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Prison walls serve two main purposes: they keep the prisoners in, and they keep the outside world out. Last semester, students from Hamilton used literature to permeate these walls. Professor Doran Larson's 400-level seminar concentrated on prison writing, and traveled outside the classroom to participate in a creative writing class taught by Professor Larson at the maximum security Attica State Prison. 

Eight students from "English 442: Booked" gave a presentation of their experiences on April 29, in a small but crowded Root Hall classroom. While the audience awaited the students' production, images and quotes from prisoners played on a screen. The artists dated from the 6th century to the activists of the Irish Republican Army; from victims of Nazi concentration camps to prisoners of the Gulag. 

Seniors Joe Liotta, Emily Powell, Celia Coan and Remi Gendron presented their documentary, "From the Outside In," in which they examined the reactions of the outside world to their experiences within the prison system. Those interviewed, including Professor Larson and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Anjela Peck, described that they saw "what was normally kept hidden behind barbed wire." The interviews drew the audience's attention to our tendency as a society to forget about those who have been locked up. 

Peck volunteers at the Oneida Correctional Facility, participating in a book group. She said that going into the prison, she didn't expect to find "similarities between herself and the prisoners." She was surprised, however, to feel a very human connection to the inmates with whom she read. 

Professor Larson commented on the internal prison culture. What surprised him most about entering Attica was the security apparatus in place. He said that the goals of his creative writing class sometimes contradicted the goals of the security guards, because his program "works against keeping people down." The students brought up an interesting statistic: two-thirds of those serving time in prison will be incarcerated again. Yet for every program like Professor Larson's that an inmate participates in, his chance of re-entering the prison system decreases by 10 percent.
 
Writers Chris Abani and Chuck Culhane were filmed reading from their own work about their time in prison. Abani was a political prisoner in Nigeria, and Culhane was formerly on Death Row for capital murder before he was exonerated. Both went on to become award-winning authors. The sobering passages from which they read evoked the hopelessness of life in prison. 

For many prisoners, writing is what saves them. The second portion of the evening's presentation focused on reading excerpts from prison literature. Rachel Richardson '10, Kaity Hill '09, Jonathan Wilson'09 and Nick Fesette'09 read from works by men who had died from hunger strikes, women who had been forbidden from hugging their children in the visiting room, and men who committed rape. The passages were both painful and profound. An excerpt from the work of Eldridge Cleaver said that he was forced to confront himself in prison, and that he began to write to save himself. He said, "Prison authorities were both unwilling and unable to save me. Only I could save myself."
At the conclusion of the reading, the students of the prison-writing seminar answered questions about their experiences and changed perceptions. All of them said that they were struck by the humanity of the prisoners. "None of them seemed like criminals," said one student. "It's hard to imagine that they could do anything that would get them in prison if you're sitting in a class next to them." 

Professor Larson said at the beginning of the evening that coming face-to-face with the often-disturbing prison system could be compared to hearing the siren of a police car. The sound either fills you with alarm, or it gives you hope that help is on the way. Professor Larson's work and the class of English 442 do represent a new hope for the way the world interacts with those it has locked away. 

-- by Nora Grenfell '12

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