Changing Lives

Working with Literature in an Alternative Sentencing Program

Taylor Stoehr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317262589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Changing Lives recounts the experiences of a dozen men on probation in Massachusetts who took classes for three months to read and talk about great works of literature. The men explored the writings of Malcolm X, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, amongst others. In these writings the men discovered many issues relating to their own lives, such as substance abuse, family breakdown, poverty and racism. The lessons create a safe space for reflection and earnest conversation, in which the students no longer have to bluff or be cool, guarded, or evasive. And because the classroom puts them on equal footing with authority figures - teachers, probation officers and even judges - a new social awareness begins to emerge. Changing Lives shows how reawakening moral consciousness and a fresh commitment to society is essential if probationers are not to cycle endlessly through the limbo of street life and jail time.

Part One

Getting Started

Chapter 1

Masks

On the first night it’s always the same. When my friend Bert and I arrive at the classroom around 7:20 p.m., a few of our new students have gotten there before us, anxious not to miss their chance to cut six months off their probation time. Sometimes they’ll be in little groups of two or three, but more often they’ll be sitting alone, usually in the back of the room, where years of schooling have taught them to hide from the teacher’s eye. At 7:30 the probation officers arrive, right on time. By a quarter to eight there are at least fifteen of us in the room—two teachers, two probation officers, and, depending on our luck in recruitment, a dozen or so men on probation from the Dorchester District Court, Boston’s most active criminal court.

Except for Bert and me, most of the faces in the room will be black, though in some years almost half have been white, and there are usually a couple of light brown guys from Caribbean or Cape Verdean backgrounds, who may speak without an accent but whose names are Marcel or Mario, and whose sport is soccer. Once, there was an Asian man. The group ranges in age all the way up to seventy, but most are at the lower end, some as young as eighteen.

Whatever color or age or accent, everyone comes that first night wearing a mask. Most of them acquired this blank and impenetrable gaze very early in life, when they were told, Big boys don’t cry, or maybe just, Shut up! Don’t bother me! By the time they get to us, the blank look has become habitual, and seems sullen and defiant—not quite a “thuggish” look, but on the verge of it. This is the armor that life on the street requires men to wear. You can imagine it on a mug shot, with a number below.

And why not? Some of these men have done hard time in state prison, where hooded eyes and an unsmiling mouth can be a matter of survival. One and all they’ve been dealt the slap in the face that our justice system administers to criminal offenders—arrest, trial, punishment. Now on probation and nearing the end of the gauntlet, these men have no reason to expect anything but another humiliating experience, one last finger-wagging admonition before being flushed out on the streets again.

The situation is loaded with ambiguity as well as indignity. Is this part of their punishment, disguised as rehabilitation? Is there any chance to get something more than six months’ remission of probation time? What would it be? The course is billed as “college-level,” and they’ve come, many for the first time, to an ordinary campus classroom. But unlike students in prison-based courses, almost no one here has come into the program to further his education, though its title is Changing Lives Through Literature. For men who may not have finished high school, and who haven’t read a book in years, if ever, the prospect of ten weeks of “literature” is daunting. As for the “Changing Lives” part, the main challenge they see is just to get through ten weeks without giving up any more of their autonomy than absolutely necessary. The perceived intent of every school they’ve ever known has been to break their spirit.

Quite a few of them are proud of their “street smarts” and can hold their own in any contest that depends on a quick mind and glib tongue. Some will have finished high school, perhaps even completed a year or two in a community college, or job training in the army—for not all our students are dropouts. But whatever their skills and resources, the entering attitude of most probationers is defensive, braced for the same old effort to convince their teachers that they are doing the assignments. For many, this is the way most of life has gone for them—dodging and bluffing, evasiveness alternating with bravado. Even for those who have avoided the streets, who have decent jobs and family responsibilities, there is a deep-seated distrust of strangers, especially people in authority, who always want something from you and must be outwitted.

But now conditions have changed: What is there to hide, after you’ve been caught and convicted? Having hit bottom, there may be some relief in no longer pretending you’re anyone but who you are.

On the first night every student gets a copy of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave in a slim one-dollar edition. The first assignment is to read a couple of chapters, just ten or twelve pages. In addition, a small packet is passed around, containing excerpts from other writers that parallel the opening passages in Douglass’s story. All in all, each week’s reading comes to thirty or forty pages, and there is a single question to be answered, related to the reading. Everyone gets a bluebook to write his answer in.

