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- Title
'Hope Across the RazorWire: Student-Inmate Reading Groups at Monroe Correctional Facility.
- Authors
Wiltse, Ed
- Abstract
The 'Jail Project' is an ongoing service-learning project that brings together Nazareth College students in an introductory literature class with Monroe Correctional Facility inmates who have been provided with books for that class, for a series of meetings in jail classrooms to discuss literature and its relation to our lives. Over six years of doing this work, I have encouraged each small group of students and inmates to regard each other as resources, with varying backgrounds, knowledge, talents, and beliefs. Since the theme of the course is 'Crime and Punishment in the USA,' even when the inmates, as the demographics of US incarceration would predict, bring weaker educational backgrounds to the discussion, they often bring real-life experience of the criminal justice system that the college students do not. However, for all my careful preparation and thinking about reciprocity in this collaboration among peers, insofar as I thought about hope at all, I assumed that the college students would be bringing it to the inmates. Although this does happen, a surprising counter-narrative has emerged in the journals that the students and inmates keep during the project. For all their privilege, my students, the majority of whom are white and middle class, often harbour a profound cynicism about themselves, each other, and the world. How remarkable, then, that they find in this group of people, for many of who the 'American Dream' of opportunity and equality has been so relentlessly foreclosed, a spirit of hope that far exceeds their own! Vaclav Havel reflects that hope, 'especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as a prison,' is above all 'an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.' This essay shows the truth of Havel's comments, and how the experience of reading and writing together can cultivate that 'orientation' to hope.
- Subjects
ROCHESTER (N.Y.); NEW York (N.Y.); CORRECTIONAL institutions; INSTITUTIONALIZED persons; NAZARETH College (Rochester, N.Y.); HAVEL, Vaclav, 1936-2011
- Publication
At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 2010, Vol 67, p207
- ISSN
1570-7113
- Publication type
Article