Bo Lozoff, a teacher and singer who has visited more than eleven-hundred U.S. prisons, tries to uplift inmates by teaching that even while incarcerated, a person can become free. Not physically liberated while confined behind bars, but inwardly free — by focusing on their true human potential. He’s witnessed how people who’ve committed horrible crimes can truly change. Since the 1970s, this has been the vision of the Prison-Ashram Project that Bo founded with the author and teacher Ram Dass. More than eleven-hundred prison visits later, he still travels the United States reaching out to inmates.

At this point, I’ve probably been in more prisons than any other person alive. And from my point of view, I would say 80 percent of the people we put in prisons shouldn’t be there.”

—Bo Lozoff, teacher and singer-songwriter