Fighting Crime through the Classics

prison

Reader Farida Bag sent me a link to an article from the London Guardian about literature being used to rehabilitate prisoners in Texas. The program, called Changing Lives through Literature (here’s the link to their website) has been racking up impressive results:

Of the 597 who have completed the course in Brazoria County, Texas, between 1997 and 2008, only 36 (6%) had their probations revoked and were sent to jail.

A year-long study of the first cohort that went through the programme, which was founded in Massachusetts in 1991, found that only 19% had reoffended compared with 42% in a control group. And those from the programme who did reoffend committed less serious crimes.

The program was founded by Robert Waxler, a professor of English at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He tells the following story:

In one group we read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. The story focuses on Santiago, an old fisherman in Cuba, and opens with some heartache: Santiago is not able to catch fish. We talk about him and the endurance he seems to represent, the very fact that he gets up every morning despite the battering he takes.

The following time the group meet, one of the offenders wants to share something. He’d been walking down Main Street and he said he could hear, metaphorically speaking, the voices of his neighborhood. He’d been thinking about returning to his old life, to drugs, but as he listened to those voices, he also heard the voice of Santiago. If Santiago could continue to get up each day and make the right choice then he could do too.

In the Guardian article, Waxler notes that the literature can provide something which many offenders have never had: a worthy role model.

If you want a further look at the kinds of interactions that are possible between prisoners and a work of literature, check out this description of a prison production of Midsummer Night’s Dream . My colleague Beth Charlebois spent a year in Missouri working with Prison Performing Arts (founded by Agnex Wilcox, an old Sewanee friend of mine) and talks about the tremendous impact Shakespeare can have.

Back to Texas. Apparently even prisoners who have committed armed robbery, assault or drug dealing will attend reading discussion groups and talk about such works as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bell Jar and Of Mice and Men. They also discuss texts by Plato, Mill and Socrates “to explore themes of fate, love, anger, liberty, tolerance and empathy.”

The newspaper article looks at a comparable program in England called Stories Connect, which is aimed at those with a record of alcohol and drug abuse (although it does not function as an alternative to prison sentencing). An opium addict tells the follow story of how Stories Connect saved his life:

We looked at a section of Oliver Twist, the relationship between Bill Sikes and Nancy. One of us pretended we were Bill while everyone else asked questions. The idea was you responded as much as you could from that character’s point of view. It makes you think about what others think and feel, and really helps you to reflect on yourself.

I sometimes see the classics like the forces of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, fighting bravely but desperately to hold off the invading hoards. From time to time, they chalk up a victory.

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