SESSION ONE (10/14/09)
Garner Correctional Institution (GCI) sits on 118 wooded acres just a few miles from the quaint Main Street of Newtown, Connecticut. Approaching GCI from a narrow, tree-lined drive, I see first only the prison’s main entrance, constructed of reddish orange brick and elaborately criss-crossed by white arches and beams. The place looks as harmless as a community college until I drive closer and enter the visitors’ parking lot, where the view opens up to reveal two tall parallel chain-link fences crowned with razor wire.
I park and stare at the blank walls beyond the fences. I’m going in there, I remind myself.
In 1993, not long after GCI opened, two inmates escaped by cutting through these fences, but as I walk to the front door I can sense the fortification, the heaviness of the place—these outer walls look as though they could be ten feet thick—and I can’t imagine anyone getting out of here. All that’s missing is a moat filled with crocodiles. There’s not a soul in sight—not in the parking lot (though it’s full of cars and SUVs), not on the strip of grass beyond the fences. I take a deep breath, savor the sounds of birds and the wind rustling through the autumn leaves, and open the door.
Inside I hear only the low, dull hum of air conditioning. (Like a commercial airplane, the facility is sealed tight and thus requires canned air. The inescapable sound will be a recurring motif in the inmates’ writing.) Several rows of plastic benches line the lobby. I picture the seats on visitation day, filled with wives and mothers and girlfriends and children waiting to see their incarcerated men. I imagine their high-volume chatter as they trade tales of woe and injustice, their voices hardened, like their hearts, by too many hours spent on one side of the visiting table. But today the seats are empty, the lobby as quiet as a chapel. Straight ahead, a uniformed corrections officer (or CO—the term “guard” has long been out of use) sits behind a thick plate of glass. I tell him I’m here to teach a writing class in the prison library. He nods and picks up a telephone to call Mark Aldrich, the librarian.
“Someone will be down to escort you,” he says after hanging up.
I hand over my driver’s license in exchange for a small key. Along one wall are rows of lockers, the kind once found in train and bus stations. I stow my jacket, my wallet, my car keys. Like the men inside, I’m required to give up these personal items, and it feels wrong somehow, as if I’ve given up a small piece of myself. What’s it like, I wonder, to give up everything—your clothes, your money, your car, your home, your family, your right to vote, your dignity? It must be a little bit like dying.
While I wait for my escort, I take note of the signs posted on the walls:
Each visitor shall dress in a proper fashion with reasonable modesty. Revealing, seductive or offensive clothing that draws attention shall not be permitted.
Notice: One (1) visitor at a time in the rest room. See lobby officer for the key.
NOTICE: An inmate shall normally be allowed two (2) social visits each week, Monday through Friday, and one (1) on Saturday or Sunday every other weekend. No more than one (1) social visit shall be allowed for any inmate.
Fred Sgro, the prison school principal, arrives to escort me upstairs. Affable and nonchalant, Fred has about him the air of someone who has seen it all. He reminds me of character actor Jack Warden, who tended to play tough, volatile older men—harried husbands, hassled businessmen—in movies from the 1970s.
A week or so earlier, at our first meeting, Fred warned me against “winging it” as an instructor at GCI. “Other volunteers have tried that,” he said, “and the inmates can tell right away. They consider it disrespectful.” Respect, he told me, is the currency of prison life. He also advised me to dress well; shorts, an untucked shirt, a baseball cap will broadcast a lack of seriousness, and the inmates will take note and follow suit. At the same time, the prison volunteer training manual recommends we not dress too formally, in case the inmates get the idea that we’re wealthy. So today I’m wearing a freshly washed pair of khakis and a tucked-in, button-down shirt. This is the nicest I’ve looked in months, all for a bunch of drug dealers and rapists.
Fred waves me through a metal detector into an interior lobby area, where I hand over a second ID to another CO, who sits behind an even more heavily fortified wall of glass. He slides a visitor’s pass through a little drawer and buzzes us through a solid metal door into a small anteroom—a “sally port”—with doors at either end controlled by the CO. Neither door can be opened unless both doors are closed. The second door, the one leading into the inmate area, is large and constructed of heavy metal bars. It reminds me of the barred doors you see in banks, leading to the vaults. Once Fred and I are in the sally port, the CO presses a button and the barred door disengages from its lock, making a sound like metal cracking under tremendous pressure: CLANK! Fred and I step through the opening, and the door clangs shut behind us.
