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3 months ago
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Jackson, a construction worker in his previous life, had a life-changing experience when he enrolled in Annabel’s course Origins of the English Novel, and read Chaucer, a little Rabelais, “Don Quixote,” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” After the class, he decided to focus on the eighteenth-century novel, devouring works by Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, Fanny Burney, and Tobias Smollett. In a tutorial with Annabel, he worked his way through all fifteen hundred pages of Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa.” During the pandemic, he read independently, but looked forward to a return to the classroom. “I pray you will do another class containing the classics,” he wrote. “The ones that taste like really good pudding and not metallic modernity.” Jackson’s aspiration is to become a writer. “If I had known when I was young that this world existed,” he confided to me, “my life would have been completely different.”
Another student with a remarkable capacity for work was Liam, who was of Irish descent, and had been reincarcerated on a parole violation. He had learned enough Russian from another inmate to read “War and Peace” in both the original and the translation, side by side, when we offered a class on it. He had first read the novel in English twenty-five years earlier, while in solitary confinement. In the vacuum of the cell, he wrote Annabel, “the characters and scenes in the book, aristocratic drawing rooms and battlefields, so vividly rendered by Tolstoy, so rich and detailed and colorful, seemed realer than my own life, which was a drab, monotonous blur.” The prospect of revisiting Tolstoy’s classic in a P.E.I. class filled him with joy. “Dangling before me is the dazzling prospect of reading Tolstoy’s great novel in the original,” he wrote. “I view this as nothing less than cosmic grace.”
For those of us who taught literature at Great Meadow, there was the question of which literary works to include in our curricula. Not only which were “important” by the standards of literary history, but which would most enrich the inmates’ inner lives and foster communication among them. Annabel included authors who wrote of traumatic situations: Primo Levi, Chinua Achebe, Sebastian Barry. I leaned toward thinkers who would stretch the students’ brains to the maximum, and whose ideas could be applied to current events: Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, David Hume. Lisa Fox Martin, a former N.Y.U. and Brooklyn College classicist, undertook to teach Homer. The first course she offered, on the Iliad, was pertinent to our population’s “lived experience,” as the saying goes: the violence, the gang-style warfare, the masculinity, both real and performative, and the devastation wrought on families and communities by all of the above. The students recognized the situations and characters immediately. But, to my surprise, they found Lisa’s next offering, on the Odyssey, even more applicable to their lives. Like Odysseus, they were all on a journey, a quest to reach their real homes or to find a spiritual center that would serve instead. “Prison is like Hades to a degree,” one of the class members, Mike, observed. “It’s full of sad souls with their sorrowful stories full of anguish and regret.” Above all, Mike, a former street hustler intent on changing his life, was taken with Homer’s idea of nostos, or homecoming, for which all the denizens of Great Meadow shared an overpowering longing.
Readers familiar with the culture wars on college campuses might wonder whether we got pushback for any of the books we assigned, from either the left or the right. No. The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did not reject anything on our list. I later learned that Machiavelli’s “The Prince” had something of a cult following in Great Meadow, among wannabe Big Men who looked to it for tips on how to gain power. If I had known this ahead of time, I might not have assigned the book in my Renaissance class, but I did, and DOCCS made no objection. Among the students, what might broadly be described as concern over political correctness simply did not exist. They were open-minded and eager to tackle whatever we gave them. Annabel had given up assigning Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” at Bennington several years before; though that novel is one of the most potent anti-colonialist works in English literature, Conrad’s message is perhaps too subtly delivered for current college students, conveyed in the voice of a narrator who does not choose his words according to twenty-first-century sensitivities. This was not a problem at Great Meadow, whose denizens were older and far more experienced.
