EVENT PREVIEW

“By Our Hands”

The production is part of UGA’s Spotlight on the Arts Festival.

8 p.m. Nov. 8 and Nov. 16; 2:30 p.m. Nov. 10 and Nov. 17. Free. University of Georgia’s Fine Arts Building, 255 Baldwin St., Athens. drama. uga.edu.

“College Behind Bars”

A four-part documentary on one particular effort of inmates to earn college degrees will premiere later this month on PBS.

“College Behind Bars” shows faculty members at Bard College, a private, liberal arts school in upstate New York, teaching inmates at several prisons under a program called the Bard Prison Initiative. Ken Burns, the awardwinning filmmaker behind documentaries on the Civil War, baseball and other topics, is the executive producer.

Director Lynn Novick, producer Sarah Botstein and graduates Wesley Caines and Dyjuan Tatro recently visited Atlanta for a screening and met with The Atlanta JournalConstitution to discuss the documentary and the initiative.

Novick said the documentary gave her a new perspective for the importance of a college education.

Social justice and incarceration are issues being increasingly discussed among college students, the filmmakers said.

“This is a hugely important topic on college campuses,” Novick said.

A group of Bard students started the initiative in 1999 in response to a decline in government funding for college education prison programs. It currently has about 300 students and awarded more than 550 degrees. Bard faculty teach inside the prisons the same curriculum being learned by undergraduate students.

“I want everyone to have a discussion around what have we made our criminal spaces, our prisons, look like,”said Caines, 53, a former inmate who is one of the initiative’s first graduates and now works at Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit organization that helps accused offenders. “The deeper question is how do we value liberal arts education in our society and this is a vehicle for that.”

The documentary began after Botstein and Novick gave a guest lecture inside the prison in 2012 to discuss a Burns documentary on Prohibition. The filmmakers were fascinated by the program and talked about how they would make a documentary. It took about two years to get permission from New York prison officials to film, Botstein recalled.

The college raises money to fund the program. The filmmakers visited the prisons more than 100 times and shot about 400 hours of film for the four-hour documentary. The inmates talked out their concerns about the film. They did not want a film showing stereotypical images of inmates.

“This film had the potential to tell a different type of story about us,”said Tatro, 33, who completed his degree after leaving prison and is now government affairs associate for the initiative.

Tatro talked about what the initiative does for students.

“It allows us to reimagine ourselves.”