Not long after being booked into state prison, Kory Nokes realized he was going to be reminded on a daily basis that he lived at rock bottom.

“When I put my clothes on, it said ‘prisoner’ on them,” he recalled. “No privacy—the guards, the sounds, the violence. But I decided I wasn’t going to keep going down. There was only one way I was willing to go, and that was up. I started investing in myself every day, to slowly chip away at this mountain I had in front of me.”

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In January, researchers at Stanford Law School published a report citing a national “movement to expand higher education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students,” with 19 community colleges in California alone providing full-credit, face-to-face classes in “nearly all of the state’s 35 prisons.”