Getting In

Today, Tilia Klebenov Jacobs, longtime NaNoWriMo participant and educator, as well as author of Second Helpings at the Serve You Right Cafe , shares her experiences helping her students in prisons write novels with NaNoWriMo:

I hope I never get so cynical that my heart fails to break a bit when one of my inmate students tells me he’s taking my class to learn to write better letters to his nine-year-old son.

I teach writing to inmates in several prisons: one women’s pre-release center, plus one medium-security and one maximum-security facility, both men’s. Entry procedures are different at every location. The prerelease center is easy.

The officer at the desk says, “Do you have a cell phone or other electronic equipment?” When I say no, he or she nods and I head to my classroom.

Sometimes they shake it up a bit. “Do you have a weapon or cuff keys?”

“Cuff keys?” I squawked. “Why would I have cuff keys?”

The women’s stories tend to be autobiographical, enough that it’s often hard to get them to change their protagonist’s name from their own.

By contrast, getting into a medium-security prison isn’t medium. 

The first part feels a lot like an airport: put shoes and belt in a blue plastic box. Hand over driver’s license, sign in, write “No” in the box that says, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Get a volunteer tag on a lanyard; walk through the metal detector (that clearly hates me, because even though I’ve left all my jewelry at home and I’m not allowed to have a clip in my hair and I don’t wear a bra with an underwire, the damn thing beeps anyway).

I step into a windowless room with a female Corrections Officer. She turns on a tape recorder and says her name and the date and states that the search will be conducted according to DOC rules. I say my name; I sign off on the search in a notebook. Then I turn around and raise my arms for a pat-down. I lift my hair so she can see the back of my neck. I pull my bra away from my body and no drugs drop out. I run my fingers around the waistband of my slacks. I lift my pants to the knee and roll my socks down to the toe. I open my mouth to reveal no pills, packages, or teensy metal devices.

And even though I know perfectly well that I’m not smuggling anything in, that even if I carelessly left some cash or a binder clip in my pocket the worst I would get is an eye roll and instructions to take it back to my car, my stomach yanks and I twitch all over. So I try to keep my visible jitters to a minimum, thinking, if you have to jiggle something, make it your toe. 

Back in the hallway, the CO stamps my hand with invisible ink. They have several designs, and they rotate them. When I leave I’ll put my hand under a black light and they’ll check it. This is apparently so I can’t switch places with my incarcerated identical twin, who is a man.

I stand back from a steel door. It rolls open and lets me into a locked, chain-link enclosure topped with coils of glittering razor wire. This place is called “the trap.” It fits.

Another CO unlocks the door, and I walk across a paved yard into a low, boxy brick building with classrooms on the second floor.

I’m finally in.

The classroom has linoleum floors and a chalkboard and a jumble of battered, mismatched chairs with desktops attached. It’s very ordinary, except for the fact that the door is always propped open and windows overlook the hallway. With COs strolling the hallway at unscheduled intervals, we are under constant possible scrutiny. It’s a reminder that no matter how many confidences we exchange in class, no matter the warm and fuzzy feelings we generate, these guys didn’t get here by accident.

The men write more out-and-out fiction, partly because they’re men and partly because what they’ve done is generally far more, um, colorful than what the women did. Once an administrator explicitly told a particular con not to share the story of his life with me, or at least not to exceed PG-13. 

They love fantasy, creating eight-year-old dragon riders and mysterious funerals and dark future worlds where sunlight is at a premium. Writing is an escape. One man told me my course gave him and his fellows “a respite from despair.”

And that, ultimately, is why I keep going back. I help my incarcerated students string their words together and make them their own, so that their stories—and voices—soar. Writing provides an escape to men and women who know little other freedom.

Tilia Klebenov Jacobs is a graduate of Oberlin College and Harvard Divinity School, and is the author of Second Helpings at the Serve You Right Cafe. She has taught middle school, high school, and college; currently she teaches writing to inmates, and is a judge in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition in San Francisco. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published to critical acclaim. Tilia lives near Boston with her husband, two children, and two standard poodles.

Top photo by Flickr user c_l_b.