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This week on Reformed N' Reel, Mario and Wayne sit down with Rashmi Mukherjee, Associate Professor of Literature, Humanities, and Culture at Boise State University — and the woman who has been quietly doing some of the most human work inside Idaho State Correctional Institution. For the last several years, Rashmi has been bringing BSU students inside ISCI to take classes alongside the men who live there. She calls herself a "story collector." What she's built is something closer to a bridge.

The conversation opens with how she first heard Mario's name — not from a colleague or a nonprofit brochure, but from inside ISCI itself, where the men in her classes kept saying "learning to live" and pointing in his direction. From there, she walks us through the Inside Out program: BSU students and incarcerated students watching The Shawshank Redemption together, writing and reading each other's personal stories aloud, and what happens when a 19-year-old college student reads the story of a man who's been locked up for twenty years and cut off from his children. "It's a very heavy, very emotionally heavy experience," Rashmi says. "That was the point."

The emotional center of the episode is a story told by a student named Chris — a man who, at six years old, ran to his teacher's house to borrow money for a loaf of bread so his hungry sister could have something on Christmas Eve, and came back with sprinkles from the gas station attendant. Rashmi didn't know what to do with it. "I don't care if this is true or false or what," she told him. "It's a fantastic story." That story opened the floodgates. Men started writing. Stories started stacking up. Rashmi started going home at night and crying. Her husband told her she had to do something with them. A book was born.

She's honest about the transformation that happened inside her, too. She came in careful. She left more forgiving. She says the conversations she has inside ISCI are "the best conversations I can have as an academic — I don't have that kind of intellectual stimulation outside." Mario reflects on why that is: men in a box with nothing but time and themselves tend to think deeply. Rashmi calls them Zen Buddhists. Mario calls them broken souls who just want to be normal.

The episode ends on a challenge to all of us: "People have to look at the human inside and not just get stuck by the space like prison." The book is almost done. The stories keep coming.

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