In the past weeks, I have read about two remarkable people who affected my life and work. The first, Jon Marc Taylor, was not someone I knew well, but I knew of his impact on the world. In my book Shakespeare Behind Bars, I discussed how the removal of Pell Grants almost destroyed college education behind bars. Jon was one of the most important voices in the fight to return them. But rather than talk about him myself, Lynn Glover, his long-time friend, wrote a beautiful letter that was just published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and she has given me permission to share it below.

“Jon Marc Taylor was a remarkable man. He accomplished more than most people from a prison cell than most people have in the “free world.” He received a bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ball State University and went on to complete a doctorate in public administration.

Taylor was an author and organizer. He was a strong advocate for reducing recidivism by restoring Pell Grants and he started numerous NAACP chapters in Missouri prisons. In 2010, he arranged for a full-day seminar of the national NAACP meeting in Kansas City to be held at his prison in Cameron, Mo.. Taylor wrote a book designed to help other prisoners rehabilitate themselves through education.

Taylor was incarcerated in Licking, Mo., when he was taken into solitary confinement for over 30 days for having contraband, which amounted to a small amount of butter. This is where he had a debilitating stroke in February 2014. He received therapy for this and was making much progress when his therapy was ended last February and was transferred to Charleston, Mo. He died Dec. 27, 2015, of an apparent heart attack.

Taylor was a brilliant, funny, caring and resilient man who was severely impaired in his ability to communicate from the stroke. He never gave up trying to rehabilitate himself after this and always saw hope in everything that he did. He was turned down for parole four times even though it was determined through a psychological evaluation, and through his many giving actions, that he would be no danger to society.

There is so much more that Jon Marc Taylor did while incarcerated. In the words of writer Bill Tammeus, we really did fail Jon Marc Taylor. If this is what he accomplished behind the walls of prison, it is hard to imagine what he would have done to make our world a better place had he been given his freedom many years ago. Our system is broken and we all need to do something — no matter how big or small — to prevent more injustice.”

Lynn Glover  •  Cabool, Mo.”

Pictured above is Rick Cluchey, author and performer from the amazing play, The Cage, that was my introduction to prison theatre. I saw this production when I lived in the Bay Area in California, and Cluchey, freed from San Quentin, was touring this production. As I wrote in the Forward  of the paperback edition of SBB, ” I was taken less by the content of the play—a nightmare of violence that pitted men against guards—than by the incredible talent of the performers. The image of artists in prison as a cage with men struggling to be free stuck in my mind.” It also helped me take the punge to direct plays in prison, the beginning of my activism.

Cluchey was an amazing talent and as the New York Times recently wrote after being sentenced to prison at age 21,  “his life began to change for the better when the San Francisco Actors Workshop performed Waiting for Godot directed by Herbert Blau, at San Quentin State Prison in November 1957. Thus began the unlikely redemptive arc of Mr. Cluchey’s adulthood, one that led him out of jail and toward a career as an actor and playwright, most notably as a protégé of Samuel Beckett and an interpreter of his cryptic work.”

Cluchey died at age 82, after a career of acting in Beckett’s plays and collaborating with the man himself. he educated himself in prison, read plays, helped start the San Quentin  Actors Workshop, and became devoted to theatre. As the Times wrote, “Mr. Cluchey’s work in prison theater — including a play he wrote about prison life, “The Cage” — was a factor in the commutation of his sentence by Gov. Edmund G. Brown and his release on parole in 1966. He subsequently formed Barbwire Theater, a troupe that including several ex-convicts. They performed The Cage in numerous cities.”

While Cluchey had the chance to change his life on the outside, Jon Marc Taylor did not get the freedom he deserved. And when prisoners die, not enough people know. These two amazing men are getting important shout-outs. We also would do ourselves well to remember the men and women who die behind bars and go unnoticed by most of us.

Christopher Zoukis, incarcerated writer, interviewed me on Huffington Post about why we should not sentence kids to adult prisons, and here’s a piece of his intro:

“In recent years a question has presented itself amongst criminal justice circles: Should juvenile offenders be treated as kids or adults? This question seems to be increasingly important as instances of serious crime committed by juveniles has become more prevalent, or at least more visible, in the United States. The fact that “as many as 250,000 juveniles are tried, sentenced or incarcerated each year as adults”, according to Aljazeera America is enough to give anyone pause due to the breadth of the issue.” More