The Best Place for a College Student to Truly Learn
May 27, 2026
On the first day of class, Inside-Out instructor Reiko Hillyer writes a quote from French philosopher Michel Foucault on the board: Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
The students in the room have a lot to say about that topic. The class includes undergraduates from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and incarcerated students—they’re meeting inside Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum-security prison, for a course on the history of crime and punishment in the United States.
Hillyer, a historian at Lewis & Clark, has been teaching it since 2012 and wrote about the experience in the 2024 book A Wall Is Just a Wall, published by Duke University Press. A documentary about the class, Classroom 4, directed by her childhood friend Eden Wurmfeld, is now streaming on PBS.
The class includes undergraduates from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and incarcerated students.