One of the most interesting members of the P.E.I. program was Vincent, a ferociously intelligent man in his mid-thirties who had been a truck driver in civilian life. Vincent was, in many ways, a classic autodidact. He reminded me of other students I’d encountered over the years who, accustomed to being reliably smarter than their teachers, had come to mistrust all intellectual authority and weave their own erratic paths. He was an electrifying presence in class, sparking discussion with unusual insights, some legitimate and others less so. In one session on Samuel Johnson’s essays, I drew a limit when he suggested that Johnson, perhaps the best-read man of the eighteenth century, didn’t understand the meaning of the word “stoicism.” “I’m sure you’re smarter than your other teachers, and I’m sure you’re smarter than I am, but I don’t actually think you’re smarter than Samuel Johnson,” I said. He took such rebuffs with good humor, laughing and moving on to the next mental challenge.
During the isolation of the pandemic, in which Vincent pursued a correspondence course with Annabel on the British regional novel, he had the time to rethink his way of learning. At one point, he misused the word “hypocritical” and Annabel corrected him gently by showing him the Oxford English Dictionary definition for “hypocrisy.” He was very much struck by it:
I can’t say when I learned this word (third grade?), but I can say that as soon as I read your reply, the definition, and your further response, I knew I was wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. I thought, “I have never actually known this word’s definition. Huh . . . A week before that, I would have argued my superiority with words. I was wrong, and I was glad to read this and be so thoroughly humbled.
Vincent sailed through his classes at P.E.I., and began to plan for a possible writing career after his release, a few years down the road. In 2024, he won second prize in a national essay competition on Samuel Beckett, open to every incarcerated person.
In July, 2024, it was announced that Great Meadow would be closing in just a few months. This did not come as a surprise. Prison populations across New York State had been shrinking, owing to a decline in crime rates and in sentences for minor drug offenses. Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan was to consolidate prison populations and shut down the worst facilities. Inmates were reassigned to other facilities; P.E.I. was given some influence over where its students went, as they all wished to continue their studies. Most of the men we taught have ended up in places with academic programs, although many are given little or no access to the classes. Eric has been denied access to college courses, not because he’s a lifer but because he already has a degree. He believes, though, that the work he did with us at Great Meadow has given him an excellent foundation for future independent studies. As I write, he is tackling Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson.”
“Of course Great Meadow should be closed,” Annabel said at the time. “But there are men there who have no other family, friends, community than the men they live close to, work with, and perhaps, more poignantly, study with, who now lose all that and have to begin again somewhere they have no social capital and in some cases quite a lot to fear.” (The latter is particularly true for former gang members, who may come across enemies from a previous life, and for inmates who are particularly vulnerable to staff assault—sex offenders, for example, or those who have attacked police officers.) The closure, she went on, “was hard on those P.E.I. students who were dependent on the program as a safe place to think and talk, and I was aware of friends who would be separated.”
Katherine Meeks, an instructor who taught college courses to New York inmates through the nonprofit Rising Hope, concurs. “I have long thought that the major benefit of our educational programs is less in the knowledge conveyed than in the relationships built, both between teachers and students and among the students themselves,” she wrote Davis-Goff. “Without those kinds of relationships, how can they even see themselves (in a positive light, for once), let alone come to understand others? That is what has the biggest impact on rehabilitation, in my opinion.” In my own opinion, the very decision to join the program, which was not always valued by the prison culture, and which was quite intense, meant that the inmate had already taken a considered step toward rehabilitation.
Greg Mingo, a graduate of P.E.I. who received clemency from then Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2021, after forty years of incarceration, has spent the time since his release engaged in activism on behalf of the incarcerated and the recently released. A co-founder of the Clemency Collective, he has worked with the Innocence Project, Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, and CUNY’s clemency cases. “Out of seventeen people I know that received clemency, fifteen of them were in college or had college degrees at the time,” he said, before leaving Great Meadow. “It makes a huge difference. Not just because you’re trying to attain something, but because it makes a difference in your life for you. You have a sense of accomplishment that nobody can take away from you. You have a sense of dignity that nobody can take away from you.” ♦
