Escaping Into a Good Book

Editor’s note: Last week, the Reading Page ran an article about the need to teach literacy skills to prison inmates. Today, it looks at a reading program that extends beyond prison walls.

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For a group of lifers at the California Institution for Women, comfort comes in the form of a room the size of a phone booth, escape in the form of good diction.

To understand why, meet Vonda White, 60.

The former preschool teacher received a life sentence in 1979 for first-degree murder, and never expects to leave the sprawling compound of nondescript buildings. During the day, she works for a little spending money as a peer counselor for about 40 of the facility’s mentally ill.

But after spending hours with other people’s grief, she finds solace by sitting in a small soundproof booth two or three times a week, reading a book out loud for someone she will never meet. Her good diction qualified her to be a reader for Voices From Within, a program in which inmates--most serving life sentences--tape books for the blind and those with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.

Reading means more than leisure, or even charity, for White and about 15 other inmates who volunteer for the program. It’s all about self-preservation.

“As soon as you shut the door, this room is sacred,” White said. “And you come out feeling that other stuff, it’s all not real. It’s wonderful. It’s another world.”

White has been incarcerated for more than 20 years at Frontera, where the prison is surrounded by cattle pens and fertilizer plants. She said her life could be worse. There are no bars on her cell doors, and few fights. The prison yard vaguely resembles a college campus quad.

But living quarters are cramped and bare, the population is generally troubled--and then there’s the fact that the air is always thick with the smell of manure from nearby farms.

“We call it essence of cow. You can get used to a lot of things,” she said, sighing. “But not that.”

The smell isn’t as bad in the small office of the Voices From Within program, which is housed in the prison’s educational center. Volunteers have worked hard to make the area hospitable with everyday niceties: a velvet chair with a flower pattern, a silk rose in a cup.

Feeling Connected

It is within these confines that women convicted of robbery, kidnapping and murder sound like public radio announcers as they record books on tape in complete, well-modulated sentences.

White says she sometimes thinks about her potential listeners when she reads, and it’s as if she is transformed by the thought. She says her voice becomes more expressive and the interpretations of the text grow more thoughtful and nuanced.

“You feel connected to someone,” White said. “You’re sharing an experience with another person.”

Those receiving the audio books range from elementary school classes to visually impaired Cal Poly Pomona college students, many of whom have become aware of the prison reading program through word of mouth.

The tapes--which are free and made on request--have ranged from the children’s series “The Magic School Bus” to John Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” and premed textbooks. Last year, the inmates read 110 books, produced 395 tapes and logged more than 2,000 hours of reading time.

One recipient, Rose Ann Hammond, a teacher at Buena Vista Alternative High School in Chino, said she was “shocked” when she first heard an audiotape from the program.

“They sound like they could be television broadcasters. They’re just very polished,” said Hammond. “To tell you the truth, it just seemed too good to be true.”

Among the titles Hammond has ordered were “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Diary of Anne Frank” and textbooks about world history and government.

Hammond said her students, who are troubled themselves, are aware that the tapes are made by prisoners.

“The first time some of the students listened to it, they wanted to see if there was some hidden message, like ‘Get me out of here!’ ” said Hammond. “It is very hard for [students] to imagine that these readers are possibly in there for life.”

The idea for the Frontera program came from Alexandra Paeff, a prison administrator who organizes inmate volunteer programs. Paeff said she saw two similar audiotape programs at men’s prisons near Sacramento and wanted to start her own, a desire that initially got smothered by red tape.

“It took 11 years before we got off the ground,” said Paeff. “There was no physical space for the program,” which requires recording booths.

But about five years ago, a group of prisoners serving life terms expressed such an interest that it received special clearance for an In-N-Out Burger fund-raiser, which produced $3,000 in seed money for cassette tape recorders and other supplies. From there, said Paeff, the program took off.

Paeff fought for office space and designed the sound rooms, while a chaplain trained in theater taught the inmates how to perfect their diction.

Since then, the Voices From Within program has survived on occasional donations--the Chino Kiwanis club, for instance, once gave recording equipment worth $1,000. But the program mostly relies on the manpower and money of the Long Termers Organization, an inmate-run support group that resorts to more burger sales when it needs cash.

The program’s only paid employee is Anika Deasey, 46, who is serving 25 years to life for murder. Deasey receives $24 a month to field audio book requests, organize readings and package tapes. She also does what she called “maximizing the capabilities of the equipment”--in other words, keeping the tape machines running. The donated reel-to-reel recorders are old and erratic, she said.

“We’re operating on a shoestring,” said Deasey. “We need four-track recorders, reel-to-reel tape. $5,000? We could go through that in a heartbeat.”

Known to go about her duties with the purpose of a businessperson, Deasey confessed that she’s personally addicted--”pretty strung out”--on Dean Koontz thrillers.

Getting Beyond Bitterness

But for the reading program, the eighth-grade dropout prefers to record textbooks, like a thick one she recently pointed to on a shelf in her small office.

“That’s a comparative literature study,” she said. “That is an awesome book.”

Access to such weighty textbooks, Deasey said, has satisfied her yearning for higher education. She completed her GED in prison, and was taking college correspondence courses until federal scholarship funds to prisoners dried up in 1994.

Other inmates say they get various rewards from their work with Voices From Within.

For Maryann Acker, sentenced to life for murder in 1978, it’s a way to get beyond the bitterness that’s a staple of prison life.

“Some people are resentful,” said Acker, 40. “Most of us have done quite a bit of time. But after a while, you get to a point where you have to stop thinking about your resentment--your anger, how you got here--and start thinking about others.”