The Maximum Security Book Club
by Mikita Brottman
(Harper-Perennial, New York, 2016)
I’ve long been preoccupied with the lives of people generally considered unworthy of sympathy, especially those who’ve committed crimes with irreversible moral implications, like murder. Such people, more so even than the rest of us, are unable to escape the past.
Page ix.
Right or wrong, it’s to the past that we look when seeking explanations for human behavior, digging through family histories to find motives for present tendencies.
Page ix.
I don’t think of people in prison as “bad people” who’ve broken he rules of the “good people” on the outside. Rather, I often think how easily I - how anyone - could end up there.
Page xi.
Even the most stable and prosperous life can be derailed by an impulsive move with tragic consequences (shooting an intruder, punching a girlfriend, knocking over a pedestrian).
Pages xi-xii.
I can’t help but feel a powerful allegiance to those whose lives haven’t worked out so well, and it’s partly this feeling that drives me to volunteer at the prison.
Page xii.
One of the reasons Heart of Darkness speaks to me so deeply is because, like Marlow, I, too, am fascinated by dark places and their inhabitants.
Page xii.
I like to turn things over and see what they look like underneath.
Page xii.
Virtually all educators who volunteer their time in prisons - and perhaps elsewhere - are based in the humanities and related fields. This is not only because those drawn to these subject areas tend to have a more liberal, idealistic way of thinking - and are seldom paid enough to feel their wisdom is too hard earned to be given away for free - but also because these disciplines require no expensive equipment (unlike, say, classes in engineering, computer science, architecture, or medicine).
Page xviii.
For me, the prison was a new and compelling place for me to talk about books I love with people I wouldn’t otherwise get to know. Page xviii.
At JCI, boundaries were built into every human encounter, and we were explicitly discouraged from befriending our prison students - we were not allowed, for example, to visit them, write to them, or receive letters or calls from them - which made things difficult, because I found myself increasingly drawn to these men.
Page xviii.
Top dogs annoy me: underdogs are more my type.
Page xix.
At JCI, I learned the converse is also true: muscles can be a sign or sadness, tattoos can cover lack, and underdogs come in all shapes and sizes. Once I discovered this, the convicts began to fascinate me.
Page xix.
As a woman in a male prison, I’ve never been pestered ort harassed, but then, women in men’s prisons aren’t as rare as you might think.
Page xx.
At the prison it’s enormously gratifying to be with men who not only want to be there but also tell me my visit is the highlight of their week.
Page xxi.
In books, women who try to use culture to help those sores off than themselves are always deluded.
Page xxii.
These nine prisoners are smart and thoughtful, but they’re also tough, hard-edged, and practical. For them, the books we read seem to provide a kind of defensive barrier, as well as a bridge. It’s always easier to get to know people when they’re not talking about themselves directly, and I soon came to realize that when the men are talking about books, they’re also talking about their lives.
Page xxiii.
The group brings together men from different housing units, gang affiliations, and racial and religious backgrounds who wouldn’t normally spend time together.
Page xxiii.
They insist they want to learn and say they’re open to new ideas, yet on many subjects they’re already rock-solid in their opinions.
Page xxiv.
I’ve always believed that, to remain open to the surprises and contingencies offered by literature, you have to value ignorance more than self-confidence.
Page xxiv.
Why do we find it so difficult to believe that men who’ve killed are as capable of literary appreciation as anyone else?
Page xxv.
Outside prison, the accepted, value-neutral word for an incarcerated individual in “inmate,” but within the prison gates, this word is taboo. The men at JCI taught me that in most American prisons, “inmate” is regarded as a euphemism coined by the prison authorities - the equivalent to the average slave of an “Uncle Tom.” “The difference between an inmate and a convict,” one of the men told me, “is respect.” Instead of regarding words like “convict| and “criminal” as demeaning, the prisoners saw them as honest descriptions of their position.
Page xxvi.
It wasn’t a “class” in the sense that I didn’t have anything to “teach” the men. I wanted to introduce them to some books they wouldn’t normally have encountered, and I wanted to hear what they had to say about them.
Page xxvii.
The rewards the book club offered these nine men were intangible and inexpressible, and I never lost sight of the fact that they would surely have preferred to spend their time learning something practical: computer skills, car mechanics, or carpentry, perhaps.
Page xxix.
Just as certain pieces of music can’t be understood until you’ve heard them over and over again, some books need to be read more than once.
Page 5.
Over the months and years I spent with this group of men, I noticed that - until we came to the final book - they always sat faithfully in the place they chose that very first day. Clearly, these were men who were accustomed to sticking to a routing and to carving out the boundaries of their own space, however small.
