Deborah Appleman didn't ask her students what they had done, because she knew they had done terrible things.

"Every single other person in their lives -- from their lawyers, to their parole officers, to their families, to the guards -- viewed them as inmates," she said. "The one important gift I could give them was to perceive them just as human beings."

Appleman is a professor at Carleton College in Northfield. On sabbatical last year, she taught creative writing at the maximum-security Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater.

Writing letters, memoirs and haikus, the 24 men were much like Appleman's students at Carleton: bright, respectful, excited to learn. When turning in a paper late, they "offer the same excuse ... as generations of students have done," Appleman wrote. "'I ran out of time.'

"I thought time was all they had."

Most were serving life sentences. But before being locked up, many had lockers in the same Minneapolis high schools where Appleman once taught. She'd study their faces. "Did I see them then? Could I have done something then? Could an assignment have saved them?"

Now, in a sense, the men are saving themselves. As part of the class, for which they received credit toward an associate degree, they wrote letters to young men. In thoughtful prose, they encouraged them to respect their mothers, trust themselves and read Robert Bly.

"There's always hope," LaVon Johnson wrote. "Hope that one day you'll be able to look in the mirror and be proud of the man standing there looking back."

Appleman compiled their letters and poems in a book, "From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings," leaving her own name off the cover. "I want this to be theirs, and me to basically disappear from it."

She brought them copies.

"I feel like I could see them recalibrating their identity," she said. "Not only are you a writer and a thinker -- which is how I always tried to treat them -- but you're a published writer."

Jenna Ross • 612-673-7168