As I look around the room at their faces, it’s easy to imagine a grueling semester trying to get them to take an interest in these readings, even though the authors have been carefully chosen to speak to their condition, starting with three whose names are familiar to most of them: Frederick Douglass, the slave who made a man of himself; Malcolm X, the hoodlum who found religion in prison, took a new name and mission, and ultimately became a public icon; and Bill Russell, the tall youngster from the Deep South who ended up a famous basketball player and coach for the all-time champions, our local Boston team. We start with these, hoping such exemplary lives may strike the right note, but it’s not guaranteed. After all, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and Bill Russell are faded celebrities, and being asked to read about them can seem like just another history lesson—or worse, an obvious ploy, condescending to race and predicament. Some of the white and Hispanic students may resent the bias toward black authors, but even the African American members of the class are not necessarily happy with the prospect of “studying” heroes of their culture as far away and one-dimensional as Abraham Lincoln, John Lennon, or Bill Bradley would seem to a white probationer.

As I pass out books and assignment sheets, I can see people weighing them against the six months’ probation. Thirty pages seems overwhelming to some students, though the slimness of the Douglass volume is reassuring. I take time to praise Douglass, trying to make my own admiration for him apparent. He was “younger than any of you” when he escaped, I tell them, and only in his mid-twenties when he wrote this best-selling story of life in slavery. His passion for freedom made him the most important black man in America, going from total illiteracy as a slave to worldwide fame as a writer and orator, ultimately the US Consul to Haiti. I always end by advising them to skip the prefaces by the white preacher abolitionists Garrison and Phillips, whose stiff and formal prose doesn’t hold a candle to Douglass’s forthright idiom. By this time, they’re interested. Some have already opened their books.

As students raise their hands to ask questions, I make a point of getting each man’s name, trying to memorize as many as I can: Dave, Willy, Albert, José, Anthony, Trevor.

Dave, the man with a long ugly scar across his shaved skull, wants to know who takes attendance. Willy asks who will sign the papers at the end of the semester, when six months’ credit will get him off probation. Albert, who looks as scruffy as a panhandler come in from the cold, wonders whether the course counts toward college credit. I tell him no, asking myself what I will say if it turns out he wants to go back to school. He’s sitting right up front, where the good boys sit. José wants to keep his cell phone turned on, against our rules, because his girlfriend is pregnant and about to give birth. Anthony asks why we’re reading Frederick Douglass, hinting that he knows who that is. And Trevor—handsome as the devil—wants to know how to find the men’s room.

Here they are then, ten “black” students, three of whom might check “Hispanic” on the census, and two “white” students, Italian and Irish. Handsome, scruffy, scarred, poker-faced. One of the white guys and two or three of the others will disappear after tonight, but next week there will be some late arrivals to make up for them. An average class.

The two probation officers are black, but we’ve had white POs too over the years. As for the instructors, we’re both white, and we’re also a good deal older than anyone else in the room. Bert and I are long past retirement age—he’s actually retired and working a new job as an editor, whereas I still teach at the university. Once, at a graduation ceremony for the probationers, Bert began his speech by saying that between us we had taught an entire century. For good or ill, we’ve been part of the educational system that has failed many of its students, people we now confront once again, trying to repair the damage.

Of course, a bad education can’t be directly blamed for the offenses that have brought our students here. Very few of the probationers we meet ever protest their innocence, and even those few admit that they are guilty of some crime, if not the one they were accused of. Guilty or not, worthless schooling is one of the big factors in bringing them here—along with poverty, broken families, substance abuse, miserable health care, lousy jobs, and public indifference—all of which coalesce in a self-perpetuating culture of despair at the heart of the problem. “The list is endless,” as one of our probation officers puts it,

starting with prenatal care, where insurance companies and hospitals will provide better care for white females than for blacks. In the hospital white nurses treat black children differently. School teachers being made to use substandard materials to teach, coupled with improper training, treat black children differently. Police—racial profiling? Politicians using blacks to gain political advantages for their own kind. Real estate, banks, on and on.

Obviously, we are not going to reverse the effects of these chronic disorders in ten weeks of reading and writing, and yet some such desire, for each of our probationers, is the reason Bert and I keep coming out to the campus Tuesday nights.

