II've been sitting with a particular sentence for several weeks now. Not a sentence from a book or a journal article — a sentence spoken to me by a man who had spent nearly three decades inside an American prison.

"It's changed what I'm living for."

He wasn't describing a program. He wasn't performing rehabilitation for an audience that might influence his future. He was telling me something true about himself — something that had quietly, irrevocably shifted in the years since he began studying theology behind bars.

This July, I'll carry his words — and the words of many others like him — to Nottingham, England, where I'll present a paper at the British Society of Criminology annual conference. It is, I'll admit, both an honor and a source of considerable nerves. The BSC is one of the most respected criminological gatherings in the world. My research, rooted in American prisons and anchored in stories rather than statistics, will enter a conversation shaped by scholars I've long admired.

I find myself asking: What do I want these colleagues to hear?

What the Numbers Don't Carry

My study followed 287 men and women who participated in seminary-level theological education while serving long-term sentences. I collected surveys. I analyzed behavioral records. I compared pre- and post-program data. The numbers tell a meaningful story.

But numbers don't carry the weight of a person.

They don't carry the image of a man in his fifties — convicted of a hate crime at seventeen — sitting with a Greek New Testament, working through the original text of a passage about love and reconciliation. They don't carry the quiet gravity of a group of incarcerated men holding one another accountable, not because the institution requires it, but because they have chosen to. They don't carry the moment when a man who has spent decades defined by the worst thing he ever did begins to define himself by something else entirely.

This is what I mean by human flourishing. Not the absence of consequences. Not the erasure of the past. But the emergence of something genuinely new — a self that is learning, growing, contributing, and reaching toward a future that has meaning.

Five Things That Seem to Make a Difference

Across the narratives I collected, five patterns kept surfacing — not as a tidy formula, but as recurring conditions under which transformation became visible.

1. The first was intellectual engagement that took people seriously. Seminary-level coursework in Greek, Hebrew, and systematic theology asked participants to wrestle with complex texts and hard ideas. It treated them as thinkers. That turned out to matter enormously.
2. The second was authentic community — cohorts of people studying together, arguing together, holding each other's stories with care. Not the manufactured community of a required group session, but the kind that forms when people are genuinely invested in one another's growth.
3. The third was relational accountability — structures in which participants could speak truth to each other and be held to the commitments they'd made. Not surveillance. Covenant.
4. The fourth was purpose. A future-oriented sense of why — why it matters to keep going, keep growing, keep becoming. For many of these men, that purpose extended beyond their own lives to the people they were now mentoring, teaching, and accompanying.
5. And the fifth was action. The movement from receiving to giving. From being ministered to, to ministering. From being a subject of someone else's story, to becoming an author of their own.

The Part That Troubles Me Most

Here is where I have to be honest about something that keeps me up at night.

One of the men whose story anchors my research — I'll call him Dominic — has been incarcerated for nearly thirty years. In that time, he has completed a rigorous theological education. He mentors other incarcerated men. His disciplinary record is clean. By every measure my study tracked, he is a different person than the teenager who committed a terrible crime.

The parole board acknowledged all of this. And then they denied him.

The letter didn't dispute that he had changed. It simply determined that the severity of his original offense outweighed his transformation.

I don't tell this story to argue that every transformed person should be immediately released. The questions of public safety, accountability, and justice are genuinely complex, and I hold them with humility. But I do want to name what troubles me: we build systems that tell people transformation is possible, fund programs to facilitate it, measure it carefully — and then treat the evidence as essentially irrelevant.

What does that do to a person? What does it do to a field?

Why I'm Going to Nottingham

I'm not a criminologist by training. I'm an evaluator and a storyteller who wandered into prisons trying to measure a program and found myself undone by the people inside them.

What I'm bringing to Nottingham is a simple argument: if we want to understand rehabilitation, we have to be willing to look at it. Not just count it. Not just track recidivism rates from a distance. But actually look — at who these people are becoming, what is making that possible, and what is getting in the way.

The men and women in my study have trusted me with their stories. Some of them will never be free. They participated in my research with no expectation that it would benefit them. That is an extraordinary gift, and I feel the weight of it.

So I'm going to Nottingham to say: These lives are evidence. These stories are data. And our field is not yet asking the right questions about what they mean.

I hope the conversation that follows is a good one. I think it will be.

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.