For These Female Offenders, It’s Read or Do Time

The reading assignment was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and around the oval table, strong opinions were flying.

“You want me to toss it out the window now?” asked 21-year-old Tina Berry, convicted on marijuana charges. “I hated it. I hated it. It was very complicated for me.”

Tracy Merritt, whose alcohol-related offenses include malicious destruction of property, assault and she has forgotten what else, aimed her gaze at professor Jean Trounstine.

The print was too small, the 37-year-old Merritt said, and there were too many words on the page. “But I think I’ve met people like that nasty neighbor--where you kick the soccer ball into his yard and you’re afraid to go get it.”

Probation Officers Also Participate

When Merritt’s probation officer, Bobby Hassert, dismissed the novel as an out-of-date fantasy, U.S. District Judge Joseph Dever jumped in to counter that the book was a timeless classic.

“Take him down, judge!” Merritt interjected.

For a handful of Massachusetts women, this ongoing seminar in modern American literature is an alternative to incarceration. With rigid rules to offset the relaxed atmosphere, the biweekly class turns courtroom antagonists into intellectual peers.

Rather than merely sentencing criminal offenders to read and discuss books by contemporary American authors, Dever and other Massachusetts judges complete the assignments too, and join in the conversation. Probation officers who monitor the women’s cases also take part in the classes.

The Changing Lives Through Literature seminar at Middlesex Community College here is voluntary. Still, some women opt out, saying they would rather do time in county jail or state prison than read Joyce Carol Oates or Toni Morrison. Their skepticism is shared by some critics, who blast this approach as soft and an invitation to manipulate the system.

But Trounstine, who for several years led inmates at a nearby women’s prison in productions of Shakespeare, believes that, in some cases, books may be more effective than bars. Reading, said Trounstine, is redemptive.

“There is something transformative about the power of the imagination to take on a character,” she said. “It’s hard to measure, it’s hard to really discuss, it’s not magical--but there’s something experiential that happens to a person in reading a book and then in talking about that book.”

It was that notion that propelled University of Massachusetts English professor Robert P. Waxler to dream up the concept of literature as an alternative sentence. Waxler contacted another district judge, Robert Kane, who proposed that court officers participate in the program, which began eight years ago.

Waxler reasoned that criminal offenders were so marginalized that “nobody was listening to them. They had lost their voice. They also didn’t believe in themselves. They didn’t have any place in the larger society.”

Literature--”in my mind, probably the most important tool we have to maintain a human society, to keep people human”--offered a vehicle for offenders to explore their identities in the context of the world around them, Waxler said.

“It’s a very important social experience. That’s what literature, I think, is all about.”

In Massachusetts, state legislators overcame some initial concerns and now provide $100,000 a year for the Changing Lives effort. The men’s program has been exported to Texas, New York, Kansas and Arizona, and Waxler has received inquiries from England as well.

But only in this state have women been included. Overwhelmingly, Dever said, their crimes involve drugs or prostitution. The judge said he relies on intuition in offering the literature seminar as a sentence, seeking what he calls “a maximum degree of motivation and a minimum degree of literacy.”

Students who fail to attend a class or to complete an assignment may be tossed out and resentenced. A student who commits a new crime is automatically expelled. With signed contracts from the offenders in hand, probation officers keep a close eye on participants.

Still, some criminologists express skepticism. Rutgers University professor Freda Adler, an expert on women in prison, said the schedule of seven biweekly meetings is grossly insufficient. Reading great books is commendable, Adler said, but in the case of many offenders, “going back to live in the same neighborhoods, hanging out with the same peers--and maybe not even telling anybody you’re reading a book because you have to hide it. I have my doubts.”

But those involved in the literature program insist it is an antidote to recidivism.

Around Trounstine’s most recent seminar table, the discussion centered not on individual crimes but on the broader theme of justice. Reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” said a student, who gave her name only as Nyda, made her think that maybe, instead of breaking the law, she could find a career there.

Harper Lee’s novel, set in a small Southern town, also prompted reflection about racial attitudes. Trounstine asked if the book’s African American housekeeper provided an entry point into the black world of the Deep South.

“I loved her because she brought the children to a black church,” Berry said.

“That’s insightful, Tina, tell us more,” Trounstine inveighed.

“Come on,” Berry protested. “Why do I have to speak up?”

“Because you do,” Trounstine told her, with a laugh that filled the room.

Berry said she dropped out of high school at 16 and struggled when she started Trounstine’s class. But taking part in the seminar inspired her to sign up to take her high school equivalency exam.

“Granted, we only have to read one book every two weeks,” Berry said. “But reading one book is a whole lot better than nothing. And it’s a whole, whole lot more than I ever read before.”

She Read Cisneros’ Book 6 Times

Merritt, meanwhile, said she was so uninterested in the printed word that as a child she paid her sister in breakfast cereal to have her read the TV Guide to her. When Judge Dever proposed the literature seminar instead of jail, Merritt thought to herself, “What the hell is reading going to do for me?”

But she signed up “because I wanted better than I had.” She limped through Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” But she loved Sandra Cisneros’ “House on Mango Street” so much that she read it six times.

Trounstine, a woman with gold eye shadow, dangling earrings and a habit of calling her students “you guys,” asked the class to list three qualities about their favorite character from “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

The offenders, the probation officers and the judge got to work. But Merritt peeked up to glance in Trounstine’s direction.

“Because of her,” she said, “I read.”