Inside the Walls
From sonnets to sestinas, the Boston University
Prison Education Program’s poetry workshop mirrors
its campus equivalent. To incarcerated students, however,
BU’s classes provide more than education.
by by Midge Raymond
Jill McDonough walks through seven doors to get to the
poetry workshop she teaches. She must first surrender her
driver’s license and take off her shoes for inspection.
She cannot wear jeans, a belt, or any jewelry other than
a wedding ring.
McDonough (GRS’98) is one of twenty instructors in
the Boston University Prison Education Program (PEP); her
spring semester poetry workshop is at MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security
men’s prison about twenty miles from the Charles River
Campus. The security measures have become routine for McDonough;
she knows the guards, who greet her cheerfully. She passes
through a thick mechanical steel door that leads to “the
trap,” a long, narrow hallway where she walks through
a metal detector. A female prison guard inspects her shoes,
the soles of her feet, and occasionally the inside of her
mouth. McDonough wears her hair atop her head -- tied with
a band with no metal parts -- so she doesn’t have
to lift her hair off her neck for the guard. She brings
only loose papers, two books, and a ballpoint pen to class;
spiral binding isn’t permitted, nor are hollow, liquid-ink
pens, which inmates can use to make syringes.
Across the prison yard, her sunlit classroom on the second
floor of the school building looks like any other college
classroom, with five enormous windows, a bookshelf, a chalkboard,
and a map of the world. Like many college students, the
inmates wear jeans -- which is why McDonough cannot -- and
shirts, sweatshirts, and jackets in varying shades of blue
and black. Only a glimpse outside, at the razor wire over
the chain-link fences, is a reminder that this is prison.
Today McDonough and her students gather in a circle to
discuss four students’ interpretations of a translated
ballad by fifteenth-century poet François Villon.
While incarcerated students take courses ranging from sociology
to accounting, the Prison Education Program has roots in
poetry. In 1970 the late Elizabeth “Ma” Barker,
a College of Arts and Sciences and Metropolitan College
associate professor, began organizing poetry readings in
Massachusetts prisons. The year before, she had brought
a BU student team to MCI-Norfolk to practice against a team
of inmates for the quiz show GE College Bowl. She
was so impressed with the inmates’ knowledge and their
interest in learning that she asked BU to sponsor college-level
courses for them, winning the approval of the University’s
new president, John Silber, in 1972. Now BU awards bachelor’s
degrees to inmates from MCI-Norfolk, MCI-Framingham, and
Bay State Correctional Center. In the spring of 2003, says
program director Robert Cadigan, more than 115 students
were enrolled in twenty courses.
McDonough also teaches creative writing and English composition,
using the same course syllabi in the prisons that she uses
on BU’s campus. In fact, she says that the differences
are few when it comes to teaching inside the walls. Incarcerated
students may not have the same resources as other BU students
(Internet access, for example), but, McDonough says, they
“make up for it with their devotion. They try really
hard. And I feel that they’re not as distracted as
undergraduate students.”
She also says that her incarcerated students’ life
experiences make their poetry richer than the work of younger
writers; although her students range from seventeen to seventy
years of age, they’re generally in their thirties
and forties. Yet inmates tend not to write about their crimes,
she says, but about such things as building a house or the
death of a family member.
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