A few of the most articulate in our groups—always black men—insist vigorously that only they themselves, working in their community, can solve these problems, by refusing roles and patterns pushed on them, by convincing their own neighborhoods to organize for the common good. Whatever else needs changing, they’re probably right about this. Not many of them have a very clear notion of how to do it, but the impulse to make a difference is very strong in some of them and is often part of a more personal ambition to change their own lives. Our course may serve as a practical step in this direction, since it gives them a platform from which to practice persuading others to their views—though not, of course, on opening night when everyone is still playing his cards very close to his chest. I leave it to the reader to decide, after finishing this book, what our program has done for its graduates.

The faces fracture a bit when I announce that we are now going to write and begin handing out pencils and paper. A few people don’t need pencils, the ones who immediately begin reading the question sheet I’ve given them. But the majority have worried brows and tight mouths as they look around to see what others are doing. “Write your name on the front of the bluebook,” I say, to let them know that these will be collected at the end of class.

Despite their anxiety, even they are soon writing—including the probation officers and Bert. I’m the only one who doesn’t have his nose in a bluebook. For the next twenty minutes I just study the faces, trying to fix them in memory. One of the POs has given me a class roster so I can try to match names to the beards and bandannas, and sad eyes.

It’s Charles who has the sad eyes. He is sitting as close to the hallway door as possible, head bent down to his bluebook and face hidden by the bill of a baseball cap that I never saw him take off, though he’s a man in his fifties. His pencil moves very slowly across the page. He raises his head to see whether it’s time to stop, and it’s then I glimpse his tired, cloudy eyes—cataracts forming there. He’s got a pair of glasses tucked into the collar of his pullover, but he doesn’t put them on.

We have asked everyone to answer one question:

What are the most important things a child needs in order to grow up “normal”—a healthy, happy, worthy person?

Charles makes a list of four that circles back on itself:

A child needs good parents

Self-respect and respect for others

A good home

Education

Parents to look after him or her

A home to comfort

Education for support

Respect for fellow men and women

That’s as far as he gets.

Meanwhile, I too am watching to see who has finished writing. Charles is not the only one who works with his head bowed almost to the paper, as if their mouths had to be near their pencils, whispering words out onto the page. For them writing is a kind of talk, something they must sound in their throats before transcribing it. But in the back of the room there’s a bright-faced fellow in his early twenties with bushy eyebrows, who sits straight in his chair and is writing fast, with evident ease. Luis will turn out to be the only confident writer in our class this semester. Indeed, one night he will tell Bert he’d like to become a writer. Whether or not he has the necessary obstinacy for such a calling, he stands out in this group of men whose hands are obviously not used to holding pencils.

The fellow with gold-rimmed glasses sitting next to Luis is José, the one whose girlfriend is pregnant. They were the first people in the room tonight, talking quietly together when we came in. I introduced myself, asked them their names and whether they knew each other. In fact they did, having met in another program administered by the courts to which they both had been sent.

“Anger management?” “Substance abuse?” “Fatherhood?” I never inquire. In general, I don’t want to know why our students are in trouble with the law, how much time they’ve served in prison, or what the court has identified as their problem. Some of them are actually eager to tell, others embarrassed and ashamed, but it’s not really helpful information for us. What I wonder about is to what degree their self-image is clouded or distorted by some label they’ve accepted or refused—“addict,” “batterer,” “drunk.” The truth is that in most respects they are all quite ordinary human beings, coming out of a nightmare, trying to get their bearings again but still very much in the dark. One of the biggest problems they have now is the way they’ve been defined by their crime, their “record,” the label society has pinned on their backs, which makes it hard for them to get a decent job or a place to live, or a life. But here in this room they’re welcome regardless of their past. Whatever they need to tell, or to hide, is okay with us. To this day I don’t know how Luis and José got into trouble, or what program they were ordered to attend. What I do know is that Luis once saved someone’s life, and that José must have a child of school-age by now.

The first one to finish writing—to run out of things to say—is not Charles after all, but Trevor, and my initial intuition about him is already beginning to be confirmed. He doesn’t want to be here, and he will do what he can to demonstrate it. When he comes back from the men’s room, he sits in the far corner near Luis and José, who are still writing. His handsome face has a guarded look, and his posture—a loose, baggy slouch—is meant to communicate indifference. Looking at Trevor’s writing later, I find he can string sentences together with ease, but he puts all his effort into keeping what really matters to him from coming to the surface. The result is like his demeanor, bored and boring. He’s just waiting it out.

Although it proved difficult, we would be able to get behind this façade at times. With the right provocation, Trevor could break into a marvelous grin and blurt out some blunt truth about himself: “People all tellin’ me I’m selfish,” he laughed one night—“Well, I am!”

It was hard not to like Trevor, but we w...