Prison Experiment: Sentenced To Read

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By Hartford Courant

Published: 10/14/2002

Filing into class, they looked no different from the other young people at the mall-like campus of Tunxis Community College in Farmington.
They took seats and were soon talking about three fictional teenagers, characters in T. Coraghessan Boyle's short story 'Greasy Lake' whose drunken trip to a lakeside hangout turns weirdly violent.
They all knew about drugs and alcohol, the 'gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird and Bali Hai' that Boyle's characters chugged down.
Peer pressure was a factor in the story, said English Professor Francena Dwyer, and peer pressure led to bad choices. The kids could relate again. Their bad choices are a matter of record in Superior Court. They have either been arrested or convicted of criminal violations. The class is an alternative sentence.
We've tried other ways to reduce criminal activity in Connecticut, without huge success. Why not literature?
The class I visited this week was the first Connecticut version of a program begun in Massachusetts a decade ago called 'Changing Lives Through Literature.'
The program, which someone called 'the book club for convicts,' is offered in a dozen locations in the Bay State as condition of probation. Eligible offenders agree to attend a class on a college campus each week for 10 or 12 weeks. If they complete the program, their probation is reduced, usually by three months.
It was started by an English professor, Robert Waxler of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and a judge, Robert Kane, two friends who were unhappy about trends in their respective professions.
Waxler had been told at seminars and workshops that literature was marginalized, that it had lost its power. He didn't believe it. Kane was frustrated by turnstile justice, the rote sentencing of the same people to the same jail cells over and over.
The two men talked about an alternative, said Waxler, who was in Hartford on Tuesday. He told Kane to find eight men with serious records, and send them to a program at UMass. Waxler set it up and got the books.
Kane did his part. The eight men had a total of 148 convictions among them, but they could all read at an eighth-grade level or better. Waxler picked such books as 'The Old Man and the Sea,' 'Deliverance,' 'The Sea Wolf,' 'Of Mice and Men' and 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'
The men stood out from the students, in the way they dressed and carried themselves. Some college officials were nervous that they'd rip the place off. Waxler plunged ahead. Kane and a probation officer also attended the class.
After about three weeks, Waxler knew he was onto something. The men now dressed and walked like college students. One drug dealer was staying home reading, and reading to his child.
Waxler and Kane started a program for women in the Lowell area, and they were on their way. In addition to the Massachusetts venues, 'Changing Lives Through Literature' is now in more than a half-dozen states, including Texas, and may soon expand to England.
The program does a lot of good things. It gets offenders out of their environments and brings them to a new environment, the college campus. They have a voice at the table, the respect of an audience.
But mostly, it's the books. 'Literature is a mirror,' Waxler said. 'Many [of the offenders] are in a continuous present, in their own jail. They can't get beyond the self. Then they'll see themselves in a character, see themselves from the outside, and there's a moment of revelation.' He had one student who identified with Wolf Larsen, the cruel, domineering captain from 'The Sea Wolf,' but said, 'Now I see that Wolf Larsen was an idiot.' Another was inspired by the endurance of Santiago, the aged fisherman in 'Old Man and the Sea,' to keep out of the drug life.
There's data to back this up. A study of the men who went through the first four classes found that only 18 percent committed crimes again, compared with 43 percent in a comparable group of offenders.
The program was brought to Connecticut by Brian Sullivan, a retired probation officer who works for Community Partners in Action's Alternative Incarceration Center in New Britain and also teaches a class at Tunxis.
The fledgling class has five students from the New Britain center aged 17 to 23. Unlike Massachusetts, the Connecticut class has some pre-sentence clients, doing the program before they go to trial. The goal is the same: They'd like to direct their lives away from crime and jail.
If it goes well, as it seems to be, Sullivan hopes to expand the class to eight or 10. CPA is looking at establishing programs at alternative incarceration programs in other cities.
As Sullivan is quick to point out, this isn't a panacea. But it reaches some people, and isn't very expensive. He thinks that makes it worth trying, and so do I. Connecticut has spent more than $1 billion for new jails in the past 15 years, and we spend almost $1 billion a year for our seven criminal justice agencies. And it's all for a core group of 30,000 to 35,000 people - 1 percent of the state's population - who keep funneling through the criminal justice system.
Reducing the size of that group ought to be our primary goal, and every little bit helps. Sullivan said two of the young people in the 'Changing Lives' class, and possibly a third, plan to attend community college in the next year.

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