Laura Bates was an English professor who began teaching
Shakespeare to inmates in Indiana prisons. She eventually managed to get the
prison system to allow her to teach a Shakespeare class in ‘SuperMax’; the ‘prison
within a prison’ for the most violent, incorrigible criminals.
In this memoir, Bates describes the “Shakespeare in Shackles”
where she met Larry Newton. Newton spent over 10 years in solitary confinement;
as a teenager he murdered a man and got life in prison without parole in return
for pleading guilty. Newton got Bates’ attention with his first essay about
Richard III. He posed questions on topics such as honor, revenge and
conscience.
The impact of Shakespeare's
works, primarily Macbeth and Hamlet, on
Newton was so powerful that he became a teacher, prepared workbooks to help inmates study, and helped
create videos to inform other inmates about the relevance of Shakespeare to
their lives. And the impact on Bates has
led her to ask questions such as: Should the state pay for educational programs
to rehabilitate criminals?
Need we be concerned about the inhumane and unsanitary conditions that exist in
some American prisons? Can we prevent juvenile offenders from become career
criminals?
An interesting read.
308
pages
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