"I made a speech at a town meeting about the audacity of this killer to think the state had any responsibility to give him a free education. It got written up in the papers and a professor friend of mine called me and said, 'If you've never been in jail you don't know what the hell you're talking about.' So I visited a jail and realized I really didn't know what the hell I was talking about. That's when I volunteered to teach there."

His first class at the medium-security Woodburne Correctional Facility consisted of twenty-eight men. Instead of teaching from textbooks, he drew from the pages of his life. "I grew up dirt poor in a hard neighborhood, and when I came to Brooklyn College I didn't have any special goals in life except to get out of the gutter. I worked full time all through school, making eight dollars a week to help out my family; just buying a pair of shoes was something for me. So I felt, in a way, I could relate to these men. That first day, I looked at them and said, 'I don't know you, and you don't know me. But I'm gonna tell you, unless you're a blinking genius-and I don't think there's a blinking genius in this room, and I'm including me-education is the key to getting out of the gutter."

At Brooklyn College, Sunshine studied economics and government, and in 1971 he earned a master's degree in cultural and policy studies from SUNY Empire State. But in prison, he taught the inmates what he had learned in life, about business and the principles of salesmanship.

"When you make a date with someone, you're selling. When you go for a job interview, you're selling. You're always selling. It's an important art to master," he explains.

Sunshine taught for ten years in the college program at both the medium-security Woodburne Correctional Facility and the maximum-security Sullivan Correctional Facility, and became the director of the program at Woodburne. "I talked with every new prisoner who came in and tried to motivate them. Only about 10 percent ever signed up, but the ones who did were sponges. I fed them what I knew in spoonfuls of truths-met them on common ground. And what I got in return were the best years of my life."

Sunshine's efforts gave his students a second chance at life. "Statewide rates of recidivism in the 1980s and 1990s were between 48 and 52 percent," he says. "For the inmates in my program, it was between 8 and 10 percent. When they got out of jail, they didn't have to go back to what they were doing to make a living. Education gave them the tools to change their lives. I met all kinds-rapists, murderers, thieves, gang lords-but all of them, and myself included, came out a different man."

In 1995, bowing to social pressures to take a tougher stance on criminals, Governor George Pataki cut the prison college programs. "We were shut down in one day," Sunshine recalls bitterly, then adds, "Prisons are warehouses now, and society's the poorer for it."

During his time teaching in prisons, Sunshine earned the name Hombre Bravos-Brave Man-for taking even the most hardened inmates under his wing. "I'm eighty-three years old," he says. "And those years were the best I had."