Hollywood is full of ‘based on a true story’ movies where some inner city youth takes up chess / football / jukskei (alright, maybe not that last one) and escapes the harsh realities of their everyday lives.

Their next script has just been written and it’s one for the ages, some hardened criminals from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility beating the Harvard University debate team.

We’re not talking petty thieves either, we mean three men convicted of violent crimes such as manslaughter who call the maximum security prison home. The Telegraph reports:

The three inmates, Carl Snyder, Dyjuan Tatro and Carlos Polanco, were tasked with arguing that public schools should be allowed to turn away students whose parents entered the US illegally.

The inmates, who were quick to establish after their victory that they would never want to bar a child from school, were not allowed to use the internet to study for the debate, but were able to come up with arguments that the Harvard team had not considered.

The inmates impressed the judges by suggesting that if public schools turned the students away, non-governmental organisations or wealthier schools could step in and provide better education to the children in any case.

We can start counting the days until Matt Damon and Ben Affleck turn this one into a cult classic. Maybe they can get Sandra Bullock involved as well, she loves winning an undeserved Oscar for appearing in movies like these.

[source:telegraph]