Inmates Sew Up a Self-Help Plan

They come to the visitors center three times a week with a singular purpose: to piece together colorful swatches of fabric.

They will cut and stitch and turn rags into rich and glorious quilts that will comfort the sick and forlorn and give their own spirits a boost.

The eight men belong to a quilting club at the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp in western Maryland. Some savor the artistic challenge of designing and creating a quilt from heaps of donated fabric. Thirty-year-old Jason Haigh discovered other reasons to be proud of his handiwork.

“It has a calming influence,” says Haigh, who is serving a 12 1/2-year sentence for drug conspiracy. “I haven’t actually done anything positive in a long time. Some of my guys kind of give me a hard time, but it doesn’t matter. I do it for me, not for them.”

There was initial reluctance to join this unlikeliest of prison clubs, but only until the men learned where the quilts were going. About three dozen quilts were donated to Project Linus (named after the blanket-toting character in the “Peanuts” comic strip), a national charity connected to children’s hospitals. Two dozen more went to the Family Crisis Resource Center, which helps victims of domestic abuse.

“I have a little boy, 4 years old this year, and I kind of thought, ‘What if he were sick and he got a quilt?’ It would be kind of nice if he got something to hold on to,” Haigh says.

The prison club was formed two years ago by a member of the local Schoolhouse Quilters Guild. Since Todd Adams, a drug offender, learned how to cut and stitch, he has made nine or 10 quilts of increasing complexity. He has also become a teacher.

An inmate’s first quilt goes to charity; his second goes home.

Kenneth Yount sent one home to Orange, Va., when his first grandchild, also named Kenneth, was born. The baby died three months later of crib death. He was buried in the quilt.

“I got down on my knees and prayed and it came to me that a part of me will always be with him,” Yount says.

Two quilts the inmates produced as group projects display other sorrows. One, called “To Daddy With Love,” features 22 panels derived from letters and multicolored crayon drawings made by prisoners’ children.

“I love you, Dad. I wish you could come home tomorrow,” says a stick-figure girl in one panels.

“Memories of Men Behind Bars” incorporates 33 images: a guitar behind bars, a rose encircled by thorns, and Reginald Johnson’s cryptic sketch of a courtroom, captioned: “Judge me by twelve before you carry me with six.”

“I guess I had a little attitude with the justice system,” he says.

The quilts have won prizes at contests sponsored by the Schoolhouse Quilters Guild, some of whose members volunteer as quilting coaches at the prison camp.

“To be perfectly honest, the first time we came, we were a little nervous,” says coach Linda Leathersich. “But we felt comfortable right from the first week and have never had any second thoughts.”

The prison quilters are not paid --they have other jobs in the institution--and the handiwork does not reduce their prison time, says Steven Finger, executive assistant for the prison camp and the adjacent medium-security prison. “But it does help the inmates stay connected with the community, and it helps increase their self-esteem and their sense of self-worth.”

Yount, whose tattoos cover his muscular arms and creep up his neck, admits he hesitated before joining the club.

“Where I come from, if a man goes to quilt, he’s a sissy,” says Yount, a 42-year-old drug offender who is eligible for release in 2003. “Now I guess I’ll be a sissy all my life because I’m going to do it when I get home.”