They say you shouldn't judge a book by the cover but we are more than happy for this book to be judged that way. The cover art for this book was given to us by an artist in a Scottish prison. He got to hear about the book through the regular outreach work conducted by the Open University's (OU’s) Students in Secure Environments (SiSE) team. His work has been acclaimed and displayed by the Koestler Trust, a charity that promotes arts and humanities activities in prisons across the UK. Ruth McFarlane (see Chapter 2) invited ‘Ben’ to produce an image for the cover of the book. Without much briefing – except that it was about the OU's work in prison – he produced the stunning image on the front cover. We could not have asked for a more life-affirming image. As one of our contributors, Erwin James (see Chapter 14), a former prisoner himself, has said, ‘in prison you live in your head’ (James, 2013, p 3). Anyone who has been imprisoned knows the truth of that. Here, in ‘Ben’s’ artwork, that quality of imprisonment is invoked and subverted. The light of learning pours out of a radiant and smiling face. You can judge our book by the way it measures up to this image. It is not all about hope, transcendence and liberation, but the opening of life's potentials that Ben's image evokes has driven the OU's work in prison and propelled the contributors to this book, most of whom have been imprisoned themselves.

Academic publishing houses, such as Policy Press, invite independent academics to critically evaluate the strength and viability of the book proposals they receive. One of the academics reviewing our proposal commented “it reads a bit like a love letter to the OU”. We stand guilty as charged. Although the real history of The Open University is one of a tangled and contested mesh of competing narratives, as Dan Weinbren's Chapter 4 shrewdly attests (see also Weinbren, 2014), there is much to be loved and cherished about the OU.