I’ve only been in this position at Ashland for just over a year, so all of my stories of Ashland are going to be very recent. What’s struck me working as the Correctional Education Librarian is that most of the students we have in the program are some of the most driven, intelligent, and grateful people I’ve ever been involved with. I had one student with whom I’d communicated over the course of a few semesters. When he graduated last December with an undergrad degree, he wrote me a letter expressing just how big an opportunity it was to be able to get a degree while incarcerated. He had his sentence reduced because of the courses he took and he was just so thankful for all the help he’d gotten through the program. We know that recidivism goes down by 40 percent when they get a degree, so it was just neat to see how much the opportunity had changed the course of his life.
