“It is in proximity,” as public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson says, “that we understand things we cannot understand from a distance.” For the last 12 years, college faculty working with the nonprofit Common Good Atlanta have worked to foster proximity between Georgia’s prisons and Georgia’s universities, drawing more than 100 volunteer professors from nine southern universities to teach courses on literature, history, science, psychology, philosophy, art, and writing inside both men’s and women’s prisons five days a week. When students are released, they return to their families and communities having read widely, refined their writing and speaking skills, and perhaps most importantly, having been accepted as intellectual and social peers.

Until COVID-19, proximity was key to the work. Professors leave their college campuses, drive to remote prisons, navigate security checkpoints, and enter into deep, lively, intellectual discussions with men and women who are otherwise isolated from society. Proximity is part of how the program affirms their human dignity: “When college faculty walk into our classroom and take us seriously,” writes an incarcerated student named Akeem, “they remind me after seven years of incarceration how it feels to be looked at as a human being.” Likewise, many faculty members say that teaching inside prisons represents their most rewarding and fulfilling professional experiences. Our work resists insular mentalities and we reject isolation as a means of addressing social problems.

When prisons suspended all in-person programs in response to COVID-19, we had to rethink how to build proximity. Since March 10, and with no end in sight, Georgia’s prisons locked down to all volunteer and family visits.

In late March 2020, Common Good Atlanta shifted to a writing-intensive, epistolary method that has revealed surprising strengths. Each week we drop off clear plastic portfolios labeled with every student’s name, with a shared reading—a book, article, or chapter—along with a letter from the faculty site director, a letter from the teaching professor with background and analysis on the week’s reading, a writing prompt for the week, and individual feedback on their last assignment.

Read the full article about proximity by Sarah Higinbotham & Jamil Zainaldin at Stanford Social Innovation Review.