Knowledge & Redemption

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Lynn Novick about her four-part documentary College Behind Bars. The film follows the progress of students in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) as they pursue their undergraduate degrees. Sam and Lynn are joined by Jule Hall, a BPI graduate who served a 22-year sentence and is now working for the Ford Foundation.

Lynn Novick is an Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. duPont Columbia Award-winning documentary filmmaker. She has been producing and directing documentaries about American culture, history, politics, sports, art, and music for nearly 30 years. In collaboration with co-director Ken Burns, she has created more than 80 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS, including The Vietnam War, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, The War, and Prohibition.

Jule Hall is a BPI graduate who completed an undergraduate degree in German Studies in 2011. He continued his education by enrolling in a graduate-level, Public Health specialization and became a BPI-Tow Public Health Fellow. In 2015, he volunteered at the Brownsville Community Justice Center, where he tutored justice-involved youth in preparation for high school equivalency exams. In 2016, he secured employment as a campaign coordinator at Picture Motion, where he helped to create social impact campaigns for award-winning documentaries examining Prisoner Reentry, Gun Violence and Inequality in America. In 2017, Jule served on the Documentary Selection Committee of NBCUniversal and AFI DOC’s 2017 Impact Lab. Currently, Jule works as a program associate for the Ford Foundation where he provides data analysis and strategy development in its unit for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice.

Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events.

Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Harris's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.