They did not always find the books easy, but our discussions were invariably enlightening, for myself as well as the convicts. In the meantime, I had got the men to struggle, reluctantly at first, through literary classics like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr.
Although we value our volunteers time and service to the population we cannot allow such breaches to occur. “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “you will not be permitted to volunteer at JCI due to your failure to adhere to rules set forth by our volunteer program coordinator. On August 15, the day after the second stabbing, I received an email from the prison’s Assistant Warden, whom I have never met, informing me that I had been found guilty of an infraction. One or two of these men had never read a book before. It had taken a long time for us to trust one another, but I felt the men were beginning to recognize that reading could be an alternative to the more perilous ways of negotiating the everyday monotony of prison life. There were only nine men in my book club, but I knew that for these convicts, the group had become an essential part of their weekly routine. More recently, on August 14th, a gang of men stabbed another inmate to death. On January 18th, a convict killed his cellmate with a homemade shank.
JCI is one of the worst of Maryland’s 23 prisons, notorious for gang violence. In The Maximum Security Book Club, released last June, I wrote about the reading group I have been running for the past four years at Jessup Correctional Institute, a men’s Maximum Security Prison about 15 miles outside Baltimore.
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