Between Right And Wrong
Eight years ago, the Maine Humanities Council and the Maine Department of Corrections wondered what it would take to get probationers to participate in reading and discussion groups. The Associate Commissioner for Adult Community Corrections, Nancy Bouchard, thought she could convince some probation officers (POs) to send their probationers to the groups if the Council could provide facilitators and books for each participant to keep. These unlikely partners spent months in planning meetings, then signed a contract and launched Stories for Life.
The program was active for several years, but it was a tough sell. Probationers and officers were accustomed to a strictly hierarchical system; gathering around a table to talk about a short story put them on the same level. “I’ve never had POs talk to me that way before,” one participant commented, “like a person.” Some POs seemed threatened by this challenge to their authority; others just had a hard time seeing the reading groups, with their free cookies and lofty ideas, as a tool for rehabilitation. As Stories for Life Program Director Julia Walkling points out, “books and book discussion differ from the other, more directive tools in the probation officer’s toolbox.” So the program faded away.
Among the POs who were most enthusiastic about Stories for Life were Bud Hall and John Lorenzen, who coordinated groups in two different parts of the state. These days, Bud and John are both based in Augusta, where they share an office, a coffee pot, and a nagging frustration with the cycle—probation, violation, imprisonment—that ensnares many criminal offenders. They are willing to entertain any idea or initiative that might break that cycle, whether or not it’s within the purview of traditional correctional theory. So last spring, they hatched a plan to bring Stories for Life back to life, with the new name Outside the Box.
The Council was not asked to offer financial support at the time; instead, John and Bud convinced their supervisor to pay for books with Department funds, and decided they could serve as discussion facilitators. They used correctional jargon—cognitive skills training, stage of change assessment—to help POs understand that the program could be both a sanction and an opportunity for their probationers. And so a group was cobbled together, encompassing everyone from graduate-degree holders to those at a fourth-grade reading level.
The sixth 10-week series of Outside the Box convenes this fall. It includes some participants from that original group who have come back for all but a handful of meetings, even after serving out the terms of their probation. They’ve read Carver’s Cathedral, Steinbeck’s The Long Valley, Salinger’s Nine Stories. It’s no accident that these are gritty, plot-driven collections of realistic short fiction. The probationers are much more interested in talking about what happens in a story than in dissecting descriptive passages or analyzing the author’s style. That suits Bud and John just fine. They’re quick to point out that they are not literary scholars. They want to provoke discussion about the conflicts between characters, or the conflicts within, that lead to good or bad decisions. They ask questions like “where did he mess up?” “what was he thinking?” “what would you do in that situation?” then sit back and wait for the insightful answers that never fail to come.
As newly minted discussion facilitators, John and Bud have been resourceful in borrowing strategies from experts. Each Outside the Box session begins with two brief discussions, prompted first by a photograph, then by a single word. These discussions give the less proficient readers, some of whom rely on their wives or girlfriends to read to them, a chance to participate. They also demonstrate that everyone can look at the same picture and see different things, or use the same word with different meanings in mind. The photograph idea comes from Jeff Aronson, the original facilitator for Stories for Life (and many other Council programs). The inspiration to discuss a word came from a conference for “Changing Lives Through Literature,” another literature program for correctional systems, established in Massachusetts in 1993 and now operating in eight states and the UK.
At the first meeting of the current series, discussion of the word “culture” ranged from the tongue-in-cheek “it’s a sample of bacteria that you put on a slide” to the languages spoken in one of Augusta’s subsidized housing developments to conservative commentator Michael Savage’s slogan, “Borders — Language — Culture.” Discussion of the story for this session, Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948), was equally wide-ranging. There were attempts to diagnosis the main character, Seymour Glass. The consensus is that “he’s got post-traumatic stress—or whatever they called it back then, shell shock.” At this, the veterans in the group offered their perspective on what discharge might have meant for Seymour. Do his background and his condition justify his behavior? Just how badly does he behave, anyway? To what extent are his actions premeditated? What was he thinking?
The very least that can be said for Outside the Box is that for the ninety minutes of each group meeting, these probationers are interacting with peers in a structured activity. John and Bud acknowledge that for some, the group is just a way to kill time. But for others, the books are beacons. One left his copy of The Long Valley at a truck stop in South Carolina and paid to replace it, not because he had to, but because he wanted to finish the story he was reading, knowing that his opinions about it would be heard. For ninety minutes, he would be a person, not a probationer; in thrall to a story, not a sentence.
Stories for Life, as Outside the Box shows, has great potential for people within the correctional system. For more information on Stories for Life, contact Program Director Julia Walkling. To support this program, contact Development Director Diane Magras.