I’m in.
We climb a set of stairs and enter a long hallway that wouldn’t be out of place in a large high school, except that the small rooms we pass on the right—“We hold GED classes in there,” Fred explains—all have large plate glass windows so that the inmates can be visible from the hall at all times, like goldfish in a bowl.
An inmate approaches in a khaki-colored prison outfit—V-necked top, elastic-waist pants—that makes him look like a hospital worker in scrubs. My first thought is, What’s he in for? Is he dangerous? “Stay to the right,” Fred tells me, as if he were a driving instructor and the hallway a major city thoroughfare. Are there “traffic” rules here, too? I wonder. If I walk down the left side of the hallway, will the inmate challenge me? At the orientation meeting I attended a few weeks earlier, Mary Dunn, GCI’s volunteer coordinator, advised us to “always be a little scared.” Inmates are “keen judges of character,” she warned us, “and superb con artists.” According to the Volunteer Security Orientation Handbook, “Expect the unexpected… In several cases, volunteers have been hurt, victimized or murdered by inmates.” In the section titled “Hostage Situations,” we are advised “Don’t be a hero, wait for help.”
“Hello,” Fred says.
“Hey, Mr. Sgro,” the inmate replies with a smile.
A few more inmates pass us, each one saying hello to Fred. They’re black, white, Latino; some look tough, with hard faces and bulging biceps; some look like accountants. I expect them to check me out—Who’s this guy? What’s he doing here?—but they barely acknowledge me.
We turn left, passing a door leading onto a veranda. From the veranda a ramp leads down to a small walled-in courtyard, nicely manicured with grass and a few shrubs. This tiny oasis is for the staff only, Fred says, though inmates are allowed to mow the grass.
“Here we are,” Fred announces outside the prison library. I try to open the door myself, but it’s locked. Fred chuckles and produces a set of keys. All the doors are locked at Garner. Inmates must sign in and out, even to go to the bathroom.
The library is a more-or-less triangular room lined on one side by tall bookshelves and furnished with several large round tables and chairs. Along the near wall are low shelves and, above them, plate glass windows looking out into the hall. Another fishbowl. On the other side of the hall are more windows looking out on the courtyard. The natural light from these windows helps to counteract the harsh fluorescent ceiling lights.
A dozen or so inmates, in their identical uniforms, sit at the formica-topped tables. Mark Aldrich, the librarian, has recruited them over the past few weeks. Some are library regulars, some are in the grammar class Mark teaches, some are in a playwriting class. Today they’ve arranged themselves by race—the whites at one table, the Latinos at another, the African-Americans at two other tables. Some of the men nod at me, some stare off, others speak quietly among themselves.
I’m in prison, I keep telling myself, in a roomful of prisoners. I remember a made-for-TV movie I saw as a kid, The Glass House, a terrifying prison drama designed to scare the crap out of everyone. Male-on-male rape, drugs, gangs, sadistic guards—it had it all. Is that what life is like for these men?
“Welcome,” Mark says.
In his brightly colored sweaters, Mark has the bearing of a former priest—calm, patient, caring, but also skeptical enough that he can’t easily be bamboozled. He’s been here since 1996, and walks the two and a half miles to and from the prison every workday. A former volunteer director of community mural programs, he initiated the painting of the colorful mural of literary and movie figures—Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull, Braveheart, etc.—that brightens the cinderblock wall above the tall bookshelves. Mark is well liked by the inmates, in part because he does not behave like “management,” and treats them like real people rather than stereotypes.
“This is Mr. Belden,” he announces to the inmates. “He’s here to teach creative writing.”
And with that, I jump in, introducing myself as a writer and teacher and an MFA student. I explain that, while I’m here to satisfy a course requirement, I’ve also wanted for a very long time to teach in prison, and that I know from my own experience (as well as from others’) that writing can change your life. The inmates listen intently. I’m trying not to be unnerved by their laser-like eyes, knowing that, as Fred put it, they’re judging me—my words, my appearance, my reactions. Do I look frightened? God, I hope not.