Page 6.
It wasn’t unusual for the men to arrive at different times. They came from various locations in the prison.
Page 15.
“At first, say the first five to seven years, you’re still focused on your former life. And it you’re young, that’s usually girls, sex, and partying. That’s what you dream about. After the first seven years or so, you lose that connection to the outside and that’s when you start yearning for friends and family, especially if they’ve stopped visiting you or if they’re getting old. Then, after about fifteen years, food becomes the number one priority. You think about it constantly. You dream about it. Buys like me who’ve been in here for a while, we love to watch cooking shows on television. They help us remember things we’ve forgotten, how things used to taste.”
Pages 18-19.
When Marlow first mentions “one of the dark places of the earth” he’s referring not to Africa but to London. Marlow’s journey is literal, but it’s also symbolic and psychological. What distinguishes him from those that fall under the spell of darkness - including Kurtz, and most of the European colonizers - isn’t the color of the skin but his capacity for work.
Pages 22-23.
Language gives the illusion of bringing us closer, but it actually cuts us off from one another.
Page 26.
Conrad deliberately tries to make ordinary things seem strange, twisting words out of shape until you start to see them in a new way and think differently about what they do and how they work.
Page 26.
What Conrad shows us is our inability to make each other understand our experiences.
Page 26.
I didn’t speak, because whenever I opened my mouth, I sounded stupid. I couldn’t think and speak at the same time. Sitting down to write, I was calm. Things were in their place. The world was as it should be.
Page 29.
At the orientation session for prison volunteers we’d been told that women had to be especially careful not to dress in a way that could be considered provocative.
Page 31.
The COs, I’d noticed, liked to characterize the prisoners as hostile and dangerous caged animals just waiting for the chance to attack. I thought they took pleasure in exaggerating the threat posed by the men, who, in my expe4ience at least, were far more polite and deferential than the guards. Perhaps, by imagining this constant danger, the COs made their jobs seem more vital and exciting.
Page 32.
The prisoners, on the other hand, unversed in classroom decorum, would always be straight with me, and this was one of the things I liked about them
Page 35.
When I understood more about the men’s living conditions, however, I realized I should have been surprised when they had done the reading. The prison was an echo chamber; everywhere, sound reverberated off metal surfaces and concrete walls.
Page 35.
Within their own groups and gangs, the prisoners would dl favors for one another: lend each other money, clothing, and books, help one another move to different cell clocks and obtain coveted work assignments; give advice on how to get various kinds of privileges; and shout encouraging messages to those in the segregation cells. Most important, they listened to one another’s life stories and followed the endless ins and outs of one another’s legal cases.
Page 36.
Some lifers, I’d noticed, were unusually young looking for their age, since limited sun exposure delayed the normal signs of aging.
Page 36.
Intelligent discussion about a book doesn’t preclude personal anecdotes, but the men’s stories seemed to have only a very oblique connection with the text. In other words, they weren’t actually talking about “Bartleby” at all, but making “Bartleby” talk about them.
Page 41.
The men didn’t want to look at Melville’s words. They wanted to use their own.
Page 42.
There was no point pushing the men to focus on the parts of the story I found so compelling if they didn’t find those parts interesting themselves.
Page 43.
Communication is an illusion … each of us is alone in the universe.
Page 46.
I was starting to realize what they expected from literature: a clever point, an enlightening lesson, a key “takeaway.” They had little tolerance for indirection, oblique connections, arbitrary sidetracks. In short, they wanted a fast and obvious return on their investment.
Page 47.
The more I read, the more ignorant I feel - and this is just one of the ways in which literature does not, despite the clichés, “make us smarter.”
Page 47.
In general, the men felt that however lonely a person might be in prison, there was comfort in the knowledge that everyone around you is in the same boat.
Page 53.
The later in his life a man came to prison, the easier his time would be. Men who’d lived a full life in the outside world could sustain themselves through their memories, but those without such recollection of a past had little to nourish them.
Page 54.
These forays into the personal, I realized, would constantly infiltrate our conversations, and I need to get used to them and stop worrying about where the discussion was headed.
Page 55.
I wanted the men to be interested not in me but in the books I was trying to introduce them to. After all, one of these days, sooner rather than later, I’d be gone, but the books would remain. If they could transfer their interest from me to the books, I wanted to tell them, they’d be set for life.
Page 59.
