A Student's Reflection on ASU's Inside-Out Program
November 5, 2025
In ASU's Inside-Out program, students and inmates take a semester-long class together
Back in the late 1990s, Lori Pompa, a professor at Temple University, had an idea: what if her students took a semester-long course alongside inmates at a Pennsylvania prison?
What, she wondered, could the students learn from the inmates? What could the inmates learn from the students?
In 1997, Pompa launched the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Since then, chapters of the program have sprung up all over the country, including right here in the Valley.
Alexis Klemm is a Ph.D. student in criminology at Arizona State University, and she says the program changed her life.
After she completed a semester of the Inside-Out program as an undergrad, she returned as a facilitator, and she continues to lead gatherings of students and inmates as part of her ongoing research.
An Inside-Out Prison Program class through Arizona State University in fall 2019.
