Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard

by Laura Bates

I wanted to challenge them to go through what I went through, to try to define these terms because these things drive our lives and we don’t even know what they are. I think it’s critical to get these people to start addressing these questions.

We want to bring it to these juveniles, who are right now still shaping the rest of their lives, and hopefully we can counter the same hollow principles that we built our lives on. That’s our goal, and that’s what we’re doing.

In unison, the group spoke the closing lines: “We hope you learn from Romeo’s mistake—and from our own.” Lights out. Another standing ovation.

“What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.

One teacher, having heard of his reputation as a troublemaker, singled him out at the start of the school year—literally, singled him out. She made him spend the semester behind a partition in the back of the room, separated from the rest of the students. Over time, that led to his rejection of the teacher, of his schoolwork, of school. That led to the streets, to drugs, to violence. Jon connected the dots by concluding, “Stick me behind a partition, and I grow up and kill someone.”

My end-of-semester surveys always showed this presentation to be the most impactful moment of the semester. It was a lesson that I knew my students would remember when they started working with little Larrys, Dustins, and Patricks. And I believed that it, too, could save lives.

In addition to the Shakespeare program, Wabash Valley Correctional Facility had another unusual program that provided a creative outlet for its prisoners in general population: quilting. It was remarkably popular among many prisoners and, like Shakespeare, demonstrated that activities that might seem effeminate can be embraced by the most macho of men.

When I learned that some members of the Shakespeare program in general population were also quilters, I was amazed that they found the time to engage in two such demanding hobbies in addition to a schedule that often included a fulltime job and college classes every night.