Stop and Think

Convictions is not a volume you’ll find on the shelf at your local bookstore. It’s a 42-page pamphlet produced on a copying machine by the Bolduc Writing Group, a Maine Humanities Council-supported seminar that meets every two weeks inside a minimum security prison in Warren, Maine. It’s a work in progress in more than a literary sense, for its ten contributors arc using the written word to reconstruct that other work in progress, their lives.

Jeffrey writes of the smell of coffee at his house first thing in the morning. Todd produces a parable set in Pug Port, Maine. Paul experiments with magic realism, and Stephen creates a Last-paced comic adventure. Bolduc Correctional Facility gives a particular resonance to Convictions. These are not just stories but rehearsals for the day when their authors re-connect with the world back home.

“One thing I really like is the energy and honesty of the voices in your work,” their teacher Eleanor Morse told them recently. “This is not an environment where trust is easy.  You had the courage to write and then read aloud to the group.

Morse’s group is discovering their own voices through writing, reading, and discussing their stories aloud. Their discussion of the books of the Council-sponsored Let’s Talk About It series supports this process. That day they were talking about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper, the 1890 story of a young woman “imprisoned” by a well-meaning husband and doctors convinced she is insane. Usually read as a feminist classic, The Yellow Wall-Paper took on a slightly different hue within Bolduc’s walls.

“The group brings together inmates who wouldn’t be together,” says Todd Doody. “We’re all here to write. It doesn’t matter what we’re in prison for.” Evan Moran adds: “The reading enhances my imagination, which feeds my writing.”

That writing, reading, and discussion can help people discover how they are linked to other people seems obvious, yet it’s a radical idea in the American corrections system, which in this prison-saturated country emphasizes punishment over rehabilitation. But Maine is ahead of the pack in recognizing the importance of such new concepts as “restorative justice” and “cognitive intervention” — in plain English, “stop and think” — in reducing recidivism.

Today, thanks to the Maine Humanities Council, prisoners, probationers, and even teenagers incarcerated in the Maine Youth Center have opportunities to use books as a path to understanding themselves and their fellow inmates and to re-joining the larger community. (See related stories, pages 4-6). “It’s a chance for inmates to reflect,” says Bolduc teacher Brent Elwell of the Council’s Let’s Talk About It series, “and to connect what they’re reading with the story of their own lives.”

“People develop thinking patterns that lead to behavioral patterns,” explains Nancy Bouchard, associate director of adult services, Maine Department of Corrections. “You can tell them what they ought to do, but if they don’t have that ‘ah, ha!’ moment that changes their thinking, they’ll continue in their old ways. Book discussions help them reflect on their own thinking process.”

Actually, you can find one of the Convictions writers at your bookstore. Bolduc inmate Scott Antworth, who has won national Pen Center prison writing awards three out of the past four years, has a short story in Tobias Wolff’s anthology Best New American Voices 2000.