See my article here about one of our candidates for governor in Massachusetts.  Juliette Kayyem may not be rocking the polls, but she has some ideas about fixing the state’s criminal justice system. The good news is that she’s not thinking about making prisoners bust rocks. More at Boston Magazine’s online website:

Check out my new post on and get a good primer on this program. Here’s the intro:

“As Massachusetts begins the process of giving the most notorious Boston gangster his due, most of us aren’t thinking about the kind of lawbreakers who want a way out of the cycle of crime. But a committee met this week to expand a little-known program that does exactly that.

Trial Court Chief Justices Robert Mulligan and Paula Carey want to ensure that more opportunities exist for probationers throughout Massachusetts to become law-abiding citizens. They want the reading program Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) to “emerge from the shadows.” While at least 200 probationers across the state have graduated from the program this year, the judges, probation officers, and professors on the committee are seeking to increase participation and graduation numbers.”  More

This was a difficult week to be a prison activist.  Just as it was undoubtedly difficult to work for the rights of immigrants and the mentally ill.  It was a week in Boston where four lives were lost and 170 wounded by a truly senseless act of violence committed by two young men bent on something we do not yet understand. And the last thing anyone wanted to discuss was how we need to make sure Dzhokhar Tsarnaev gets a fair trial and is not mistreated behind bars.

As I listened to the cheering on the night that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was caught, and all our officials expressing hopes and prayers for the 58 who, as of today, are still in the hospital, I thought of many moments from this week.  My students told me these stories: one went to the hospital to visit her ailing uncle in the Brigham and Women's ICU when those who had lost limbs were wheeled in; a student rushed from Lowell into Boston to try and find her father because she didn't know if he'd been hurt; and a Vietnam vet who had gone to see the Sox got lost on his way home because of the confusion. A friend's husband saw his company's restaurant's windows blown out, just across the street from the grandstand at the finish line; a friend's son who had been in New York and close to the tragedy of 9/11was about to get on the T in and instead turned around when he heard screams nearby.  It was a very unsettling experience to feel that our houses, our business, our institutions and our loved ones in the city we call home, could be unsafe.

And yet, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is 19.  He is the age of the students I teach.  He went to U Mass Dartmouth and wanted to go into the medical profession.  In fact, for whatever reason, he was seen at U Mass in his dorm, just 2 days after the horrific act he is accused of perpetrating with his brother. He had friends. He supposedly had a girlfriend.  He is, and I say it again, a student. I do not want him to be mistreated in prison; I do not want  him to get the death penalty, if he is tried in the federal courts.  I do not want any less for him than I want for any of the prisoners who commit heinous acts and live behind bars. For most of them, I want change, believe they are capable of transformation, and deserve options behind bars and in our system that give them a second chance.

Justice does not mean mercy.  That I know.  But justice must be tempered by mercy.  As we send out love to all the victims and their families, I hope we can remember the family of the Tsarnaevs.  I hope we can remember than everyone who enters our criminal justice system has a story.  Just like the doctors who labor to heal all who are hurt– no matter what the injured have done or who they are — we too, need to keep in our hearts that compassion cannot be piecemeal.   Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's acts were evil but can we really say that he is only the sum of this horrible crime?

A wonderful article in today's The Boston Globe about a young man from Roxbury who is finding himself through Shakespeare. 

Here, in a photo by The Globe, is Antonio Stroud who auditioned for the role of Othello in 2011, got the part and worked with the Actors’ Shakespeare Project in his high school, Boston Day and Evening Academy, to get to the point where he could say  ‘Yo! I love this!’ ” This year, he's on to Henry V.

In Shakespeare, Stroud said, he found an answer to the pressures young men like him face, and the power within himself to overcome them. According to his director, he understands the notion that "great men in difficult circumstances must chart their own courses. Macbeth chose evil. But Henry V, the young king of England, grew from his wayward youth to a king who led an invasion of France against impossible odds."

How many times have we heard this? "Stroud is a child of the projects in Roxbury, his mother on welfare, his father long gone."  These are the people who so many of us teach, those of us who love Shakespeare and realize his ability to draw the best out of those who feel helpless or useless or frightened or angry– those who struggle to overcome obstacles like Rose did, the woman I cast as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. She had HIV and her life spiraled out of control into drugs and crime.  "Thank you for giving me a chance to be someone else," she said after our performance, "if only for one night."

