Shakespeare Saved My Life Page 17

  “No, my sentence doesn’t dictate that. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, and nothing’s changed with my sentence. I am hopeful, though. I am working on an appeal, for the first time. It’s so neat to reflect on myself of only five or six years ago and see the contrast. My life was so miserable! I convinced myself that I was powerless and ‘myself’ proved myself right. In almost fifteen years of prison, I had never fought to go home! My only aspirations were the idea of leaving one prison to go to another. How crazy is that?”

  “So where do you see compassion in yourself?”

  “Even as a kid, I hated them bullies that picked on people, or people that abused animals, and I ask myself, how can I be more sympathetic for a dog than for this guy that got his head busted open? I’ve never been without compassion, though some of my behaviors have seemed compassionless. But here’s the thing: I still think compassion was the dominant part of my characteristic, strangely. You probably block it out. There are people I still don’t have compassion for, but there are a lot more people at this stage in my life that I do have compassion for that I didn’t before.”

  “One reporter accused you of being a sociopath, remember? ‘His expansive enthusiasm camouflages a persistent sociopathy.’”

  “I don’t understand why my enthusiasm would camouflage that.”

  “Do you think you’re a sociopath?”

  “That sounds so scary. A sociopath is what?”

  “Someone who kills on a whim.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever killed anybody on a ‘whim.’ It’s hard for me to fathom that, having no emotions. I can’t see doing something with no emotion. I can see doing it and not being tormented by what happens. But why do you do it? There has to be some emotional attachment. There has to be something that draws you to that act. I can see not being tormented; I can see that’s a defense mechanism. If I feel I’m gonna be hurt, I have a defense mechanism. I just go numb. I don’t let it attach itself to me, right?”

  “You turn it off.”

  “Turn it off, right.”

  “Have you always had this kind of callousness?”

  “No. I don’t know when it developed, but it was definitely in my seg experience because I remember being absolutely distraught—how could I get in those states of suicide other than this great torment? I want to escape this by any means! I got to get out of this! So this callous developed through that experience. I mean, you’re at the extremes. Either you develop this kind of callous, or you’re gonna do something really regrettable. But you’re not gonna settle in, nobody’s gonna carry that kind of load.”

  “Do you think you’ll have that for the rest of your life?”

  “Yeah I do, I think it’s a part of me. It’s not one of those things that I have control over; it just happens. You just instinctively go there: This is where I need to be psychologically. This is where I’m safe. They’re not gonna touch me, nobody.”

  “Nobody except yourself.”

  “Right. That is the bottom line. It is you.”

  “If you have this callous, what keeps you from killing people?”

  “You don’t get the callous before the deed, but after. It’s a coping mechanism, not a proactive thing.”

  “But you’re talking about this coping mechanism with a lot of confidence, so knowing that you can count on it to protect you from torment.…”

  “Right, so you’re saying preemptively, I can do this and know that I can cope. But I don’t know how to explain that it’s not a weapon. Let me think it through. All this is thinking as I go. Hey, most of my thinking is on a ‘whim,’” he said with a chuckle.

  “You see where I’m going with this.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “If you can handle anything—you know that nothing’s going to torment you psychologically and you’ve survived the most extreme form of punishment—what stops you?”

  “It’s a great question, but the crazy thing is, it already presupposes—I don’t know what ‘presupposes’ means, but I assume it means that it’s already concluded—that that’s what the person wants to do.”

  “Why don’t you want to?” I kept urging because I knew that this was an important discovery that he needed to make, and he was almost there.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “For me, all my violence, all of it, related to the impression I was trying to make. I don’t think I’ll ever lose that desire to make impressions, but two things have changed. I’ve found different ways to make impressions: with my intellect or whatever. And I have more confidence in myself to not have the same insecurities to need to make those impressions. So even if I have this callous, I don’t have the incentive. That’s what’s lacking.”

  “That’s the key, right there.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Socrates

  After spending four years discussing and examining Larry’s past, we turned to speculating on his future.

  “I don’t have an idea of what my life will be like twenty years from now,” he stated. “But I do want to excel in academics. I want to get the PhD, I really do. The idea excites me. And I’m excited ’cause, man, I really think we’re getting there with our program, we’re really reaching them. That excites me, to think where the program could go.”

  “You’re a good teacher.”

  “I will be,” he said with a proud smile.

  I liked the confidence with which he made the assertion, though his request for permission to file an appeal of his sentence—permission just to file—had been denied.

  “How did you get from contemplating suicide to saving lives?”

  “That’s difficult to say. For one, it’s uncharted territory. I think most people that look at things like this, these psychologists, are from the outside looking in. For two, there’s no one single thing, it’s a cocktail of things. The whole being here at this end and now here at this end, it could be that when people fall the farthest down, they bounce back the highest. What’s the opposite of ‘tragedy’? Aristotle says that tragedy is the downfall of the protagonist through his own internal tragic flaw. Then what’s the term for the story of a protagonist heading in the other direction? That is my story! Macbeth met me at his end and pointed me in the direction he vacated. In a strange twist of roles, this villain has served a very noble purpose.”

