New York governor Andrew Cuomo set off a firestorm when he proposed that the state spend $5 million on higher education for prison inmates. Apparently, university tuition is so high that parents couldn’t stomach providing college to inmates free of charge.

So Cuomo backed off. But the contretemps revealed that the prison system already already provides college courses for inmates, organized and paid for by Bard College, a liberal arts school within the state. And it turns out that private charities in California, too, support prison education. Jesse Saffron suggests that private approaches should provide a model for other states.