written by Max Blau
Dawn has yet to break when Peter Lindsay plugs the coordinates for Sparta, Ga., into his GPS. It’s a tiny rural town 100 miles east of Georgia State’s Atlanta Campus that seems an unlikely destination for the political philosophy teacher. But on this dreary Friday in late December, a few minutes before 9 a.m., he steers his black hybrid into a parking spot outside today’s classroom. Before heading inside, the professor glances over his notes on today’s reading, Peter Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”
To get to class, Lindsay empties the pockets of his black sport coat, passes through a metal detector and stands still inside a full-body X-ray scanner. He’s then escorted past four locked metal doors and several barbed wire fences. Inside a room brightened by sterile fluorescent lights, he can see students looking over printouts of the Singer article.
Once he walks through the door, they each shake his hand as if they’re his advisees. On a wooden lectern, he fans out a stack of photos of his two dozen students. He flips through each image, matching faces to names. Here, more than in most classrooms, remembering a name is the ultimate sign of respect.
Lindsay asks his students to turn to the third page of Singer’s article — home to one of the philosopher’s classic cases. After laying out a few assumptions — that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are intrinsically bad and we’re morally obligated to prevent something bad from happening if it doesn’t require great sacrifice — Singer argues someone ought to pull out a drowning child from a shallow pond, even if it means getting his clothes muddy. Leaning on the lectern, Lindsay asks the students: “Would you save the child?”
Hands dart up in the air, students eager to weigh in.
“It’s like pulling someone from a burning house when you’re not a firefighter,” says one student with thick-rimmed glasses. “The decision is an instinctual one.”
“Is it an instinctual decision?” Lindsay pushes back. “Or is it a moral decision?”
“What if you’re wearing a $200 suit,” says another student in the front row. “It’s money versus life.”
For more than an hour, the students discuss a variety of moral quandaries: Do people have a responsibility to help starving children overseas? Is it better to give money or perform acts of service? In the back of the classroom, Lindsay calls on a student with a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. He broaches the topic of whether personal motive matters in performing a good deed. As the students turn his way, he wonders whether it would be better to give a meal to an inmate sitting beside you instead of donating one anonymously to someone sitting in solitary confinement.
“For those who have more,” the student says, “more is expected.”
Lindsay continues on toward a broader Kantian conversation focused on duty and obligation. But the student’s point seems to resonate with the rest of the class.
After all, these students aren’t wearing Panther blue. Instead, they’re dressed in white scrubs. Nor are they sitting in his classroom at 25 Park Place, but rather inside a building at 701 Prison Blvd., the address for one of Georgia’s highest security correctional facilities, Hancock State Prison.
Five years ago, Lindsay decided to teach philosophy inside a prison. There wasn’t a specific moment that had initially sparked his interest, but Lindsay’s curiosity arose at a perfect time.
Nearing the end of his first term, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal was hoping to lower Georgia’s incarceration rate, then one of the nation’s highest. He proposed ambitious reforms that would not just save taxpayer dollars but also better prepare inmates for life on the outside.
Near the top of Deal’s list: education. According to a 2016 report from the Vera Institute of Justice, more than a third of the state prisons in the U.S. offered college courses, but less than a 10th of inmates had access to those lessons. Inmates, too, were half as likely to have a college education than the rest of the population. With studies linking prison education to reduced recidivism, Deal sought to expand those offerings to improve Georgia inmates’ chances of securing jobs in spite of their criminal records. He hoped education could prevent prisoners from ending up back where they had started.
With the help of a colleague, Lindsay secured a meeting with a pair of top officials at the Georgia Department of Corrections: Commissioner Brian Owens and Assistant Commissioner of Education and Services L. C. “Buster” Evans. When Lindsay brought up the topic of teaching political philosophy to inmates, their response was simple: Start yesterday.
Lindsay was encouraged to start off at the Atlanta Transitional Center. A few phone calls later, he was inside the Midtown halfway house teaching Platonic dialogue to a class of 15 men. None had read the article he had assigned, he noticed, in part because they were skeptical of his intentions. Who is this guy? Why is he here? Is he conducting research? As they sat in a circle, Lindsay assured them he wasn’t seeking anything for his own gain. He simply wanted to make his course available in correctional facilities.
Lindsay returned week after week, intrigued by the dynamic that existed in a classroom of nontraditional college students. These students seemed more appreciative and attentive. Cell phones didn’t distract them. (Nor did they distract Lindsay, who has never owned a cell phone.)
After a year there, he contacted Sarah Higinbotham (Ph.D. ’13), who had co-founded Common Good Atlanta, a nonprofit that provides higher education opportunities to inmates. One day in 2015, Lindsay accompanied Higinbotham on a visit to Phillips State Prison in Buford, where she began teaching in 2009 while working on her doctor’s degree at Georgia State. Soon after, he returned to teach a four-week course on the ethics of warfare.