Mark has handed out small, flimsy notebooks, and I make a mental note to bring in more sturdy ones next time. Still, I try to impress on them the importance of the notebooks—that they need to take care of them, that the notebooks belong to them, that they contain their words, their creations. Mark has also handed out pencils, which they’re required to turn in at the end of the workshop, though inmates are allowed writing utensils inside their cells (pens and pencils are considered potential weapons only outside their cells and the library).
A few have questions. Where do I go to school? How long will I be teaching here? The unspoken concern behind their questions is Are you going to keep coming back? From what Mark and Fred have told me, and according to accounts of prison writing classes I’ve read, inmates can be like children who require reassurance of your commitment to them. I tell them that I plan to continue teaching even after my MFA program requirement is satisfied, and that, as long as we’re all having a good time, I will keep coming back.
As the men speak, I refer to a list of their names and try to remember who’s who. At first I call them by their first names, which are easier to remember: Khalif, Brushawn, Hank. But at one point Mark slips me a hastily scrawled note: It’s better to refer to them as Mr. So-and-so. I nod, remembering how it’s all about respect.
Rather than have the men introduce themselves, I give them their first exercise.
“Write ten things about yourself,” I say. “But make one of those things a lie. When we’re done, we’ll read our lists out loud, and the class gets three chances to guess the lie.” They start writing before I even stop talking.
After ten minutes, everyone has finished. No one hesitates to read their work out loud. The lists are funny, revealing, and sometimes heartbreaking. Most of the lies are quickly uncovered—“Yo, holmes, you don’t love jazz!” “He ain’t no Jets fan!” “You’re Puerto Rican, not Dominican!”—because, as the men explain, they know each other so well that it’s hard to fool anyone.
Each list conveys important character information. Some men write ten simple factual sentences: “I was born in New Haven. I have five brothers and sisters, etc.” One writes a list of beliefs about himself: “I’m a good son. I’m a good father…” One forgoes a list in favor of a narrative, which throws off the others, who get caught up in the story and forget to look for the lie. By the time we’re done, they’ve loosened up a little, and I feel like I know them better than if they’d spoken extemporaneously about themselves.
*
THE INMATES
Mr. Carlin*: white, stocky, with a shaved head and multiple tattoos on his thick arms. A longtime inmate, he works in the library, and seems to have found a positive outlet through writing and reading. He smiles readily, a big toothy grin, but it’s not difficult to imagine him, in his younger days, being violent.
Mr. Thomas: African-American, thin, with intense, piercing eyes that show a combination of intelligence and anger. He’s the only inmate who has shared with me his crime—larceny (it comes up during a one-on-one discussion in which he expressed excitement about a big court case that might affect his own case).
Mr. Brown: African-American, tall, built like a refrigerator, with a large square head to match. An intimidating character, with a sarcastic sense of humor.
Mr. Mendoza: Latino, skinny, with cornbraids, a spark plug, tough on the outside but capable of very sensitive writing.
Mr. Lewis: African-American, wiry, with a gentle voice and shy smile. He seems out of place here.
Mr. Chandler: white, young, lost. At first this guy breaks my heart—he seems like he’ll never make it here—but as the weeks go by, he opens up and seems to find his place, and the other guys respect his intelligence.
Mr. Sherman: African-American, stocky, with tight cornbraids and a round face. He consistently comes up with insightful comments about others’ work. Drops out after a few weeks due to a new job in the prison laundry (returns for second term).
Mr. Gutierrez: Latino, tall, shaved head, a little older than most of the guys, with a tough exterior that softens when he puts on his reading glasses and shares his metaphor-laden stories.
Mr. Douglas: African-American, large but soft-spoken, very much a mama’s boy if his work is any indication. He contributes recipes to the prison newspaper. “Big D’s Jail Snacks and Meals” include S’mores and Spicy Nachos Supreme.
Mr. Jones: African-American, brawny, with two short, tightly wrapped braids that hang to the back of his neck, thick glasses. He speaks in a tough Brooklyn mumble and can be resistant and slightly combative, but in the end he becomes one of the workshop’s greatest cheerleaders.
Mr. Compson: white, burly, with shaved head and tattoos, plus a long, bushy country gentleman beard. He’d fit right in at a Hell’s Angels rally. A strong writer, but self-critical, afraid to let the creative side of him fly.
Mr. King: African-American, thin, bespectacled, with short-cropped hair. He’s unafraid to swing for the bleachers with his ambitious, philosophical stories.
