Something familiar was happening to Floyd Kemfort, and you could see it in his eyes as he squinted at the math problem on a whiteboard, then looked back at his sheet of scratch paper. He shrugged, stymied by the numbers, and crumpled the paper into a ball.

Kemfort's frustration was cut short, though, by the patient voice of Brother Greg O'Donnell.

"You're doing OK," he said. "You know more than you did three weeks ago."

Kemfort sat in silence as seven other men — all fellow inmates at Waiawa Correctional Center — listened to O'Donnell, a member of the Congregation of Christian Brothers and a retired educator from Damien Memorial School.

They are men accustomed to being judged. They understand failure better than adding fractions. And yet, they know none of that matters when O'Donnell, a 69-year-old volunteer, comes to their prison classroom.

"Even though we are inmates, he teaches us with dignity," said Eric Johnson, a 40-year-old Big Island man serving time for a drug offense. "It allows the learning process to take place."

But O'Donnell's calm explanation is more than a math lesson. It's the legacy of his father, a Chicago policeman who helped inmates with their rehabilitation for nearly 30 years.

When O'Donnell retired in June 2007 as president and chief executive officer at Damien, he thought back to what his father often said about inmates.

"They are not bad people," Michael O'Donnell told his youngest child. "They are people who made mistakes."

So in the dingy classroom, with its cracked vinyl chairs, thickly waxed floor tiles and shuttered windows, O'Donnell sought to help, and in turn, Kemfort put his trust in the brother.

A 43-year-old Maui man serving time for assault, Kemfort twiddled his yellow No. 2 pencil as O'Donnell outlined a solution. He listened so hard, he said, that it made his brain hurt. Then he grinned.

The answer, he said, "came into my brain."

"I look forward to coming to this class," said Kemfort when it was time to leave. "It makes me want to go do homework. I still get confused, but by the time I get out of here, I know it."

BEING RESPONSIBLE

O'Donnell's father knew that a prison record would haunt a man no matter how hard he tried to succeed. The reality shaped the policeman's solution.

The elder O'Donnell would arrest criminals, then visit them in prison. When an inmate was released, he often got a ride from the penitentiary to the O'Donnell home for a celebratory dinner. Steak was always on the menu, and they ate off the good china. Then the detective would help the man find work.

"He felt that was part of being a responsible person," O'Donnell said. "He would sometimes see these guys as people who had been dealt a tough hand to work with."

O'Donnell grew up in the working-class landscape of 1950s southside Chicago. His home was a simple place with dinner at a kitchen table, a stay-at-home mom and family friends, all police officers, who put their guns on his parents' bureau before playing cards on Saturday nights.

Here, you were born Catholic and Democrat. Irish, too.

His father was "a tough cop." He left for work each morning with a shotgun. Sometimes took his wife on stakeouts. Once, he even sent his youngest child into an ice cream parlor to scope out suspected criminal activity.

"He was the kind of person who would always look for the best in somebody but at the same time be prepared for the worst," O'Donnell said. "He was not naive."

The fight against recidivism was a family affair. Sometimes, O'Donnell's mother, Mae, would drive the wives of inmates to the Pontiac Correctional Center so they could see their husbands. She often told her children, as she loaded them into the car for the one-hour drive, that they were going to "the big church."

"I didn't know that other people didn't do this," O'Donnell said. "A lot of these guys became family friends."

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Such were the life lessons that shaped O'Donnell, who joined the Christian Brothers when he was 17 because he wanted to make a difference as an educator. By retirement, he had spent 50 years in education. He had been a teacher, principal, coach, administrator — but he wasn't finished making a difference.

In October 2007, he walked into a classroom at Waiawa, a minimum-security prison that stresses education.

"I thought maybe I could work with these guys and teach them math," he said. "Math is a skill everyone needs. Every job needs it. And it is probably the toughest thing to deal with."

At first, the relationship was tentative. O'Donnell asked the inmates not to swear, but he didn't ask about their crimes. He gave them space but was not intimidated by angry outbursts, like the time an inmate slammed a chair against wall because he objected to the brother's seating chart. The inmates liked his Mustang convertible but could not understand his vow of celibacy.

Still, even after a lifetime of teaching, O'Donnell found his most appreciative students.

"At the end of class, I would say without exception, two-thirds of those guys will make an absolute deliberate move to shake my hand and say thank you," he said.

It's deeply satisfying.

"I really feel I am making a difference in someone's life," O'Donnell said. "I feel these guys know that there is somebody there in the system that cares about them. That is very heady wine for a guy in prison."

The odds would seem stacked against O'Donnell. Nobody he has taught graduated from high school.

"They all had varying degrees of failure in school," he said. "Virtually nobody has had any success. I go in there, and I try to get them excited. My biggest challenge is to try and excite them about math."

He's taught basic adult math, algebra and geometry. The inmates insist they'll never learn any of that, but O'Donnell always counters that they will fall in love with it.

So far, they have.

"For the most part, they want to participate," he said. "They want to go to the board and do a problem. That is a big step, to participate and be successful."