“Ideally, a college education lets you step back from the immediate forces against you, and analyze and critique those forces,” says Higinbotham, now an assistant professor of English at Oxford College of Emory University. “With Lindsay’s course, I remember watching incarcerated combat veterans step back from the experience they were swept up in and think about it in terms of philosophy — and not in terms of right or wrong, loyal or disloyal, patriotic or unpatriotic. It was moving.”
Lindsay loved the experience. Because this was his first time inside a higher-security state prison, Lindsay moved cautiously. He followed Higinbotham’s lead to not ask inmates about their convictions. The approach seemed to make sense: He wanted to focus on the students.
But one day in class, not long after he began teaching there, he told his students that he didn’t feel like knowing them from the worst thing they had ever done.
“All I know is what I see in the classroom,” he told the inmates. “I like what I see.”
In the front row, one inmate spoke up, telling Lindsay something that he’d never forget: “No. I want you to know the worst thing I’ve ever done. And I want you to not judge me for it.”
Peter Lindsay, professor of political science and philosophy, had been teaching prisoners for a few years before he brought his course to Hancock State Prison in 2017. His students are now earning college credit for their work.
Lindsay hadn’t known anyone who had spent time in prison until he was incarcerated himself. In the early 1980s, after graduating from the University of Colorado, he and a friend visited El Salvador. The nation was in the midst of a civil war. His friend was taking photos of the unrest. One day after rebels bombed a bus to scare potential voters, soldiers arrested the pair after his friend pointed his camera at a military building. He worried for his freedom, uncertain of how long he’d be detained. After hours of detention, he convinced a colonel they were harmless, “stupid tourists.”
More than three decades passed before Lindsay stepped back inside a prison. In the meantime, he taught high school students, earned his doctorate and lectured at Harvard University. In 1999, Georgia State offered him the chance to teach political philosophy.
Like those of many other schools, Georgia State’s political science program focused more on how politics worked than the ways justice, equality and morality shaped those systems. But when Lindsay first introduced political philosophy, only 13 undergraduate students signed up for his first two classes.
“[The students] seemingly found their way there either by accident (‘I thought it was political psychology’) or — I have long suspected, anyway — by clerical error,” he once wrote.
Over the next seven years, his courses gradually filled up with students who often debated the larger ideas concerning politics, including morality, equality and justice. In 2007, he became director of the Center for Teaching & Learning, which supports Georgia State faculty in their teaching responsibilities. Four years later, he returned to lecturing.
“What I enjoy most about teaching is how every setting offers a different experience,” Lindsay says. “I can take my course material to people with whom I have almost nothing in common and share a unique experience with them in a classroom.”
Peter Lindsay, professor of political science and philosophy, had been teaching prisoners for a few years before he brought his course to Hancock State Prison in 2017. His students are now earning college credit for their work.
Lindsay hadn’t known anyone who had spent time in prison until he was incarcerated himself. In the early 1980s, after graduating from the University of Colorado, he and a friend visited El Salvador. The nation was in the midst of a civil war. His friend was taking photos of the unrest. One day after rebels bombed a bus to scare potential voters, soldiers arrested the pair after his friend pointed his camera at a military building. He worried for his freedom, uncertain of how long he’d be detained. After hours of detention, he convinced a colonel they were harmless, “stupid tourists.”
More than three decades passed before Lindsay stepped back inside a prison. In the meantime, he taught high school students, earned his doctorate and lectured at Harvard University. In 1999, Georgia State offered him the chance to teach political philosophy.
Like those of many other schools, Georgia State’s political science program focused more on how politics worked than the ways justice, equality and morality shaped those systems. But when Lindsay first introduced political philosophy, only 13 undergraduate students signed up for his first two classes.
“[The students] seemingly found their way there either by accident (‘I thought it was political psychology’) or — I have long suspected, anyway — by clerical error,” he once wrote.
Over the next seven years, his courses gradually filled up with students who often debated the larger ideas concerning politics, including morality, equality and justice. In 2007, he became director of the Center for Teaching & Learning, which supports Georgia State faculty in their teaching responsibilities. Four years later, he returned to lecturing.
“What I enjoy most about teaching is how every setting offers a different experience,” Lindsay says. “I can take my course material to people with whom I have almost nothing in common and share a unique experience with them in a classroom.”
By the time Lindsay was making trips to Sparta in fall 2017, he had met Perimeter College instructors Andy Rogers and Katherine Perry. The three of them had each been dreaming of a single goal: a prison education program that offered college credit — and even diplomas.
