Shakespeare Saved My Life Read online

  I was talking to a prisoner in cell 11, the penultimate cell, on the second level of the range. This was the most dangerous location on any range, as it required walking past every cell, upstairs and downstairs, on your way in and again on your way out. On this particular day, I found the range door open, so I slipped in unannounced and made my way upstairs. I was unaware that there happened to be a prisoner in the upstairs shower, which was located just past cell 12. Normally, prisoners were cuffed and chained and escorted by two officers even for the short walk from their cell to the shower. But, as I was talking to the prisoner in cell 11, I heard the shower door roll open—with no officer on the range. Suddenly, I realized what that meant: I was about to come face-to-face with a naked killer.

  Think quick: what would you do? Let me emphasize that I do not assume that every prisoner in supermax is a crazed killer eager for any opportunity to kill again. However, in those days, most of the prisoners in long-term segregation (70 percent to be exact) were “crazed”—literally, psych patients. And even if this man did not want to kill or rape, how could he “save face” among his peers if—faced with the opportunity to assault a female on the range—he simply said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and walked on by?

  Newton had recently told me that few prisoners are motivated just by a desire to hurt people, that most “troubles” happen because of peer pressure, the need to look tough in front of others, something that is especially important in a tough prison environment. When that shower door rolled open, I bet my life that he was right. The prisoner in the shower was from cell 12; I knew that because his cell door was open. In that, I was lucky: he wouldn’t have to walk past me to get to his cell. If I could avoid any response to his presence, he would have the opportunity to slip into his cell without his peers knowing that he had given up the opportunity for an assault. Hard as it was, I kept my focus intently on cell 11, keeping up our conversation about Macbeth: “Why do you think Macbeth did not stop killing after the murder of King Duncan?” I asked cell 11.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see the man step out of the shower. Upon catching sight of me, he did a double take. Clearly, he was facing a “first” in his life as well. He stood there, as if frozen, and finally—after what seemed like a year later!—he turned and walked into his cell. As his door rolled closed with a loud clang, cell 11 gave me a startled look, suddenly aware of what had happened. I finished our conversation with a quote from Macbeth: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time.”

  And I left the range with a sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER 26

  All Hands on Deck

  Working in supermax presented its own unique learning curve. For example, here’s something that a teacher in a normal classroom doesn’t usually encounter: masturbation. Seated in an open classroom, fully visible not only to the teacher, but also to his classmates, a student is unlikely to drop his drawers and expose himself. But the setting of my SHU classroom revealed only the student’s eyes and a partial view of his face. I could see the prisoner’s hands only when he reached out through the opened cuff port to catch my attention in an approximation of a student raising his hand in a traditional classroom. Or if he held a paper in his hands as he read from it or gesticulated toward another student in enthusiasm for (or rejection of) a comment that was made. But in all of those instances, I rarely, if ever, saw both of the prisoner’s hands. They could be doing…anything.

  This was, in fact, what I learned one day as I was walking from one cuff port to the next, collecting papers at the end of our session. It had been a very focused discussion, in which each of the students had been actively engaged. So it came as a bit of a shock to me to peer into one of the cells through that little window in the door and realize that one student had other— shall we say, non-Shakespearean—thoughts in mind.

  As with the shower incident of the previous chapter, this was a moment requiring a quick—and appropriate—response. Again I opted not to go public with this man’s very private behavior. But when the officers arrived to bring the prisoners back to their cells, I retained this particular student till the last so that we had a chance for a private conversation.

  “This is unacceptable,” I said to him.

  “I don’t mean no disrespect,” he said, and I believed him. “It’s just been so long since I’ve even seen a woman.” And then he surprised me again by adding, “Besides, they’re all doing it.”

  I had to acknowledge that that was possible, but, I hoped, not true. At least I could hope that it wasn’t all of them.

  “I’m not going to tell the others why, but next week, you will not be allowed to come to the class. If, the following week, you are able to keep your mind—and your hands—on your Shakespeare work, then I will give you another chance. But if you return and do this again, then I will inform the officers and publicly remove you in the middle of the class. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

  Two weeks later, he returned to class, and I was never aware of any further misbehavior.

  This is one aspect of working in a men’s prison that causes female staff, as well as volunteers, a lot of concern. I thought I had handled it very smoothly, addressing the problem without anyone even being aware of the situation. At least, that’s what I thought…until three years later when Newton said to me: “Hey, did old boy Guido ever, you know, do anything back there in the SHU?”

  “Uh, what do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s just that I remember this one time, when I was still back there in the group, when you looked into his cell, you had this strange look on your face, and I just imagined that he was lying there in the cell, buck naked.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The Boat

  One day, Newton said to me, “Can I ask you something?” and I knew it was not going to be about Shakespeare.

  “No personal questions,” I repeated my familiar refrain.

  “I’m not going ‘personal’ or anything.”

  I looked at him skeptically.

  “Do you guys have a boat?” he asked.

  I was right; this was not going to be about Shakespeare.

