Shakespeare Saved My Life Read online

  When I began my journey into prison in 1983, I tutored first-time offenders in a basic literacy program through the PACE Institute at Chicago’s Cook County Jail. (PACE is an acronym for Programmed Activities in Correctional Education.) I discovered that some of the prisoners I worked with were from my old neighborhood. And, in a strange way, I felt at home.

  I felt much less comfortable when, ten years later, I went back to school to finish the college education I had discontinued to take on a full-time job. My goal was to complete that bachelor’s degree so I could continue on toward a PhD—making up for my mother’s lack of education in an incongruous way.

  While negotiating the unfamiliar terrain of academia and grappling with unfamiliar concepts such as literary theory, I once again returned to the more familiar ground of prison in 1993. This time, I was inspired by a comment made in a lecture by a famous literary scholar, who asserted that Shakespeare’s play Macbeth represented “the ipso facto valorization of transgression.” He seemed to be suggesting that Macbeth’s acts of transgression (murder) were worthy of praise, but I couldn’t help feeling that real-life transgressors would disagree, that they would feel that “valorization” of transgression was anything but “ipso facto”! And that conviction would eventually lead me to work with Shakespeare in prison.

  With a graduate degree in hand, I started working as a college instructor in prison, teaching introductory-level English classes to incarcerated students pursuing an undergraduate degree in several medium- and maximum-security facilities in Indiana. Some years later, I would make my way into supermax: the long-term solitary confinement unit housing the state’s most dangerous prisoners.

  My sister, the levelheaded and responsible one, cautioned me.

  “What do you think,” I replied with a laugh, “that I’ll be taken hostage?”

  I can laugh about it now, but the very first time I stepped into supermax, I really could have been.

  CHAPTER 3

  Breaking Out

  One warm spring day in May of 2000, a short but stocky Caucasian prisoner named Newton was playing an innocent-looking game of basketball with three other prisoners on a little concrete-enclosed recreation pad at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. Each time he reached up to make a shot, his arms revealed an assortment of tattoos. He was younger than the other prisoners, only in his mid-twenties, but he’d spent nearly a decade in prison already, much of it in solitary confinement. In those days, prisoners in the Wabash Valley solitary confinement unit were allowed to have group recreation, but all that would change because of the events about to unfold. Afterward, there would be no group recreation. There wouldn’t even be a basketball.

  Suddenly, on cue, one of the prisoners fell to the ground, clutching his ankle. The other three rushed to the door, banging on it, shouting in unison: “Nurse! Hey, we need a nurse back here!” The plan called for a hostage with whom to negotiate. Not necessarily a release to the streets; they knew that wasn’t going to happen. But some of the prisoners thought they could negotiate for better living conditions. Newton just wanted to cause enough mayhem to get shipped out of the Wabash Valley supermax, even if it was only to another supermax.

  They kept calling: “Hey! Need a nurse!”

  Newton turned to the prisoner on the ground: “Moan or something, man!”

  “Ohhh! Ohhhh!” The man faked a moan, but it wasn’t convincing enough. Instead of a nurse, they got four armed officers. Newton watched them approach, feeling himself get hot and angry. It was a familiar feeling. It didn’t take much; he was always angry in those days.

  Now he turned to his partners and shrieked. “What? Like they think they can just come in here and punk us off the rec pad?!”

  He shoved one of them toward the steel door. “Open the door!”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, open the freakin’ door!” (Newton didn’t like to cuss, even among his peers.)

  The man was frozen. Newton pushed him aside. “Forget it. I’ll do it!” With some difficulty, he managed to slide open the door, which he had secretly set from locking with some batteries when the group had been brought in. Facing the officers now, he was completely fearless—or, at least, he appeared to be.

  “So what? You gonna punk us off the freakin’ rec pad?!” He assumed a fighting stance, his weapon—a homemade knife—drawn. “Well, all right, come on then!”

  The biggest, baddest officer was the first one on the cell-house range and the first one off. Seeing the weapon in the hands of a prisoner with an extensive and violent history, he turned and fled. His partners started to spray Newton with OC (oleoresin capsicum, a high-intensity pepper spray). Newton grabbed one of the officers, Sgt. Harper, and started beating him in the face with some other batteries that he had placed in a sock. A tug-of-war ensued as the other officers tried to pull the sergeant away. In desperation, Newton took out his knife and stabbed the sergeant once in the shoulder.

  By now, the spray had disoriented Newton to the point that the other officers were able to pull Harper out, roll the door closed, and seal off the range. The four prisoners were left in the range while the officers assembled their extraction team. With a lull in the action, a hush fell over the stunned prisoners who had been watching, glued to their cell doors. Feeling his way down the range, Newton stumbled from one cell door to the next. There are twelve side-by-side cells (six on the ground level and six upstairs) on each range in the solitary confinement unit, each with a little slot in the steel door that the prisoners have to put their hands through to be handcuffed prior to leaving their cells. These cuff ports are usually kept locked, but Newton, working his way from the recreation pad that was located at the end of the range, finally found one that was open.

  “Hey, man,” he begged the invisible prisoner inside the cell, “gimme some water, would you? I’m so blasted, I can hardly see!”

