It happened twice this week.

The first time, my morning radio alarm went off.

It was tuned to KLCC, and through that half-awake fog of morning I started listening to a story about a powwow at Oregon State Correctional Institution.

Then I heard a voice I recognized.

Wait.

I know him.

It was Charlie.

Charlie is one of the people we’ve gotten to know through Adopt an Inmate, an inside participant in a Letters From Prison: In the Classroom collaboration. I went looking for the story afterward, and there he was—not only speaking in the piece, but pictured in the accompanying story.

There is something wonderfully strange about encountering someone you know from inside prison out in the wider world like that.

And then it happened again.

This time I was watching CBS News and saw a story about Paws For Life, the California program that brings incarcerated people together with rescue dogs for training and rehabilitation.

And there was Adrian Berumen.

Adrian is one of our artist contacts inside the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, who is also active in the dog program at his institution.

Twice.

In one week.

Two people we know inside prison suddenly appearing in news stories in the outside world.

What struck me most was what those stories allowed other people to see.

Charlie wasn’t simply an “inmate at OSCI.” He was a person participating in a cultural tradition and talking about what it meant to him.

Adrian wasn’t simply an “inmate in California.” He was someone caring for and working with an animal, participating in a program built around trust, responsibility and connection.

Those distinctions matter.

So much of what the public sees about incarcerated people begins with the thing that brought them to prison. Their crime. Their sentence. Their mugshot. Their worst day.

But that’s never the whole person.

The people we’ve come to know through Adopt an Inmate are readers and writers. Artists and musicians. Parents and grandparents. Students and teachers. Dog lovers. People of faith. People learning languages. People preserving cultural traditions. People trying to become better versions of themselves.

They are complicated human beings.

Just like the rest of us.

That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about Letters From Prison: In the Classroom. When students have an opportunity to communicate directly with someone who is incarcerated, they’re no longer learning about an abstract population.

They’re meeting a person.

They can ask questions.

They can listen.

They can encounter experiences very different from their own.

And perhaps they can discover that the distance between “us” and “them” isn’t nearly as great as we’re sometimes encouraged to believe.

I loved seeing Charlie come through my radio this week.

I loved spotting Adrian on my news feed.

And I especially loved that, for a few minutes, people on the outside got to see something we at Adopt an Inmate have the privilege of seeing all the time:

The person beyond the prison number.