Bill Cosby speaks to inmates at the ACI’s Medium Security Unit yesterday. “You did wrong, you got busted. But are you still dumb?” he asks.

The Providence Journal Mary Murphy

CRANSTON — Bill Cosby, the comedian and, more recently, social critic, once took a film crew inside a prison to learn why so many felons waited until they were jailed before they picked up books and started educating themselves.

In the prison’s barbershop, Cosby found nine men standing around. He asked each one why they were in, what crimes they had committed.

What he learned, Cosby told more than 200 Rhode Island prison inmates yesterday, was that “Nobody did it!”

As the laughter subsided inside the Medium Security Unit visitors’ room, Cosby delivered the point of his story: “Responsibility is what it’s about. You can’t go back [once you are released] and let people wait on you … If you want more, you have to give more. You have to believe in you! And you have to get up! Get up!”

The message has become one of Cosby’s mantras in recent years as he has lectured around the country criticizing social mores, particularly of young black men, and the importance of education to lift people from poverty and to curb violence.

Cosby’s appearance at the annual recognition ceremonies held at the Adult Correctional Institutions came about because of a letter Tracey Poole, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, wrote directly to Cosby in December.

Poole had read about Cosby speaking at a Connecticut prison. She asked whether he might do the same at the ACI. Months passed without word. Then one day this spring Poole picked up the phone. It was Cosby’s agent.

Cosby, who lives in Western Massachusetts, made two requests before he agreed to speak for free yesterday: he wanted a glass bottle of water, and he wanted to speak after Andres Idarraga, a former ACI inmate who since his 2004 parole has earned degrees in economics and literature from Brown University and plans to enter Yale University law school in the fall.

The 70-year-old Cosby, known widely as “America’s dad” from his television years as Cliff Huxtable of The Cosby Show, spoke with earnest while offering bits of humor.

Last fall he released a book, Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors. He told the inmates they need to purge their anger at their lot in life and stop making excuses before they are able to move on.

“I don’t know how to get a job — that’s how 4-year-olds talk. Grow up.” The thinking that “They ain’t going to give me nothin’ — this is the stuff that keeps people stuck.”

Cosby noted the success of Idarraga, who in 1998 entered prison as a 20-year-old convicted cocaine dealer looking at 14 years to serve behind bars.

Cosby said when Idarraga and other Brown University students enter college as freshmen, they pass through a campus gate and ceremoniously walk through it again upon graduation. He noted: that’s not much different than when convicts pass through prison’s gates, right?

“So you guys [are] just like Brown.”

Cosby told the group that with hard work, they could have bursts of achievement and success that would overshadow the mistakes they’d made in the past. But it was up to them.

“You did wrong, you got busted,” he said. “But are you still dumb?”

Idarraga encouraged the inmates to use their time wisely behind bars to prepare for their eventual release. He spoke of the shame he felt, knowing that his father had risked his life coming to America from Colombia for a better life for their family, only to see his son in prison.

As Idarraga spoke, his father, Argemiron, listened, a seat away from Cosby.

Afterwards, Idarraga said his father had told him how proud he was of his son’s prison-to-Ivy League journey.

“But he told me, ‘Well, you could have been doing this from the beginning.’ ”

tmooney@projo.com