Assistant Professor of Music Hannah Standiford is hoping to offer a new music appreciation course entitled “Discovering Music” on Friday afternoons next fall, but the course will not be taught in the usual Arnold Hall of Music. Rather, it will take place at the State Correctional Institution Cambridge Springs — a local minimum-security women’s prison.

Standiford was inspired by work she did with Andy McGraw, a professor at the University of Richmond, who was working with Open Minds, a “college program sponsored by the Richmond City Sheriff’s Office and Virginia Commonwealth University offering dual enrollment classes held at the Richmond City Jail,” according to the program website.

McGraw started a recording studio at the jail in 2014 and due to the facility being a mixed-gender facility, he needed someone to orchestrate the women’s recording sessions. This is where Standiford was able to step in.
“The women who are there would write spoken-word poetry, or raps or songs,” Standiford said. “My job was just to help them record it.”

She spent nearly two years going in once per week to help with the recording sessions.

“I was like 21, 22, and to actually go in and have these kind of everyday interactions with people who are so demonized and misunderstood in our society was really powerful for me,” Standiford said. “It just really transformed my thinking about prisons and jails as parts of our community.”

These kinds of prison exchange programs have been around since the 1990s, with the most notable being the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program operated by Temple University.

The Inside-Out program “has now grown into an international movement comprised of hundreds of correctional and higher education partnerships, nearly 1,600 trained instructors, over two dozen think tanks, and more than 65,000 students worldwide who have benefited from these life-changing courses,” according to the program’s website.

Standiford took the Inside-Out training program to become an instructor in May 2025. The week-long 40-hour training program was led by Lori Pompa, a Temple professor and the founder of Inside-Out, and Gabby Yearwood, a senior lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh.

The training takes place online, with program mentors who were formerly incarcerated in order to convey the personal experience of incarcerated lzife, especially for those in the training who may have never stepped foot inside a prison or jail before.

“The whole idea is that folks from outside of the prison or jail are taking classes alongside those inside of the prison or jail as peers,” Standiford said. “They really emphasize that the folks inside, the incarcerated people, are not objects of study.”

Standiford’s music course would be the latest addition to the educational programming happening at the prison. There is already the opportunity to earn a GED, as well as vocational programs, such as an optical lab where the incarcerated will make glasses for The Eye Institute’s “Looking Out for Kids” School Vision Program, which helps the incarcerated women become certified opticians through the prison’s reentry program, according to Salus University Health. There are also opportunities to study cosmetology and to work in the Braillemates program, where incarcerated individuals learn to proofread, emboss and transcribe braille.

Standiford also hopes that Professor of Political Science Sharon Wesoky will also have a political theory course in the fall of 2027 at the prison.

“I am on sabbatical next year and one of my projects is going to be to revise the class, probably to orient the class around concepts of freedom and liberty,” Wesoky said about her political theory course. “I think it would be really interesting to talk about that with incarcerated persons, and a core concept of political theory.

For the last two years she has taught meditation to a dozen people at the prison.

“My job is to find people, outside students who think it would be worthwhile and build them in some way,” Standiford said, “to see this other part of their community that’s been totally hidden from their view.”