Prison book club raises $30,000 for high school student in need

It’s hard to imagine two more different places than an elite private school and California’s Soledad State Prison, which houses the state’s largest concentration of men sentenced to life behind bars. But for the past seven years, the two worlds have collided in an unusual way: through a book club.

Palma School, a prep school for boys in Salinas, California, created a partnership with the Correctional Training Facility (CTF) at Soledad State Prison to form a reading group for inmates and high school students — bringing the two groups together to learn and develop greater understanding of one another.

But the reading group has developed into much more than an exchange of knowledge and empathy. When one Palma student was struggling to pay the $1,200 monthly tuition after both his parents suffered medical emergencies, the inmates already had a plan to help.

They raised $30,000, which is an astonishing feature considering that minimum wage in prison can be as low as 8 cents an hour, so every cent donated by inmates is worth a lot more than a penny in the free world…