Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, has established a new associate of arts degree program that will be offered exclusively to inmates at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville. Instruction at the prison will not be done through a distance education program. Rather faculty and traditional students will travel from the university campus for classes inside prison walls.
“One of the things that tends to happen in our criminal justice system is that the inmates become dehumanized,” says Richard Goode, a history professor at Lipscomb. “We never see the inmates, so we develop certain perceptions about them, most of which are false. When we all get in a room together, it humanizes the situation.”