Inmates Find Value of Books Behind Bars

Randy Ziegler is in Idaho’s most secure prison for slashing a guard’s throat while helping another inmate escape.

It is there that Ziegler, 41, spends his days patiently teaching fellow prisoners to read and write.

“You can look in his eyes and tell he’s a changed person,” said Warden Arvon Arave. “He’s doing something for somebody else.”

Arave turned to fellow prison workers--and inmates such as Ziegler--last year after the state turned down his request for a prison teacher. Together, they scraped together a few computer programs and correspondence courses for prisoners at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution, where illiteracy is a problem.

The prison tested more than 100 of the 330 inmates and found that about 20% could not read above the fifth-grade level, 47% were functionally illiterate in language and comprehension, and 23% could not do sixth-grade math.

What Arave came up with is no ordinary school. No more than a handful of inmates are allowed in the same area at once. Some are so dangerous that they can participate only from a locked chamber about the size of a telephone booth.

Tony Cootz, 39, the prison’s education clerk, is serving time for aggravated battery, robbery, firearms violations and escape.

Cootz, like Ziegler, spent years breaking rules and being held in tight security. When he took on a new attitude he was rewarded with increased freedom and more access to books and computers.

Cootz expects to spend at least 10 more years in prison. But he wants other inmates to know they need an education on the outside.

“I know how it affected me,” Cootz said. “If I had been pushed by somebody I respected, I might not have turned out the way I did.”

Now, even some inmates on the prison’s Death Row are taking education seriously.

For Randy McKinney, it is a matter of trying to improve himself.

He has been on Death Row for almost 10 years, spending 23 hours a day in a small cell with virtually no chance of being set free.

“It gets really monotonous,’ he said. “What else can you do but go on?”

McKinney, 30, used to sit around a lot, reading and watching television. Now he is working toward his high school equivalency diploma.