  “You said this was the best time of your life. Is that true?”

  “Absolutely, this has been at least a couple of years that I’ve known this is the best time of my life. And it’s not just a maintained thing—it keeps getting better. I’m stronger in those abilities, more able to influence my mood and shape the guy I want to be. The world just opens up, you really can do anything—okay, you can’t fly—but you can shape your life. There really is nothing I can conceive of that I can’t do. So without question, yes, absolutely the best time of my life, the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Forty years from now, I’m gonna owe the great things in my life to these times. This Shakespeare experience really is the key defining pivotal moment in my life.”

  He was beaming as he opened his book to start our work for the day. I was still trying to imagine where his life would go, whether he would get out one day, whether he would even get the chance to pursue his dream, but I didn’t want to shatter the optimistic mood.

  “After you get your PhD,” I told him, “don’t forget to come back to prison.”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s been a big part of my life; it’d be hard to ignore it. Plus I don’t think I’d have better insight anywhere else.”

  “You know what Socrates said about that.”

  “About what?”

  “Going back after you gain your enlightenment: The Allegory of the Cave.”

  “That wasn’t Socrates, was it? That was Plato, wasn’t it?”

  I was impressed. And he was right. It’s from The Republic, in which Plato quotes Socrates.

  “I did read that little cave thing, yeah!” he continued. “That was
a cool story, man! These people come out and they had just seen shadows and had characterized all these shadows. That was their reality ’cause that was all that they knew. And then to come and find out they were just shadows of other real things. But! The challenge was in going back and trying to tell these people, ‘Look, these shadows ain’t real.’ How can you tell somebody? ‘I know it’s real! You’re a freakin’ moron!’”

  He had just presented, in his typical down-to-earth style, a perfect summary of Plato’s philosophical essay. And he was still on a roll.

  “You know what?” he continued. “Them guys on the SHU might be seeing the real life, and everybody else is like, ‘Man, they’re crazy!’ I thought about that before too: What if they’re right? What if they got it all figured out, and I’m the one that’s lost in this whole thing? You know, they all had these crazy conspiracies: ‘They’re putting things in the food! They got things in the chase ways, you gotta cover your vent!’ or whatever their little paranoid scenarios were. And you’re like, ‘Hey, come on, you’re crazy!’ But then you’re like, ‘What if they’re right? What if I’m the crazy one?’ I think I see reality a certain way, but what if I’m the one that’s warped? And that’s what makes it easier for me to be maybe not sympathetic but to understand that, you know, this isn’t just something they’re doing. It’s the condition. This is the way they see the world. It’s not like they’re trying to be this person. I know what I know based on whatever my experience is, and they know what they know because of their ordeal, right?”

  “So now that you’ve gotten out of the cave and seen the shadows to be shadows—”

  “How do you convince them? You just have to remember what it’s like to know that that’s a shadow. You know what I mean? You can’t ever forget.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Doing Good for Bad Done

  Not only was Larry a good teacher, often making adept use of the Socratic method, but he also cared passionately about education. Soon after he enrolled in his first college courses, he became aware of the controversy over the topic of correctional education: Why should tax dollars support free education for criminals when law-abiding citizens have to go into debt to cover their college costs? It is a complex debate, and Larry contributed a well-argued essay that I published in Indiana English, a journal for which I serve as editor. He titled it “Doing Good for Bad Done.” Here it is in abbreviated form:

  There appear to be two arguments under one subject. The first is that offering educational programs for criminals is, in effect, creating smarter criminals. It is a very tough argument to debate. What makes this argument so tough to oppose is exactly what will undo the argument. The second argument is essentially a question: Why should we do good things for those who have done bad things?

  So, to the first argument: The developing mind of a criminal is just that—the developing of a criminal mind. But where do we find data to support that argument? It is not as though the assumed criminal lifestyle is charted and monitored. We are left to our assumptions; why would we assume otherwise? To assume that a criminal’s developing mind is a developing criminal mind, we must assume that the very nature of every criminal is crime and that the only possible change in a criminal’s behavior can be new criminal behavior.

  Logic says that the only possible way to assume such a conclusion about a person is to already harbor a universal conclusion about the idea of such a person. “A tiger cannot change its stripes.” Who among us has not deceived someone, kept something that did not belong to us, snuck out at night, “borrowed” Mom’s car, or engaged in any number of such common youthful adventures? If we are arguing that such behavior can only develop, then what are we saying about ourselves? We have concluded that crime is not a nature, it is a choice, and any choice is influenced by our experiences and our circumstances. The only thing that really separates the criminal from us is the different experiences and circumstances. Why do we assume that educating a criminal is merely helping him commit more sophisticated crimes? Why can’t we assume that an education can give this person the tools to make more acceptable choices?

