Something caught my attention recently in the comments section of a LinkedIn post about my appearance on The Redemption Project podcast. Jeffery Nichols, a grants specialist with House of Mercy reentry ministry, left a response that stopped me mid-scroll. He wrote that treating incarcerated individuals as serious thinkers and leaders "affirms their dignity — and that shifts culture, not just outcomes."

That phrase has stayed with me.

Jeffery wasn't commenting as a casual observer. He works in the grants world, where programs live or die by their ability to demonstrate measurable impact. His instinct to name culture shift alongside outcomes signals something important: the people who fund and evaluate transformation work are increasingly ready to think beyond recidivism numbers. They want to understand what actually changes in a person — and in a community — when education is done well.

This is exactly the territory my research has been exploring for years.

In my study of 287 participants in The Urban Ministry Institute's Prison Ministry program, I documented five mechanisms through which genuine transformation takes root: rigorous intellectual engagement, authentic community, relational accountability, future-oriented purpose, and restorative action. These aren't soft concepts. They are measurable, observable, and — as Jeffery's comment suggests — increasingly recognizable to people whose job it is to evaluate what works.

What TUMI does differently is treat incarcerated men and women as capable of graduate-level theology and philosophy. Not as problems to be managed, but as thinkers with something to contribute. The ripple effects of that posture are remarkable. Housing unit culture shifts. Mentoring relationships form. People begin to imagine futures they had stopped believing were possible.

When I talked with The Redemption Project about this work, I tried to articulate why well-being matters more than recidivism as a primary metric. Recidivism tells you something about what happened after someone left prison. Well-being, purpose, and community tell you something about who a person is becoming while they're still there — and that is where transformation actually begins.

Jeffery's observation — that this work helps "translate impact into evidence that expands opportunity" — is a generous and precise description of what program evaluation can do at its best. It doesn't replace the stories. It puts the stories in conversation with data so that funders, policymakers, and practitioners can see what's actually happening and make decisions accordingly.

The conversation is shifting. I'm grateful to The Redemption Project for platforming it, to TUMI for decades of faithful presence in correctional facilities, and to thoughtful voices like Jeffery's that remind us why it matters to get this right.

Dr. Robin LaBarbera is Professor Emerita at Biola University and Principal of LaBarbera Learning Solutions, LLC, specializing in program evaluation for correctional education and reentry programs. Her book, It's Changed What I'm Living For: Exploring Narratives of Human Flourishing from Inside America's Prisons, was published by Ethics Press in 2025. She will present at the British Society of Criminology Annual Conference in Nottingham, England in July 2026.