Mr. Lake: African-American, with springy dreadlocks and a charming smile that contrasts with a slow, sandpapery speaking voice with an undertone of rage.
*
While the list of names includes each inmate’s prison numbers and which unit he lives on (each unit denoting the inmate’s security status), there is no way to know what crimes they committed to get here. They are discouraged from writing about their cases because many are still pending and anything they write could be used against them. Not that I’m anxious to find out. I can already tell that I will be getting close to these guys, and I don’t want our relationship colored by the knowledge of what terrible things they’ve done. Besides, as it says in the PEN prison workshop guide, Words Over Walls, “Never ask prisoners to write about the crime for which they are imprisoned, and do not inquire about it. Your business is to teach writing” (Jones, 19).
Next we spend a little time going over ground rules for the class. Basically, these consist of respecting each other and each other’s work. When someone is reading out loud, we’re to be quiet. When we discuss the work, we are to be positive and constructive. (In this case I follow the guidelines imposed by the New York Writers Coalition, for which I once volunteered. The people we were working with, much like these inmates, were either new to writing or had very little experience with criticism, and because our mission was not to turn them into brilliant writers but to simply encourage self-expression, we stressed only the positive.)
I also bring up ground rules imposed by the prison administration: no profanity, and no writing or discussion of violent acts. The profanity rule surprised me when Mark and Fred told me about it at our initial meeting. In Mark Salzman’s True Notebooks, the incarcerated teenagers the author works with are not prohibited from using “cuss words.” I asked Mark and Fred whether the inmates could write profanity in their exercises, so long as we edit it for publication in the prison newspaper or literary magazine. No, they said. Profanity is not allowed at all. This disappointed me at first; then I realized this kind of limitation can be advantageous—the inmates will have to be creative and find alternative ways to say what they mean.
With 20 minutes left in the two-and-a-half-hour session. I speak a bit about the five senses and ask the men how they would describe the library in a story: what does it sound like (the constant whir of the air conditioner, to one inmate, is like the sound of the ocean); what does it smell like (“old carpet,” “decaying books,” “the inmate next to me”); feel like (the tables are hard and smooth); what is the light like (harsh)? I talk about writing as a series of choices, and how those choices reflect the mood and feeling, so that someone feeling happy would describe the library differently than would someone feeling sad or angry.
Then I assign them an exercise to do on their own over the next two weeks: to describe the room they wake up in every day. Some of the men laugh.
“The rooms here are all the same!”
“Exactly,” I say, and they immediately understand how this will make the exercise interesting: despite living in identical cells, each man will write something different. Taking up the concept of mood, Mr. Sherman insightfully comments that a man would describe his cell differently on the day he was to be released than he would on his first day inside.
Mr. Thomas raises his hand. He wants me to know that, despite the inmates’ laughter, this exercise is not a joke. “Have you ever been in prison?” he asks. I tell him that I have not. “Then you can’t possibly know what it’s like to be here,” he says, “what it’s like to wake up in one of these cells.” His eyes bore in on me. “I just want you to know that this is no small thing you’re asking us to do.”
This guy frightens me, and at the same time I love what he is saying, the truth of it, the power. Of course he’s right; I don’t know what it’s like to wake up in a prison cell, and will hopefully never know. Hard pressed for a response, I thank him for his comment and assure him that I understand where he’s coming from. Later on I’ll wish that I’d had the presence of mind to respond with something profound and meaningful—the first of many such times. In this case, I could have told Mr. Thomas that it’s his job as a writer to somehow show me what it’s like to wake up on the inside, to make me feel, through detail and mood and metaphor, as if I were waking up in that cell myself.
When the session has ended, a few of the inmates approach me individually and ask me questions. Mr. Carlin wants to know about MFA programs and whether, upon his release, he would have a chance of being accepted. I take in his shaved head and the elaborate tattoos adorning his thick arms. He certainly doesn’t resemble the typical MFA candidate, but I assure him that if his writing is good, a school will want him.
Before being escorted out, I shake hands with Mark and ask him how he thinks it went. He’s happy, he says. I’d structured the class well, unlike a previous volunteer who traipsed in unprepared, wearing shorts and inviting debate on controversial topics that had the inmates practically throwing punches at one another. “The first rule of teaching in prison,” Mark says, “is to know your audience.” Then he says he’s going to invite the warden to stop by and observe, which I interpret as a thumbs-up for my performance.
