Seven young men sit around a table covered in textbooks. They are having an animated conversation in a room where bookshelves line the walls. It could be a study group meeting at any university library around the world. But these students are noticeably thin, with identically shaved heads and matching blue-and-white-striped shirts.

These law students are inmates in a Ugandan prison. They’re enrolled in a program that is teaching them to advocate for themselves and their fellow prisoners in their nation’s criminal justice system. The program is sponsored by the African Prisons Project (APP), a group founded in November 2007 by the then-law student, now UK barrister, Alexander McLean (TED Institute Talk: Restoring hope and dignity to the justice system). A few years earlier as a teenager on a Christian mission to a Ugandan hospital, McLean had observed as overtaxed staff left mortally ill patients from a nearby prison to die. He wondered whether a criminal justice system could help the people it imprisoned rather than harm them.

Offering legal education was a logical next step. In the Ugandan and Kenyan justice systems, "80 or so percent of prisoners never meet a lawyer,” McLean says.

In 2011, APP sponsored its first group of nine students to participate in an online legal studies program offered by the University of London.

Read the full article by Emily Gertz about prison law from ideas.ted.com