By Alexa Rodriguez
Jan 8, 2021
California inmates make as little as eight cents an hour sweeping floors, building furniture, and clerking. If they have an industry job, they can do better, making $1 an hour, or around $100 per month, per CBS News. That s why it took three long years for a group of nearly 800 inmates at Soledad State Prison to amass $32,000–that s $24,000 of their own money, plus an $8,000 donation from outside the prison which they swiftly gave away.
Jason Bryant, now a former inmate, had been taking part in a prison book club in 2016 with students from Palma School, a private all-boys Catholic school in Salinas, Calif., when they read Ernest Gordon s
CBS News
Inmates work together to raise $32,000 for student s tuition
For the past seven years, students from the Palma School in Salinas, California have been part of a book club at an unlikely place Soledad State Prison.
Mia Mirassou and Jim Micheletti founded the book club called Exercises In Empathy. Micheletti told CBS News correspondent Omar Villafranca that students would go into the prison afraid but would leave with a new perspective on the incarcerated men. They go in thinking monster … and they come out thinking a man. A human being … they ve done bad things, but there are no throwaway people here, Micheletti said.
Prison inmates raised $32,000 for a high school student s tuition washingtonpost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from washingtonpost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A high school student needed help with tuition, so an unlikely group stepped up: Prison inmates
Kellie B. Gormly, The Washington Post
Jan. 1, 2021
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1of5Sy Newson Green, center, attended a book club at California s Soledad State Prison while he was a student at nearby Palma School. Jason Bryant, right, is one of the inmates who led the fundraising for Newson Green s tuition at the Catholic school.Courtesy of CNNShow MoreShow Less
2of5Sy Newson Green, center, at an Exercises in Empathy book club meeting with classmates from Palma School and his benefactors at the Soledad State Prison.Courtesy of CNNShow MoreShow Less