  “You should get a boat,” he said, smiling as if he had just solved some great problem in my life. And, although I didn’t know it at the time, he had.

  “A boat,” I repeated.

  “Or maybe a porch swing.”

  It might seem an incongruous statement, but I could see the similarity. Still, I asked, “Is that as good as a boat?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded, smiling, lost in a fantasy image. “That’s almost as good as a boat.”

  “Well, get off the boat and back into the book,” I said, shoving his paperback copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare toward him on his opened cuff port. (SHU prisoners were allowed to purchase books for themselves if they were sent directly from the publisher, and it was no small gesture that Newton spent the equivalent of his life’s savings on that book.)

  He was still smiling, thinking about something non-Shakespearean at that moment.

  “The boat is my liberty,” he said.

  “Shakespeare is your liberty,” I replied.

  “That’s true. Shakespeare is my liberty.”

  He was speaking metaphorically about “the boat,” of course, but he made me start to think about boating literally. Because of our “no personal questions” rule, he couldn’t know about my lifelong fear of boats, and even of water.

  “Come on, man,” I could hear him saying, “that’s retarded!”

  A boat was not my ideal of liberty. Or…was it?

  To Newton, it was a metaphor, and maybe it was for me too. Of course I could spend my entire life never stepping onto a boat; plenty of people do. But I started to realize that, for me, “boat” was a metaphor for other unfounded fears. And as I aged, I worried that these fears would increasingly shut down and narrow my life—as their own fe
ars had done for both of my parents. I didn’t necessarily want to go skydiving at the age of ninety, but I did want my life to expand with each passing year, rather than narrow. I wanted to avoid spending my life in a prison of my own making.

  “People just put themselves into so many prisons,” Newton liked to say.

  Was fear of boats one of my prisons? Would overcoming that fear set me free?

  CHAPTER 28

  New Directions

  When I started the Shakespeare program, I had intended to do it for just one year, but we were on an unstoppable roll: our successes had impressed the prison administration and had even been noted by the local media. My prison work added another dimension to my personal life as well. The prisoners introduced me to rap music, informing me that Tupac Shakur had been a fan of Shakespeare. I did my research, and my adolescent grandson enjoyed those CDs boom-booming over my car speakers, although his parents chastised me for exposing him to “crap music.”

  So here I was starting my second year of the Shakespeare program in the SHU—and facing a happy dilemma. The prisoners who had finished the first play did not want to leave the program, while the waiting list was growing each day. Should we serve a smaller number of prisoners for a longer period of time, or do we serve a larger number for a shorter time? Over the next eight years, I would experiment with both approaches, but for now, I opted to keep the dedicated core that I had, while adding a few enthusiastic newbies.

  The second full play the prisoners read was Hamlet, twice as long and twice as difficult as Macbeth. If Macbeth hooked them in with its fast-paced and familiar criminal story, then Hamlet forced them to make their way through long, wordy speeches and ponder some sophisticated questions regarding the meaning of life. As if that weren’t challenge enough, Newton was raising the bar in another, new direction.

  After one year of exceptional performance in the program, through the individual work he did in his cell—and, not coincidentally, a year without any conduct infractions—Newton earned the right to come out of his cell and join the group discussions. It was a bit of a shock to see him for the first time without the pegboard door in front of him, and to see him actually walking down the hall, albeit on a leash and flanked by two officers. When they placed him in the individual cell, he dutifully turned and offered his hands to be uncuffed. I was struck by his quiet and respectful demeanor in his interaction with the officers. I found it hard to picture him in a violent rage, beating and stabbing Sgt. Harper—who was still, by the way, working in the SHU.

  “This feels weird,” he said, peering out through the little cuff port, looking around at the other faces in the cuff ports across from him. The others were already engaged in informal conversation. “I ain’t scared,” he said to me, and I suddenly realized that he was.

  But from the start, he distinguished himself as an extraordinary member of the group. As impressed as I was with his written work, I was now equally impressed with his participation in the group. Without formal education, he was somehow able to excel in reading Shakespeare. And despite so many years without human interaction, he was somehow able to excel in teamwork. He raised challenging questions, but in such an informal manner that he never offended or intimidated his classmates. Instead, he got the best work out of them, like a good professor would. Additionally, he was able to speak with anyone, and even to diffuse tensions among other prisoners who could not get along. Weekly arguments between a black man and a white supremacist in our group had often come close to getting out of hand. Newton was able to recognize when that was a risk and knew how to refocus them.

  When he had been approved to join the group, he told me that he thought that we could use the plays of Shakespeare to encourage prisoners to examine their own lives: “The hope is that the more insight you get into these characters, the more insight you get into yourself,” he told me excitedly. “That’s what happened to me: I’m questioning why Macbeth does what he does, and I start to question why I do what I do. And I know I can re-create that experience for other prisoners. I know it, man!”

  “Go ahead,” I told him. “Try it.”