  Instantly, another prisoner started shouting, “Hey! Hey! Call a medic! You fuckers blinded him!”

  “Oh, man,” Newton thought. “Like I need this!” The sink water was slow in coming; water pressure was minimal in this unit.

  “Hey, man,” said Newton after impatiently listening to the drip of the faucet. “Just flush the toilet and dip it out of there.”

  As he stood in the middle of the range pouring toilet water over his face, one of his useless partners approached and asked, “What do we do now?”

  Newton just laughed. “Nothing. It’s over with. We lost. I’m going in the shower, that’s where I’m going.” He made his way to the shower, wondering where he would be shipped next.

  In May 2000, Newton was trying to break out of supermax, while I was trying to break in. Years later, when he related this episode to me, it occurred to me that our paths had nearly crossed back then.

  “Your hostage could’ve been me,” I said.

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “We were so desperate back then, it could’ve been like: ‘Whoever we can get, yeah!’ Yeah,” he added thoughtfully. He fell uncharacteristically silent for a minute. Then he said, “Man!”

  “What?”

  “I’m just so glad it wasn’t.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Me too.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Breaking In

  In May 2000, I was working as a part-time instructor in the Department of English at Indiana State University. I had just completed a PhD at the prestigious University of Chicago, working with one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars, Professor David Bevington. And now I was teaching four composition courses a day to freshmen who couldn’t care less about comma splices and sentence fragments. But on Friday nights, while my colleagues kicked back with a beer or two, I taught two additional courses in English literature to maximum-security prisoners, most of whom were genuinely hungry for knowledge and guidance to become better people. These classes took place at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in downstate Indiana, in a facility that housed more than two thousand prisoners—the worst of these housed in the
long-term disciplinary segregation Secured Housing Unit known as the SHU.

  Critics of correctional education say that prisoners are motivated only by the time cut. (In some states, they can reduce their sentence by a year or two by earning a degree.) I have two responses to that. One: Why is a prisoner’s motivation to earn a degree so that he can return to his family sooner viewed more negatively than a campus student’s motivation to earn a degree so he can make more money? And, two: What about the motivation of a prisoner, like Newton, who is serving a sentence of life with no possibility of parole?

  I had another lifer in my spring 2000 semester. Donald was a quiet loner who sat in the back of the room and rarely spoke. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks before the end of the semester that I finally saw his missing teeth as he smiled. He came up to me after class and told me that our last reading assignment was really speaking to him.

  The classes I taught as an adjunct instructor were introductory level. The class Donald attended was Introduction to American Literature, but I found a way to insert a little Shakespeare in every class I taught. Not only was Shakespeare my area of academic training, but I also felt strongly that these four-hundred-year-old works could offer contemporary students—and prisoners in particular—fresh insights into their own lives.

  Our final reading assignment was The Tragedy of Macbeth. It’s been a special piece of literature for me ever since I first read it at the age of ten. Well, I can’t really say that I “read” it at that age, but I did check it out of my elementary school library. And I can still recall the thrill of poring over its archaic words that I knew meant something significant, that I hoped would someday mean something to me. By the time I reached high school, I was able to begin to make meaning out of the language. But it wasn’t until I started teaching these plays, in prison, that their full meaning would come through: beautifully crafted works of literature written hundreds of years ago that can connect with us here and now.

  The play Macbeth, for example, deals with a range of human emotions through the perspective of a good man who is considering doing what he knows is a bad deed: killing the king in order to become king. I was pleased that it was speaking to a student who had never spoken before.

  But the following week, I learned that Donald had tried to kill another prisoner and had been sent to the SHU. He was automatically withdrawn from college, as prisoners in the SHU were not permitted to be enrolled in college-credit courses. This was the end of Donald’s education but the beginning of my own. It was the first time I had heard of the SHU, aka “supermax.” I knew nothing about this other world of hardcore incarceration. My students informed me of the details.

  “You’re locked down all the time.”

  “No movement, none.”

  “No programming.”

  “Not even school.”

  “It’s worse than death row,” added Phil, who had done three years on the row.

  Walking across the prison yard that evening with another instructor, I told my colleague what I had learned in class. He pointed at a windowless brick building in the distance. “That’s the SHU,” he said. And then, as if reading my mind, he added, “But a teacher could never get in there.”

  Breaking into the state’s most secured unit would prove to be almost as difficult as breaking out. Neither one could be done legally.

  I am not a hard-core criminal, but I have been known to occasionally bend the rules.

  For example, there was the time I made a “house call” to pick up a homework assignment from a delinquent prisoner-student and then asked him to invite me into his cell. The prisoner looked at the officer on duty; the officer shrugged. I entered the cell.

  “What about you?” I said to my student’s cell mate. The startled prisoner was lying on his bunk in his underwear, watching a basketball game on his little black-and-white TV.

  “Ma’am?” he said, pulling his sheet up to his waist and trying to process the idea of a visitor in his cell.

  “Are you in college too?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Why not? What’s your problem?”

