The intelligence of a person is difficult to label or measure. IQ tests were created with the purpose of giving a numerical value to intellect, but as many people will tell you, a test cannot accurately evaluate how intelligent you are.

It’s for this same reason that district testing in high schools is so looked down upon. People may not like it, but the most common way people dictate how smart they are is by comparing the grades they receive in school. Subsequently, this leads to people using the college they attend as a way to see where they stand among others. There’s a stigma against students attending community colleges despite having a fairly good education simply because anyone can get into those schools. As a result, students spend large sums of money they may not have in order to attend public or private universities simply because they require certain grades to be allowed admittance. It’s under these guidelines that the consensus becomes that the better the school you attend, the more intellectually capable you are. If such a concept is true, then how could it be possible for Harvard to lose in a debate match against prison inmates?

Harvard is widely considered to be one of the crowning achievements of academia. Work hard, get into Harvard, and supposedly, you're better than everyone else. Many will tell you this is a load of malarkey, and inmates of the Eastern New York Correctional Facility would probably agree. As a part of the Bard Prison Initiative, these inmates were allowed to compete against the Harvard team in a debate on whether or not schools should have the right to refuse undocumented students. Much to the surprise of the Harvard team, the inmates dominated them.

This crushing defeat was a surprise for a variety of reasons. The first challenges the assumption that attending Harvard simply makes you smarter. No one is denying the Harvard team’s capabilities, but it appears that the prisoners were given limited accessibility to resources in order to research for the debate. It took quite some time for the desired books to reach the prisoners, and on top of that, they had no access to the Internet. This is a stark contrast to Harvard’s easily accessible resources. Even stated by one of the Harvard teammates, they were not expecting the prisoners to be this good.

This statement sums up much of the problem this country has with prisoners. It’s a natural response to dehumanize convicted people and pretend they are little more than criminals. The idea that they could defeat anyone in a battle of the minds is ridiculous. This mindset is a problem in how we view inmates. If prison is truly about rehabilitation, then we have to see them as human beings capable of more than crime. This does not directly refer to these inmates per se, but more to the country’s prison problem as a whole. This victory by the inmates is huge news, which is good that it is getting attention, but it means that this victory was an absolute shot. Yes, Harvard was the expected win, but is it really a surprise that individuals who don’t have much to do other than the study would come out victorious? Not really. The point of this all is that you should never count a person out. As a result of society's view on inmates, a majority of them end up right back in jail after being let out. This program proves that the prisoners are still people and instead of monopolizing the prison system, we should put more of that effort into helping them and perhaps finding a true underlining solution to these problems—as anyone is capable of achieving anything.