent – is much higher. These numbers are not seen nationwide. Michigan spends more on prisons (as a percentage of the state budget) than any other state, by a wide margin (Michigan spends 22.5 percent of its budget on prisons, and the second highest is Oregon, allocating around 13 percent of their budget towards prisons). Furthermore, Michigan is one of the few states to incarcerate juveniles as adults. So it’s not really surprising that such a significant percentage of Michigan parents are sitting in a cell at night instead of by the bedside of their child.

“I wish it were a right, not a privilege, to be read a story by a loved one,” Smyte said. “I wish everyone had that right to have rhythms and singsong wash over them, and I wish it were a right that every mother has the ability to parent how they want, but that’s not the case here. It is a privilege to read a story to your child. It is a privilege to parent.”

Inmates can choose any book they want, for each of their children. They record for about six to eight minutes, and are encouraged to deviate from the text.

Smyte recalls one woman who chose to record herself reading a book that she had used to read to her daughter before she was sent to prison.

“I remember the girl that I read the book to,” the woman said. “I remember you, and I know you’re still in there, I’m still here too.”

The program is popular among the prison inmates and their children. Since there are so many people to record, each child receives one book recording every nine months or so. But they listen to that recording over, and over, and over again.

“When they’re missing their parent, when they’re missing their grandparent, they can listen to them,” Smyte said. “They can imagine them being there. It’s almost like a good ghost. They can hear that they’re okay.”

There had been an incident – gang violence, probably – and so the prison went into lock-down. For two weeks, the prisoners stayed in their cells. For two weeks, they couldn’t go to the mess hall, shower, or go outside – although that last part isn’t unusual. At the Brooklyn prison, there is no outside.

For twelve days, a handful of prisoners could do nothing but read Gilgamesh.

The Justice-in-Education Initiative through the Center for Justice at Columbia University aims to offer courses at local prisons, that prisoners can apply to and, if accepted, receive Columbia credit through the course, with the option to continue their education at Columbia when they get out. If they get out.

Christia Mercer is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. She was the first to volunteer to teach at prisons through the Justice-in-Education initiative.

The first class after the lock-down, Mercer said, was one of the best classes she’s taught in her life. Her students knew Gilgamesh so well; not only the plot, but the deeper messages within the novel as well.

One student – who had never written a paper before, and didn’t go to high school – compared the events in Gilgamesh to his own life. He was a wild young man, he said, who made a friend who really helped him out, but who died (presumably from violence, but he didn’t specify), much like the friendship to Gilgamesh and death of Enkidu. Reading Gilgamesh, he said, was the first time he was able to confront his loss.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to begin to get over it,” the student said. “Gilgamesh is about my life and it changed my life.”

Mercer uses ancient literature in every class she teaches.

“I think it’s easier to get to people when it’s something really, really old so they can see that their own human condition is not unlike those from four thousand years ago,” Mercer said.

In her classes in prisons, they explore profound philosophical questions: what is love? What is justice? What is family? While studying Gilgamesh, for example, they discussed the concept of “immortality” at depth.

Before Mercer went into the prison for the first time, she completed a mandatory orientation lead by one of the top Commanding Officers.

“These people are animals,” Mercer recalled him saying. “They will take advantage of you. Do not give them any sympathy.”

However, she did give them sympathy. She created an environment where they could share ideas and support each other, and in this environment her incarcerated students flourished.

Moreover, she challenged the prisoners intellectually. Her joke is that she “takes no prisoners,” and she finds that they often really appreciate being taken seriously. Many of her students, Mercer said, were never taken seriously as learners. In school, if they asked hard questions or made clever remarks, they were told to shut up. In prison, this passivity is reinforced even stronger. In school, being a “wise-ass” would’ve gotten them sent to detention. In prison it gets them sent to solitary confinement.

“We want to create a space where they can be wise-asses,” Mercer said. “[The prisoners] didn’t have the chance to be brilliant, because they were never encouraged. Especially the women have never been allowed to be agents, they’ve always been victims.”

Being a professor at one of the top universities in the country, the juxtaposition between her Columbia students and those in prison is interesting. However, the biggest difference between the two, Mercer finds, is in their backgrounds. Her students at Columbia, for the most part, have trained their whole lives to be the best students they can be, whereas her incarcerated students have often not. She recalled having incarcerated students who had never learned what a thesis statement is, or didn’t know the difference between a period and a colon. It is difficult to compare her two genres of students, Mercer said, other than that they are both often incredibly intelligent.

The first prison Mercer taught in – and one she continues to teach in – is Taconic, a medium-security women’s prison. The women she teaches have been sentenced for decades; one prisoner had been in for 25 years before attending Mercer’s class. Many of them are in prison for homicide or armed robbery. One woman had smothered her child.

However, the vast majority of Mercer’s students had suffered extreme trauma in their life previous to being incarcerated or came from difficult backgrounds. Many came from poor and uneducated families. Many had self-medicated undiagnosed mental illnesses. Seventy six percent of incarcerated women in the United States have been victims of sexual assault, and Mercer’s students are no exception.

“You think, oh they must be just animals,” Mercer said. “They must be horrible human beings. And then you hear their stories. They’re really wonderful people at this point in their lives. They’re friends of mine. But when they were 17, 18, or 19 and had been on the streets for a few years, they did really bad things. What they don’t deserve is to be put in a cage.”