  Our second argument is “Why should we do good for bad people?” The answer is because “anything else would be bad.” If we are not doing good for bad people, then we are doing bad for bad people. We should not be working on ways to do bad for isolated populations of people; rather, we should work on developing good no matter who is on the receiving end. That is our obligation to society.

  The statistical evidence speaks for itself in favor of education for prisoners, but let me share with you my own experience. I have made terrible mistakes in my life, and one terrible thirty-second mistake thirteen years ago cost me my liberty. I was seventeen years old then, and I am now thirty. The furthest I made it in school was a week’s worth of my freshman year of high school. In fact, I have been locked away from society since a very early age. As a person of the world, I was pushed over by a good wind. My behavior was driven by what others expected of me and what was left for me as an example. Obviously, the world you are exposed to is critical to how you end up. The good news is that since that is true, such a person is really susceptible to positive influence by the change of the world around him. It is a very inspiring story, because I am indeed the living fossil of positive change, and that education is indeed a powerful tool for positive change. You see, I was living in a supermax segregation unit when I was exposed to an educational opportunity that reshaped the rest of my life. Education gave me not only a new confidence in making decisions for myself, but it also gave me more understanding and many more options. It helped develop my critical thinking skills, and made it possible to better weigh behaviors and consequences. It gave me new direction in life and in a real sense it saved my life.

  We cannot risk not helping. The vast majority of prisoners are going to return home. They are going to be our neighbors and they are going to be around our loved ones. The question really comes down to: what kind of prisoner do you want living next to you? No matter how you feel about the subject, the reality is that these prisoners are indeed coming home, and you do have the power to help shape what kind of neighbor they will be. Why education? Because it is the one science that overwhelmingly works.

  Based on more than a quarter century of teaching incarcerated students, I’d have to say that he’s right. And many studies have shown that the more education a prisoner receives, the less likely he is to reoffend.

  I assign Larry’s essay every semester as required reading to on-campus students in my advanced literature class, which has the theme “crime and punishment.” The class attracts a large number of criminology and psychology majors. Here’s a typical example of what my students have to say about the essay:

  Prior to reading this essay about correctional education, I had my own uneducated opinion of this topic. I believed, like many others in society, that prisoners did not deserve to have an education. They committed crimes, and they should be punished for them, not rewarded. However, my opinion about correctional education was shifted during my reading of “Doing Good for Bad Done.” I now believe that correctional education is a great benefit for prisoners and for society. He makes a valid point. Providing prisoners with the opportunity to obtain an education could give them hope, help make themselves feel worthy and knowledgeable, and most importantly help them become a better person with a vision in life.

  From behind prison walls, Larry is reaching hundreds of students on campus and teaching them valuable lessons. The irony is that Larry himself will never be able to earn his own degree. In 2010, the state of Indiana revoked funding for correctional education.

  CHAPTER 62

  Correctional Education

  The state of Indiana’s decision to discontinue higher education for inmates closed a door in many lives—including my own. Not only had I taught college-credit courses to prisoners since I joined the faculty of Indiana State University in 1997, but also I had been appointed to an advisory position by the dean of th
e College of Arts and Sciences during the year that ISU expanded its prison degree programs from the two-year associate’s degree to a four-year bachelor’s degree. In coordination with the dean and associate dean, I created the bachelor’s degree upper-division course curriculum.

  “This is better than what students on campus take,” my department chairperson had admitted.

  I thought so too. Although I was not yet tenured, I had been appointed by the chairperson to serve as the director of undergraduate studies for the Department of English. In that capacity, I worked with hundreds of campus students in scheduling their classes, and I commonly saw seniors filling their final semester with fun courses to lighten their load or introductory-level courses they had neglected to take as freshmen. By contrast, prisoners took a full load (five or six classes per semester) of only 300- or 400-level courses. Furthermore, these were all upper-division advanced courses for which they had been prepared by their associate’s degree curriculum. Finally, the courses formed a cohesive, themed focus for each semester, alternating between America and the world, classic and contemporary. One semester might include Classical Greek Mythology along with History of the Ancient World. The next semester might have Twentieth-Century American History along with Jazz Music or Modern Theater.

  Because the courses were linked, the students were the same in each class and formed a cohort of “study buddies.” Because they were the same students each semester, professors got to known them well and could consult with one another about their students’ individual strengths and weaknesses. In these respects, the education that prisoners received was superior to that on campus. In other ways, of course, it was lacking: students and professors alike complained about the minimal availability of books and limited access to computer materials. Personally, I saw that as a plus: the Shakespeare text I assigned had no footnotes, nor could the students access Internet sites like SparkNotes that on-campus students often leaned on as a crutch. And, of course, there was no texting in class.