What Change Means on the Inside

By Ivan Kilgore

People often ask whether people can truly change in prison. It’s a fair question, but I believe it’s the wrong one.

The better question is : What does change actually look like on the inside ?

For many people, change is measured by freedom. They think transformation begins when someone walks out of prison. But after spending years incarcerated, I’ve learned that real change doesn’t begin at the prison gate. It begins long before that—in the privacy of a prison cell, in the quiet moments when no one is watching, and in the difficult decision to become someone different despite living in the same environment.

I know this because I’ve lived it.

Like many men serving long sentences, I once measured time by years remaining on my sentence. Eventually, I realized that if all I did was wait for release, prison would continue imprisoning my mind long after my body left its walls. I had to make a different choice.

For me, change meant accepting responsibility—not only for the crime that brought me here, but for the life I wanted to live moving forward. Responsibility became more than admitting guilt. It became a commitment to build something meaningful with whatever time and opportunities I had left.

That commitment eventually led me to found the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation while still incarcerated. Some people found that difficult to understand.

How could someone serving a life sentence become the founder of a nonprofit organization ? How could someone society labeled a murderer become a community leader ? How could someone confined to a prison cell create programs that reached communities across the country ?

The answer is simple: Change begins when we stop allowing our circumstances to define our possibilities.

Prison strips away many things. It takes away freedom, privacy, independence, and opportunities most people take for granted. But one thing prison cannot take away is the ability to choose who you become. That choice belongs to every incarcerated person.

Over the years, I’ve watched countless men transform themselves through education, mentorship, faith, art, entrepreneurship, and service to others. Unfortunately, I’ve also watched many people remain trapped—not by concrete walls, but by hopelessness and the belief that nothing they do matters.

That is perhaps the greatest prison of all. Real change isn’t about pretending your past never happened. It isn’t about asking people to ignore the harm you’ve caused.

Real change means confronting your past honestly while refusing to let it become your future. It means developing discipline when no one is rewarding you. It means showing integrity when no one is keeping score. It means becoming accountable before anyone else believes you’ve changed.

Those lessons became especially important as I worked to build the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. Trust did not come automatically.

People questioned whether someone incarcerated for murder could lead an organization. Others questioned my motives or whether our work would last. I understood their concerns because trust isn’t something we receive simply because we ask for it.

Trust is earned.

It is built through consistency. Through transparency. Through humility. Through keeping your word even when doing so is difficult. Every letter I answered, every meeting I prepared for, every partnership I helped build, every student I spoke with, and every volunteer who joined our mission became another opportunity to demonstrate that people are capable of genuine transformation.

One of the greatest misconceptions about incarceration is that people believe change happens because prison itself changes us. It doesn’t. Prison provides time. What we do with that time determines whether change happens; some spend years becoming bitter and others spend years becoming better. The difference often comes down to purpose.

Purpose changed everything for me.

Instead of seeing prison as the end of my story, I began viewing it as the place where I would prepare for the next chapter of my life. I immersed myself in education, developed programs, built relationships with universities, collaborated with students and volunteers, and learned how organizations create lasting social impact.

I came to understand that leadership is not about titles or positions. Leadership is service. Leadership means solving problems larger than yourself. Leadership means helping other people recognize possibilities they cannot yet see for themselves.Perhaps the most valuable lesson prison has taught me is that our greatest form of wealth is not money. It is people.

Long before our organization received funding, we had relationships. We had volunteers. We had educators. We had students. We had people who believed in our mission. Those relationships became the foundation upon which everything else was built.

Social capital opened doors that financial capital could not. That lesson applies far beyond nonprofit work. Every person inside prison has something valuable to contribute. Some have artistic talent. Others have business ideas, mechanical skills, leadership abilities, writing gifts, or lived experiences capable of helping someone else avoid making the same mistakes. The challenge is believing those gifts still matter. They do.

Society often tells incarcerated people that we are defined by our worst decision. It places labels on us—felon, offender, inmate—as though those words fully describe who we are. I reject that thinking. Accountability requires us to own our past. But growth requires us to believe we are capable of becoming more than our past. Those ideas are not contradictory. They are essential to one another.

Today, when I think about change, I no longer think about release dates. I think about impact. I think about whether my life is creating opportunities for someone else. I think about whether my work is helping transform systems that have failed so many communities. I think about whether I am living in a way that honors the trust others have placed in me.

Change is not a destination. It is a daily practice. It is choosing discipline over excuses. Purpose over despair. Service over self-interest. Hope over hopelessness.

If there is one message I hope every incarcerated person hears, it is this : Never allow your current circumstances to become the measure of your future potential. The world may see prison bars. I choose to see possibilities, because real freedom begins long before the prison gates ever open. It begins the moment we decide to change ourselves—and then dedicate our lives to helping change the world around us.