On the way out, I feel like I’ve made a good start. I want to do better with the men’s names, and I wonder how many will come back next time (and the time after that), but they were engaged and their writing was good. When the barred door slams shut behind me this time, it doesn’t sound quite so loud.
*
In True Notebooks, Mark Salzman chronicles his experience as a volunteer creative writing teacher at Los Angeles’s Juvenile Hall. He is candid about his initial fear and skepticism, and even includes a list of his reasons not to teach the class (“Students all gangbangers; feel unqualified to evaluate poems about AK-47s… Still angry about having my apartment robbed in 1987” [9]), and yet the inmates seem to take to him immediately. Fred Sgro warned me not to wing it, and yet that’s exactly what Salzman appears to be doing. He has no organized plan or curriculum, no detailed map to get his students from here (resistant, lacking in craft) to there (eager, skilled writers). His first “exercise” is to “Write what’s on your mind,” and the inmates dive right in and produce impressive pieces. What was Salzman’s secret? How did he so quickly establish trust? Perhaps the kids responded to his Zen attitude, a calm core that may be a result of his years studying classical music and martial arts. (Did he leave out the part where he told his gangbanger students, “Don’t mess with me—I studied kung fu with Pan Qingfu!”?) Or maybe the inmates were so eager to express themselves that they were willing to trust almost anyone who gave them the opportunity. Probably all these elements were at play, as well as Salzman’s apparent lack of judgment. He doesn’t ask why these boys are in jail; he does not dwell on the mistakes they made to get there. He treats them like students who are there to write, and when they bring up their bad choices, he does not blame. Eventually, he comes up with this very simple teaching philosophy: “I’m trying to build their confidence by giving them topics they want to write about” (Salzman, 127).
A good portion of this paper will be devoted to my struggle to come to terms with the questions What is my goal in this writing class? and How will I achieve that goal?
On the one hand, I want to provide the inmates with the basic knowledge of craft and technique—the difference between first-person and third-person point of view, for example—so that they will become more conscious about the choices they make while writing. But I wonder if I can also, by encouraging the inmates to express themselves through writing, increase their self-confidence and contentment, which will help to facilitate their productive return to “the streets.” Is that a realistic goal? Can helping inmates to write better somehow turn them into better citizens? In his essay “A Hive of Mysterious Danger,” Joseph Murtagh, an English teacher at Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, New York, writes of prison education in general: “Stuck away in a cell you will never act as anything other than a person stuck away in a cell, but in a classroom you can at least act like a student, which in turn might lead to acting like a citizen” (Murtagh, 75).
Susan Casey, a social worker who has taught creative writing to incarcerated adolescent girls in Portland, Maine, has championed “therapeutic” writing as a way to increase the inmates’ self-worth and well-being. By using Positive Psychology techniques—e.g., having the girls write stories about themselves using “positive emotion words” (one exercise is to “Write about your best possible future event”)—she finds that the inmates begin to “think beyond their problems and envision themselves having, and being more in, their future” (interview).
Similarly, in her essay “Imprisoned Mothers and Sisters,” Judith Scheffer observes that inmates who write “grow beyond individual pain as they develop both their writing craft and their personal coping resources by sharing their stories in writing workshops” (Scheffer, 120). “Whether achieved in the isolation of a cell,” Scheffer continues, “or within the community of an established writing workshop, writing has the power to change lives, if not circumstances, within the confines of prison” (124). In I’ll Fly Away, Wally Lamb writes eloquently about the inmates in his writing workshop at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution:
Within the confines of the prison, their writing began to give them wings with which to hover above the confounding maze of their lives, and from that perspective they began to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. (5)
Coming at it from the other angle, Eldridge Cleaver, in his classic collection of prison-penned essays, Soul on Ice, recounts his road to reform after a brutally violent career as a rapist:
After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself and for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray… I lost my self-respect. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered. That is why I started to write. To save myself. (15)
Can I construct a rough curriculum—a simple road map that can be deviated from when necessary—that will help “save” prison inmates?
Mark Salzman, while actively trying to increase his students’ confidence, does not have such lofty ambitions. Asked if he has a way of measuring improvement in the self-worth of his students, he responded, “I wouldn’t know how to measure that. I don’t even know how to measure my own” (interview).