  “You must scare them,” said my department chairperson at the university when I related the incident to him. Me…scare them? As a middle-aged Shakespeare professor, I’m hardly an intimidating presence. But maybe I did need to convince myself that I was fearless. Maybe that was one of my reasons for teaching in prison.

  And maybe that’s why I asked a friend—a prison administrator who used to work in the SHU—to take me in there for a little tour. I wanted to see the unit, and I wanted to see if I would be scared. I walked close beside her as we made our way through a series of locked gates and labyrinthine corridors. I took a deep breath and summoned the courage to stand alone in front of the glass pod from which an officer controlled the range doors and call out to the officer above: “Open Range One!” He did so because, well, how could anyone without authority to give such an order arrive into this netherworld?

  The door rolled open, and I entered.

  CHAPTER 5

  I’m In

  Now I know you’re crazy!”

  That was the response of my department chairperson when, three years after my initial unofficial foray into the SHU, I burst into his office with the exciting news: “I just got permission to start a Shakespeare program in solitary confinement!”

  At this point, I was a tenure-track assistant professor, teaching Shakespeare courses on campus and in prison through Indiana State University’s Correction Education Program. After many years of teaching college-credit courses in several Indiana prisons, I had earned such a strong reputation that the superintendent of Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, which housed the solitary confinement unit, opened this unprecedented door. I thought that my new program in supermax would not only be valuable to these prisoners, but would also provide material for an article to help me to earn tenure and a permanent position at the university.

  Unfortunately, like almost everyone else I knew, my boss was not very supportive of my work in prison. He worried about my safety, and he also resented the hours that it took away from my day job. He even tried to make it a condition of my employment that I teach on campus only, and reluctantly I agreed to “retire” from my teaching of college courses in prison. That lasted just one year, and then the director of Volunteer Services at the prison asked me to begin a voluntary program for prisoners, adding, “I think we could get you into the SHU as well.”

  “I don’t want to shut any doors,” I told my boss, who was shaking his head at my foolhardiness. “And whatever door they open, I’ll go through.”

  “You’re crazy,” he repeated as I left his office.

  One friend openly admitted, “I think they should all be making license plates. They don’t deserve education.” But I wasn’t sure that I thought of education as a treat. Nor did I think of it as punishment either, as another friend said to me, “Don’t make them read Shakespeare; they’re already in prison!”

  What did I think? Why did I want to enter solitary confinement? Certainly, there was the challenge, and I have always relished a challenge. Just being told “you can never get in there” was enough to make me want to get in there. I was also curious about the people in this most extreme form of incarceration: Were they really so dangerous? Were they all insane? Or had we silenced voices that needed to be heard? Finally, I was curious to see what this other world was like. I had done a bit of traveling in my life, and I was certain that this would be like no place on Earth.

  I was right.

  Those were the reasons that I wanted to enter this extreme environment, but I was less clear on why I wanted to work there: to volunteer my free time every week; to drive two hours, round-trip, after a full day of teaching on campus; to enter through so many razor-wire fences and steel doors; to face the most dangerous prisoners in the state; to ask them to read Shakespeare? What in the world did I get myself into? These were some of the thoughts bouncing through my mind as I drove
home that day.

  My favorite Dave Matthews song came on the radio. “I will go in this way / and find my own way out,” Dave sang. Whatever might happen, I figured I would find my own way too.

  CHAPTER 6

  Newton’s In

  DOC number 91-43-82: Life. Assault history. Escape history. Possession of dangerous weapons. Tampering with locks. Attempted escape. Escape. Group demonstration. Battery. Battery with a weapon. Battery on an officer.”

  The casework manager put down the document and looked at me. Everyone in the room, prison administrators and corrections officers, looked at me. She had just read the conduct history of one of the prisoners I had requested for my first Shakespeare group. I figured I was in trouble.

  With a cheery voice, I said the only thing I could think of: “Is there any reason I can’t work with him?”

  They weren’t expecting that, so they didn’t have an answer. They looked at one another. The casework manager spoke: “I guess not. But we just want you to know what you’re in for.”

  I had no idea.

  In the twenty years I had spent working as a volunteer and as an instructor in minimum- and maximum-security prisons in Chicago and in Indiana, I had never met an inmate who scared me—until Newton. I had never rejected one—until Newton. The day we met, I was going cell to cell in the SHU looking for prisoners interested in reading Shakespeare. Eventually, I would have as many as fifty prisoners on my waiting list, nearly one out of every four housed in the unit. At the beginning, I would have been happy to find at least one. But when I looked at Newton through the pegboard steel door of his cell, I was struck by the quiet intensity of this caged beast and crossed his name off of my list, thinking, “I can’t work with this one.”

  So what was I doing one week later, fighting for special permission to get one of the allegedly most dangerous prisoners in the state’s supermax unit into my Shakespeare program? Was it the “challenge” thing again? No. It wasn’t something in me; it was something in Newton. And it was obvious from the start—not the first time he looked at me or the first time he spoke to me, but the first time he wrote for me. It was in response to the initial Shakespeare assignment I distributed to segregated prisoners to screen prospective participants: a soliloquy from the last act of Shakespeare’s history play Richard the Second.