At its best, learning is erotic. When, as a student, I’d get a crush of my own on a professor, I’d also find myself getting excited about whatever book or poem they were teaching. … It became impossible to separate my love of literature form my romantic fantasies about those figures who, to me, embodied a certain style of living. It’s natural to want to emulate the tastes and interests of those you look up to.
Page 59.
Most of the men in the book club seemed to feel that in one way or another they had been heading for success until their lives were derailed by the influence of one malignant person or one traumatic event. Something I’ve learned from literature is that trajectories appear only in retrospect. In the present, all we see are the ordinary ups and downs of everyday affairs.
Page 61.
Mostly … what they despised about shrinks was their power to pry secrets out of people - secrets that would later be used against them, sometimes in court. The psychologist at JCI got death threats from prisoners all the time.
Page 63.
Words were things that could make your mind hum.
Page 65.
I wanted people to think I was hard and tough, but the punk rock style favored by my friends and I was all naïve bravado.
Page 67.
Of course, you could get anything in prison. Deprivation creates desire, and desire creates demand.
Page 69.
Some of the men, I felt, regarded the Department of Corrections as their adversary in an ongoing game, the object of which was to score as often and in whatever form they could. In this way, their lives gained a kind of meaning from pursuit itself, whether of coffee, cigarettes, or products more illicit and more difficult to obtain.
Page 69.
Drugs can be bought in prison just as they can on the streets, and the boredom and monotony of life behind bars must surely increase the temptation to use.
Page 81.
There are no “dealers” I prison, I learned. Different men get hold of drugs art various times in different ways, and sources change from week to week (if anyone sold them consistently for several days in a row, they’d soon be found out).
Page 81.
Too busy trying to stimulate the men’s interest in Junkie, I’d f ailed to notice the presence, right in front of my eyes, of a sleepy, nodding drug addict.
Page 81.
Part of the punishment inherent in the prison system is the way it abolishes the boundary between public and private. Prisoners aren’t supposed to have any secrets. Everything is supposed to be open and transparent. Private tastes and preferences are a luxury of the free.
Page 83.
One of the things that Junkie reveals is that people never stop struggling and suffering, that lives advance and grow even int eh dark, that every history has its personal course.
Page 84.
For most of the prisoners, reading was just a way of passing time. It wasn’t as expensive or damaging to their physical health as cigarettes.
Page 84.
Prisons in fiction have to be volatile and action-packed, you couldn’t make a page-turner out of the monotony of real life behind bars.
Page 86.
The prisoners told me it was almost impossible for people “uptown” (as they called the outside world) to understand the things that happened in prison, from brutal violence to ordinary everyday indignities. Page 89.
I saw Braly’s descriptions of prison architecture as a way of suggesting that human beings are inseparable form their contest, and that the longer we live in a place, the more it becomes a part of our mind-set and physical makeup.
Page 91.
As I listened to the men talk, I noticed how in tier conversation, the planes of novel and reality seemed to overlap.
Page 93.
The prison’s many religious groups were widely believed by prison authorities to be “jailhouse religions,” meaning beliefs that would disappear as soon as the followers was released from prison.
Page 97.
The real concern with the enthusiastic espousal of religion in the prison, I suspect, was that it bonded some men too closely - in a gang-like way, perhaps - with their fellow congregants, and it isolated others so greatly in the private study of their religious texts that they were too much alone.
Page 97.
At JCI, sewing and embroidery were skills in high demand.
Page 99.
Outside of organized religious groups, the prisoners fell readily into what might be described as makeshift or syncretic belief systems, cults whose forms of worship sprang form any ingredients close at hand.
Page 102.
Prison tattooists would discourage young prisoners from getting their first stick-and-poke tattoos, since they might come to regret signs of their identity as an ex-con. But once a guy’s been in the system for a while and knows he night neve stand a chance of parole, he’ll start to acquire tattoos to confirm his identity as a convict.
Page 103.
For most of the men, tattooing was about marking them as belonging to the same culture as well as distinguishing group embers from one another.
Page 103.
The prisoners’ tribal signs and symbols fulfilled a serious adult need, and tattooing them on their flesh was a way of establishing or reaffirming community.
Pages 103-104.
In many cases, the gang is the convict’s first experience of order, whether on the street or in prison.
Page 104.
The prison’s sects and gangs provide them with more community and support than they’d ever had on the outside, and gave them a permanent, stable family, which would always be in place no matter what.
Page 104.
Most prisoners aren’t released directly from JCI but taken to a pre-release facility for a week or so, to prepare them for life on the outside. Then, once they’ve met their parole officer and arranged the details of their parole, they’re free to go.
Page 105.
