Can criminals change? Of course they can.

Two murderers pulled off a Hollywood-destined prison break two summers ago and remained on the run for almost a month. The bizarre truth behind the breach: the pair’s work supervisor smuggled in hacksaws and headlamps so the three of them could jet off to Mexico — after the two escapees killed her husband.

In the first movie about the episode, NY Prison Break: The Se

duction of Joyce Mitchell, shown recently on the Lifetime network, one of the inmates starts romancing Mitchell — his supervisor — by asking her whether people change. She answers, immediately and without thought: Of course they do.

A lot rides on whether that is true: the viability of a system that uses $1 trillion in taxpayer money a year, the perception of public safety, the moral force of our penal system, and how we view our own futures. If people can’t change, then we’re fooling ourselves about fashioning a phoenix when we imprison someone. It is just expensive warehousing.

In the six years I spent in Connecticut’s state women’s prison, I learned that to change or not to change was not the question ... because there was no question. Every inmate had to believe, at least outwardly, in the ability to transform herself if she was going to make it through the day.

This issue of whether people change is central to the criminal justice debate that has shifted so rapidly between the Obama and Trump administrations. This administration’s message is clear: Criminal defendants don’t commit bad acts; they are inherently bad actors who need to be incapacitated through incarceration. President Trump has said this often in interviews and once when he fired someone on The Appren

tice: “People don’t change.” Except they actually do. Researchers at the University of Illinois analyzed 207 studies and concluded that people can change in as little as six months if they get the proper intervention.

The National Institute of Justice reports that 76.6% of released prisoners are rearrested within five years, supporting the idea that many caught in the system are incapable of change. But the flip side is that 23.4% of ex-offenders reformed themselves. Lumping lawbreakers into a correctional facility won’t help all of them, but it will rehabilitate some of them a lot.

We need to assume the capacity to change and expand ways to help people to achieve it. Misperceiving crime as a lack of character rather than a suspension of it will continue to impede justice reform efforts under Trump.

Many perpetrators had their normally law-abiding natures hijacked by drugs or mental illness. Some, like Mitchell, who now wears prison stripes herself, exercised bad judgment in pursuit of an illusion. These prisoners simply need to revert to who they are, and we should help them.

Don’t be seduced by the rhetoric of incorrigibility and perpetual dangerousness coming from the Trump administration. People change for the better.

Under the right circumstances, of course they do.