Robert Waxler: It started for me while on a summer seminar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities at Princeton in the early 1980s. We were exploring the relationship between literature and society, how literature was becoming increasingly marginalized in the culture… By contrast, I deeply believed in literature, the power of language, the depth of the imagination.

A decade or so later, in 1991, I saw an opportunity. After a tennis match with my friend Bob Kane, we sat down to talk. Bob was serving as a district court judge in New Bedford. He was disturbed by what he characterized as “turnstile justice,” sending offenders to jail, then seeing them again before his bench, headed back to jail.

Let’s try an experiment, I suggested. Take eight to ten men coming before you over the next few weeks, and instead of sending them back behind bars, sentence them to a literature seminar at the University. This was the model for Changing Lives Through Literature: a professor, judge, and probation officer coming together with criminal offenders to talk about good literature on a college campus.

RW: We saw that reading and discussing good literature could move people, give them energy, offer them a direction. An early longitudinal study of the program found that offenders going through CLTL had a recidivism rate of only 19% compared to a control group with a rate of 45%.

In that first CLTL group, there was a young man, Jeff, who was a serious drug dealer, very bright, thrilled by the rhythm of the tough streets. After a few sessions, Jeff came in one night and told us that he had found through these sessions something as exciting as the streets: reading and talking about books. Jeff had started to read to his three-year-old daughter as well.

Jean Trounstine: A year after the “Bobs” began doing CLTL in New Bedford, I heard about the program. I was working at Middlesex Community College in Lowell as a humanities professor and also teaching writing and literature classes at Framingham Women’s Prison. I was excited about Changing Lives Through Literature because it was philosophically similar to what I was already doing; it used the arts and humanities to increase self-awareness, social skills, and self-esteem and to deepen one’s connections to others.

I enlisted an administrator of my college to drive with me to meet Judge Kane and talk about beginning a women’s CLTL program in the Lowell area. From my Framingham experience, I knew that women offenders would respond heartily to this program — a chance to get outside of their daily grind and to see themselves and their behavior in a new light.

JT: At first, I felt concerned since I was less intimately connected than I’d been with my students behind bars. But soon I began to see that they were yearning to come to the class, and that the discussions meant as much to them as the readings. During our class time, the judge and their POs looked at them as thinkers — not as lost souls or tramps or washed-up mothers.

The most important aspect of the program, I think, is that it offers a space for reflection in people’s lives. Women in the criminal justice system, by and large, have no space. What makes a difference is that there, in that sacred space, they are valued by authority figures, and their voices are heard. They begin to recognize that they have voices worth listening to.

JT: There were many skeptics along the way: POs who saw the program as a “soft” approach to crime, and judges who feared the ridicule of their peers. But bolstered by anecdotal evidence of success from our probationers and by our own faith in the program, we decided to try to obtain state funding to expand the program. In 1994, the Legislature awarded the first public monies to develop CLTL programs throughout the state.

What keeps me going is students like Kim. Kim came to CLTL with a long record, including prison time. After CLTL, Kim went on to Middlesex Community College and graduated, worked toward a BA in Psychology at UMass Lowell, kept up with AA and NA. She fell in love, got married, bought a house, became a stepmother, and had her own children. Kim used CLTL in the best possible way, understanding that she was part of a community and that she had the power to build community.

RW: I am convinced that literature offers us the best opportunity we have to keep ourselves and our community human. It is not just the criminal offenders who glimpse this. Judges who participate in the reading and discussions have described CLTL as the most enriching experience of their own long careers.

To me, that is the meaning of “human community,” the obligation of democracy: to find a way to open the closed spaces that stifle the rich variety of the human voice, to allow people the opportunity to name themselves, to create their own story in the midst of other stories, in the flow of the community. Reading and discussing good stories point us in that direction, at least for a while.

©2006 The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities