All My Friends are Felons: Finding Hope for the Utah Department of Corrections

After his long and successful career as a coach and a high school administrator, Mark Hugentobler was “sentenced” to prison by his local school board. He became academy principal within the Central Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison, Utah. Arriving at the “Island of Misfit Toys” he soon recognized that his perceptions of the prison system were completely inaccurate. He found a world without hope. He came to realize that the Department of Corrections was not, as most people think, doing all they could to help “correct” inmates. It became clear that the system was dysfunctional and was in fact helping inmates become better criminals rather than helping them become better people. He came to realize that most of those incarcerated there would readily receive help and wanted to change but could only do so by exercising extreme personal effort, overcoming countless obstacles present in the current system.
He soon identified the vast, unexplored opportunities to help inmates: providing hope and purpose through education. He also gained the viewpoint of seeing prison life through an inmate’s eye, realizing the true story of life behind bars. During his eight years “down” he saw enrollment in the prison academy jump from 200 to nearly 1,200 students and enacted, firsthand, a model of the change that is possible in a broken system. If only someone would listen.