I loved Macbeth not for its story but for its language. I was fascinated by the weight of the words their sequence and rhythm, the way they made me feel, even though they were often incomprehensible.
Pages 108-109.
I’d assumed that a trip out of the prison, even if it was to the hospital, must have been a pleasant change from the monotonous daily routine. Later, I came to realize how wrong I was. Trips “uptown,” whether to the hospital or the courtroom, meant the prisoner had to change into the requisite orange jumpsuit and “three-piece jewelry” (leg irons, waist chain, and handcuffs) and then sit in a hallway, often for hours at a time, waiting for paperwork to be filled out. If the paperwork wasn’t ready in time or if anything was missing, the appointment would be rescheduled, and another day would be spent the same way.
Pages 112-113.
Like all other U.S. prisons today, JCI is smoke-free, and so some degree candy has replaced cigarettes as a sanctioned, legitimate treat. Page 123.
In prison … there’s a set time for everything: meals, commissary, showers, school, religious services, gym, yard time, free time. You can’t delay your meal for a few minutes, take an early shower or postpone a task like you can on the outside. Everything you do is subject to detailed regulation. If you work, you might spend most of the day at your job, and when you’ve finished, had your dinner, and waited in line for a shower, it might be 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. you would get a couple of hours in the evening for writing letters and reading, although by then … most people are too tired to do anything but watch television.
Page 134.
Jekyll doesn’t create Hyde by accident, like in the movies. He creates Hyde deliberately, because he wants to do things that a man of his class, age, and position isn’t supposed to do.
Page 139.
To some degree, the more we’re able to repress, the more successful we are. An inability to compartmentalize is one of the min signs of mental illness.
Page 141.
Compartmentalization, I thought, is the soul of the prison.
Page 142.
“Everything in here happens because somebody wants it to happen.”
Page 157.
JCI had a number of different sports teams, including soccer, volleyball, handball, and basketball. At one time I’d have imagined prison to be an unlikely place for team sports to thrive, since they require perseverance and cooperation, but now I knew these were qualities in which many of the prisoners excelled. Page 165.
I laughed more in the book club than I’ve laughed since I was a kid. I laughed in ways I hadn’t laughed for so long, I hardly recognized them: sudden, undignified snorts; irrepressible sniggers; the kind of laughter that made my stomach hurt. I was reminded of the kind of joy that came from being absorbed in a group, with its exuberant and irrepressible energy.
Page 171.
It wasn’t so much the pace of the men’s reading that bothered me as their inability to look ahead. They’d focus on each word in the context of the line or, at the very most, the sentence. Everything was in the moment for them.
Page 175.
Sometimes I felt depressed to think the books we read made so little impression on the men. On the other hand, I knew books could have an indiscernible, even unconscious impact, whether or not you remembered their titles.
Pages 175-176.
The prisoners, on the other hand, had little background in literature, and many of them didn’t read a great deal, if at all, apart from magazines and religious texts. They had to make sense of every story as it unfolded, word by word, fitting together each sentence as it appeared before them, with no eye for the future and no time for the past.
Page 176.
“When we can’t grasp something enormous, we hold on to something small.”
Page 178.
“Everybody who comes to prison is in denial at first. You think it’s all a big mistake. Somebody’s going to find out what’s happened, there’ll be headlines int eh newspaper, your attorney’s going to get you out. It’ll soon be over, and you’ll be back home again. Then it finally sinks in. Nobody’s going to rescue you. This is it. You’re on your own.”
Page 179.
The prisoners had a far more passionate sense of justice than I did. The outcast is always looking for someone to throw rocks at.
Page 198.
I saw language as central to Lolita, but the prisoners saw it as a way to make the vile lusts of a pedophile seem high-minded, a smoke screen to distract gullible intellectuals who fell for a fancy prose style.
Page 201.
I’d never thought of Lolita as a story about pedophilia. To me, it was a love story and a story about language.
Page 203.
There’s no such things as ‘just an old pedo’ like Sig said. Even if you find somebody’s behavior reprehensible, pedophiles are people like you and me, individuals with histories, backgrounds, families, and relationships.
Page 205.
Sex always spills over into other kinds of experiences and emotions, like the need to be loved, or to express power, or to leave your mark.
Page 205.
Oddly enough, when their release dates came up, not all men wanted to get out of prison. Some would mess up deliberately because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to support themselves on the outside.
Page 218.
I was not turning them into readers. They were just men who attended the prison book club.
Page 228.
On the inside, I’d oved those men. But on the outside, I’d lost them.
Page 228.