With the vast majority of prisoners returning to society, the Georgia Department of Corrections had increased funding to place more than 200 teachers at every one of the state’s correctional facilities. Those education opportunities span from literacy and GED courses to specialized training in beekeeping, computer technology and design. In some cases, state prisoners can earn time off their sentences for enrolling in education programs. But while Georgia prisons have offered vocational courses for decades, few have offered a path toward receiving college degrees. The early courses Georgia State professors taught were simply for enrichment’s sake, Rogers says.
For Rogers, the path toward teaching in prisons started with a lecture. He had listened to death penalty attorney Bryan Stevenson, author of “Just Mercy,” who had challenged the audience to consider ways to help inmates who might be estranged from family or friends.
For Perry, the choice was personal. Her brother’s incarceration for addiction-related charges had led her to teach through the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project. She wanted to build a similar kind of program in Georgia.
“Having to sit across from him, with glass between us, talking via phone, jolted me into a realization about the ways our justice system separates people from other people as punishment without any assistance for improvement,” Perry says. “Once I went inside, I saw that what was true for my family is true for most people who are incarcerated or have incarcerated family members.”
So, the faculty worked with Common Ground Atlanta, along with Perimeter College dean Peter Lyons, on how to enroll incarcerated students at Perimeter. Hurdles stood in their way. First, inmates needed to pass an admissions test. Then, teachers would need to enroll them in courses. Those who got admitted would be held to the same standards required of students on campus. But they needed some admission waivers because they couldn’t be vaccinated or undergo background checks while in prison. The hardest part came after they got their student IDs: finding a way to pay for college.
In early 2017, three professors — later joined by associate professor of English Marissa McNamara — started several credit-bearing courses at Phillips State Prison, including English composition, American history and math. This past fall, the Laughing Gull Foundation awarded a $210,000 grant to Georgia State’s Prison Education project. Pending site approval by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the funds are intended to help start accredited associate degree programs for incarcerated students, including one proposed for female inmates at Lee Arrendale State Prison.
Perry hopes Georgia State can someday help train other universities on how to set up for-credit courses that lead to degree programs. And the group hopes that, as inmates get released, they’ll be able to take classes at Perimeter and eventually step foot inside Lindsay’s downtown classroom.
“There’s always a need,” Lindsay says. “The people at the Department of Corrections know what a no-brainer it is to offer education. The numbers don’t lie: People who get involved don’t come back to prison.”
Before his recent visit to Hancock, Lindsay followed the advice of his former student and looked up the convictions of those in his latest class. Most have life sentences for charges, including armed robbery, aggravated child molestation or murder. He knows these men will always be defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done. Confronted with that truth, he’s also trying to see the good in his students, most of whom have spent their days trying to improve themselves.
“You’ll notice most people don’t talk about their crimes,” Lindsay says. “But with this group, we could get into that conversation, trying to make moral sense of them.”
The conversations stretch long after Lindsay heads back to Atlanta. In a recent edition of the Hancock Herald, a newsletter published by prisoners, his students write that inmates gather in their dorms to continue those philosophical debates.
“It has opened up a new experience here at Hancock,” they wrote in the newsletter. “Men who previously rarely interacted are now having conversations that some would be surprised to hear inside a prison fence. The class has broken religious and racial lines like few others have.”
Lindsay has seen readings serve as conduits for broader discussions about morality within the lives of incarcerated students. In a recent class on Aristotelian ethics, one of Lindsay’s brightest students grappled with whether people should “do the right thing” for virtue’s sake as opposed to practical considerations. Lindsay couldn’t help but think about the fact his student was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The student’s words are still in his mind: “I ain’t never getting out of here. All I’ve got left is my own integrity. I’m doing the right thing.”
“No one has ever brought the clarity of that debate to me,” Lindsay says on the ride home from Hancock. “Being in that environment, with perspectives that are so radically different, it brings to life material I’ve been teaching for years in ways I’ve never thought of.”
At the end of his class on Singer’s article, Lindsay pulls out a stack of course certificates and gives them to the prisoners who completed his six-week course that fall. As they step out into a main room, where the phrase “Knowledge is Power” is painted on the drab gray wall, Lindsay calls out the names of his students. One by one, they grab the sheets, followed by a slice of buttercream cake. Once the small ceremony ends, a few students continue talking with Lindsay about the Singer article.
Before heading back to Atlanta, he reminds one of his students about the most important lesson.
“It’s not about the hour and a half we have together today,” he says. “It’s about where you take these lessons tomorrow.”
Max Blau writes narrative and investigative stories for newspapers, magazines and digital media outlets. His award-winning nonfiction has appeared in Atlanta Magazine, Bitter Southerner, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Politico and Rolling Stone.
Photo by Steven Thackston
Illustrations by Reid Schulz (B.F.A. '18)
