Why does bates decide to teach in a maximum security prison

Many people thought Laura Bates was out of her mind when she offered to teach Shakespeare in the maximum security wing of an Indiana prison. But the prisoners found a deep connection with the playwright’s words. Laura Bates talks about her experience in her new book Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard.1 She speaks with host Michel Martin.

BATES: Exactly. And that is the phrase that is often used, the worst of the worst. Here in the state of Indiana, we have a few super max units and they do house what are considered to be the most violent offenders throughout the state of Indiana, and I didn’t even know there was such a unit. It was a shock and a learning experience to me when I discovered this unit even existed.

And briefly, what happened was I was teaching freshman English classes at the facility, Wabash Valley, for prisoners in the general population. I was a part-time professor at the time at Indiana State University. In those days, we had a college degree granting program for prisoners, and one of my students got in trouble and he was taken out of class and I started to ask around. You know, where’s Don? What happened to him? Where’d he go? And my prisoner-students told me about this unit, this highly restricted unit, super max, and that’s where my student, Don, had been sent.

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So I was told at the time, well, there’s no education in this unit. No teacher has ever gone into this unit. So, of course, that made me want to get into that unit. I asked for permission from the administration and the warden3 at the time knew me and knew me to be, you know, a good college professor for many years. He literally opened that door for me and ended up inviting me to begin a voluntary program based on Shakespeare, which is my specialty, for these inmates that not only are the worst of the worst, at least in the eyes of the public, but more importantly, in my own eyes, they were the ones that needed education the most. They had the greatest need for education and for really any kind of programming and, ironically, they had the least available to them.

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So these are the prisoners who, over and over and over, have been told that they are not capable, that they are certainly not intelligent, that they are not able to take on these kinds of, you know, intellectual challenges and so here comes somebody from the street knocking on their cell door and saying, hi, would you like to read some Shakespeare?

So, initially, that gets their attention.