  As Hamlet says, “The readiness is all.” Now that the group was assembled for their first discussion of their new play, it was time for Newton to try it. I was skeptical, and more than a little worried that his first session in the group would result in a unanimous rejection of his lofty ideal. But I didn’t say a word. I wanted it to be their program.

  “Hamlet is windier than a bag of farts!” said Green as the group session began.

  The others laughed.

  “Yeah, man, I agree,” said Newton good-naturedly. And then he threw out his curveball: “But why do you think he’s seeking revenge?”

  I held my breath. The group did not outright reject his question, but no one, not even Green, had an answer. This group consisted of seven men who were serving murder convictions; the eighth was convicted of attempted murder. To these prisoners, it was a no-brainer: murder requires revenge, and revenge requires murder. Duh!

  “This guy killed his father, so Hamlet should kill him?” Newton prompted them.

  “That’s right!”

  “Sure!”

  “That’s what you do!”

  “So, what? It’s the ‘honorable’ thing to do?” he nudged them a bit more.

  “Hell, yeah, it’s honorable!” said Bentley, taking the bait.

  “But why is it honorable?” he challenged them now. “What makes it honorable? And what is honor anyways?”

  The group went quiet, thinking. No one had ever asked them to question such fundamental concepts that drove their lives and motivated their criminal choices. No one, that is, until Shakespeare—and Newton. Through the cuff port, he turned to me and gave me a wink. I nodded. We both knew that the Shakespeare program was entering a whole new dimension. We were going to be changing lives back here.

  CHAPTER 29

  Sensory Deprivation

  Like other supermax units across the country, the SHU was designed as a unit of sensory deprivation. More than sixty such facilities currently exist, housing thousands of prisoners. However, decades of research have amply demonstrated the adverse effects of this kind of incarceration: hallucination, paranoia, rage, social isolation, and cognitive impairment among them. “Lengthy confinement in these facilities threatens prisoners’ physical and mental health,” concluded the Human Rights Watch in a published study titled Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana.

  It’s not that there are no senses engaged, but the sensations are monotonous: the same few voices you hear across the range every day, the same gray concrete walls. Those who are lucky enough to have a TV say that, over time, staring at the same programs day after day becomes every bit as monotonous as staring at the gray walls. The only human touch is the cold steel of the handcuffs and leg chains placed on you by the officers. Even the meals are required, by law, to be bland. Forget about spices; any identifiable flavors are prohibited.

  During my training period, the chaplain, Father Bob, insisted that I have the full SHU experience and walked me into the inmate kitchen and handed me a tray with a pile of something mushy and gray. I had no idea what I was eating, and I complained to him the following week that it had made me sick.

  “I eat it all the time,” he said. “How come I don’t get sick?”

  I replied, “Father, you must be blessed.”

  I asked Newton to give me an example for each of the five senses that he was most aware of in the SHU. We started with the one that was most prominent: sound.

  “Chink-chink! Chink-chink!” he said, imitating the sound of the officers snapping their handcuffs open and closed. “Man, they just sit out there by the pod doing that all day long. You can hear it all the way out onto the range. I actually thought they were trained to do that. Even over all the psych patients beating and banging all night, the thing that stands out most in my mind is the sound of them clicking the cuffs.”

  Smell.
/>   “Poop,” he said immediately, then added, “but you can smell rain, even worms. And I can hear it too, ’cause of the plastic on the top of the ranges. These are things that I love, but back here, everything becomes miserable. I love the smell of rain, but back here, it stinks. I love the sound of the rain, but in that miserable state, you find reason to make it evil. The idea of rain is pretty, but when you’re miserable like that, you give it a violent association. Even things you like, you’ll find ways to make it miserable.”

  Touch.

  “Hot or cold. Never warm. Never comfortable. Always one extreme or the other.”

  Taste.

  “The food, man! Yeah, it’s bad, but it’s more that that’s where the focus of all that helplessness goes to. I think it’s the sense of powerlessness that you associate to the food, the lack of any choice whatsoever.”

  Sight.

  He laughed. “Just a bunch of little holes.”

  That one surprised me. I asked, “The pegboard door? Looking out, as opposed to looking in?”

  “Absolutely, man! It’s just another wall, but there’s a space between those walls. There’s a hallway, there’s a door. You know, psychologically, that’s how people travel. The hallway goes somewhere, always. I’ve counted the holes in the door, every one, I swear. Where else you gonna look? There’s nothing to look at in the cell. You know, in my earlier years in the SHU—”

  “Meaning, before Shakespeare?”

  “Right,” he said. “In those years, I always kept my light out. Most guys back here do.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah, man,” he said. “It’s just such a dark place.”

  Then he added, “Let me tell you this about the SHU: You feel like you’re decaying back here. You feel like you’re melting away. You’re just dying. You feel like you’re going further and further into the grave! There’s no kind of…life back here. It’s, it’s, just, man, a weird experience.”

  It was true. I noticed that when I walked the ranges, even in the middle of the day, I found most of the cells dark.