Stealing cars and hustling were part of Stroud's world. He was familiar with guns and drugs.  And he didn't get Othello at first.  He had to read it over and over. But eventually he understood that like himself, here was a "flawed" man who he identified with.  As reported by Meghan Irons, he says "I am human. I make mistakes. I am misunderstood.’’

The women I taught needed too to open their hearts, to forgive themselves and come to grips with their lives. With theatre, we get to walk around in the shoes of another.  Just this year, my students at the community college–non-actors all– acted out a scene from Miguel Pinero's haunting play, Short Eyes, about a pedophile who is murdered by other prisoners behind bars.  They bravely acted out the murder scene and each one had to confront his or her desire to kill the man who hurt children. Murderers, we forgive, they believed when they first began reading the play — but not pedophiles.  However, once they felt what it was like to be in that scene or watch it from the sidelines, their perspectives were changed. They realized that every person has a story and a man or woman is more than their crimes.

Theatre opens up our hearts and our minds and gives us a chance to live and learn from a life unlike our own. I hope Anthony will keep finding himself in Shakespeare and keep believing that his destiny is not written in the stars.
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My LTE about this young man was published this week in The Globe.

Last week I went to an event at Brandeis University with my niece to hear Damien Echols talk about his 18+ years in solitary confinement.  Echols is one of the so-called "West Memphis Three," all from West Memphis Arkansas and falsely convicted for the brutal murders of three boys in 1993.  Following a high-profile, celebrity-backed campaign to free the the three prisoners, all of whom received the death penalty, Echols and his two co-defendants were released from prison in August 2011.  They agreed to a rare plea bargain that essentially had them plead to guilt and not sue the state in exchange for immediate freedom.  It's a story made for a movie — and there is one and there will be another.  Plus many celebs helped with the case that includes stories to make your skin crawl–false accusations of Satanism, police corruption, i.e. the works.  Altogether another tragic indictment of our system.

Damien Echols on the left, and with his wife, Lorri Davis, who heard about his case, wrote to him, worked on freeing him, and eventually moved to Arkansas where they were married while he was in solitary in that prison.

But that's not what stirred me to write this blog. 

Yesterday I came across an article about Echols going back to Tennesee for the first time since he was released from prison in 2011.  For whatever reasons, he was invited to talk at… (ready?) — a technology conference.  Now, granted, just having Damien Echols come to your conference could add to the draw, but asking him to talk about his reactions to technology since he got out of prison seems at once fascinating and almost a little cruel.  How overwhelming must it be to get out and find yourself in this world where everything goes so fast you hardly have time to breathe!

And juxtapose this with what Echols said at the talk and writes about in his new book Life After Death — he eventually learned to spend up to 6 hours a day in prison meditating.  He bludgeoned his body to stand or sit in cold and heat and pushed himself through the physical pain.  He escaped the bars mentally, found himself through deep soul searching, got a modicum of peace.  His spiritual practice as well as his wife saved his life, he says.

So imagine after solitary confinement for eighteen years, walking into Best Buy.  The computers.  The cell phones. The tweets and whistles. Twitter, Echols says, he likes, because it feels like he's writing poetry. Texting too, a language unto itself.  But learning it in a heartbeat?  And what about the other bombardments of the techno-savvy 21st century? Apps?  Blogs? Flicker? All the ins and outs of the technological world, not to mention discovering that you can securely (sometimes) use credit cards online and drive straight through those giant stalls with Easy Pass.  What seems commonplace to us, natural, we actually learned step by step, year by year.

I remember how Dolly, one of the women I taught who spent fifteen years at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts, said that the scariest thing after release was looking at the prices of shoes in the mall.  She said she started shaking and couldn't stop.  Yes, there's reuniting with your loved ones.  There's the joy of seeing green grass, the ocean, or a blanket of snow across a mountain.  And surely, hot fudge in the free world is as blessed as a bath.  But the shock of having been years behind the eight ball, the feeling that you are always trying to catch up has to take time to deal with, and maybe more years to get over.

So while we (and I speak as much of myself here as you) might envy Echols for having a New York Times bestseller or for having the likes of Johnny Depp and Peter Jackson support him with their fame and opportunities, the truth of Echols's life is not celebrity or fame, but the hard darkness of coming out of the most repressive world in this country where we keep people in intolerable conditions.  Coming into the light from darkness — it is no wonder that Damien Echols must wear dark glasses.