Norfolk Prison Colony was founded as the nation's first "community prison" in 1929. It was built on the philosophy of keeping incarcerated people engaged with, rather than removed from, the world. It had dormitories, not cells, a school, a quad, an auditorium. According to the prison school’s former principal Carlo Geromini, “Once you got inside the walls, you didn’t even know you were in a prison.” In 1931, a group of "lifers" formed Norfolk Prison Debating Society. The Norfolk debaters went up against—and regularly defeated—top college and university teams. Malcolm X wrote that his time on the debate team gave him his first taste of public speaking: "I was gone on debating." Another debater, Bruce Geary (a.k.a Sayif) said, “Winning something other than a fight... felt good.” By the 1980s, the national shift to "tough on crime" policies meant most programs at Norfolk had been eliminated.