Why you shouldn’t be surprised that prisoners crushed Harvard’s debate team

Last month, a debate team of three inmates with violent criminal records defeated a team of three Harvard University undergraduates.

It sounds like an underdog story plucked from the pages of a yet unwritten Walt Disney screenplay — and in some ways, it is.

But it’s also worth pointing out the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a matchup — the first (and most pernicious) being that criminals aren’t smart. If a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it.

Despite living behind bars, prisoners have recorded albums, produced fine literature, run lucrative criminal enterprises and mastered the ancient meditation technique known as Vipassana.

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