The Prison Book Club (6 page)

“I put myself in his place,” said Ben. “Like what would you do?” He was trying to imagine himself as a parent in Brown's situation. “At times it was kind of touching. I found he's strong, because he's just stripped away. The way he became raw with a lot of things. It took a lot for him to do this.”

And Frank too: “I felt the desperation in his book.”

I hadn't seen empathy like this from prison book club members before. Here was the reaction that Carol and I had anticipated, or at least hoped for. We had often discussed the possibility that the process of stepping into the shoes of characters in books could encourage the development of empathy in the men.

With that, we had exhausted the roster of members who had actually finished the book. Now it was up to Carol, Derek and me to broaden the discussion to include the others.

Derek said that Brown was in a horrible situation but that he was absolutely honest about his feelings, and also funny. And with that we moved into laughing about one or two of the funnier anecdotes.

He read aloud the passage in which Brown described Walker howling and hitting his head in a doctor's waiting room while the other children were behaving well. We laughed and Carol said that we are all disabled in a sense, and that Brown and his son, Walker, had taught us not to be so afraid of our own silliness and imperfections.

How appropriate, then, when one of the men came up to me at the end of the meeting, described himself as having bipolar disorder and gave me three poems that he'd written for my feedback, one of which spoke about his imperfections motivating him to overcome his darker thoughts. I promised to take his poems and bring back comments.

About a week after the meeting, Carol phoned me to say that the men's reactions to
The Boy in the Moon
were still on her mind. “It's really given me pause,” she said. “We were asking the men to connect with a guy who comes from the same intellectual or social milieu as we do. But if anyone has met adversity, it's these guys. The food is really meagre, they have five Counts a day, so they're regimented. They don't ever see a tree. The visits are very limited. They're humiliated. They are crowded in with people they don't necessarily want to be with. I think we need to be aware that we're taking them out of their culture, which makes their responses very interesting.” The “Counts” she was referring to required inmates to return to their cells at several designated times each day to be counted by staff. I was beginning to know Carol well enough to recognize that this was no idle chat. She had decided that she had miscalculated with this book selection and that it wouldn't happen again.

Something else was niggling at her. Too many guys took a book and never reappeared at book club, or showed up at the meeting without having read the book. Watch out, I thought, she was going to start getting tough with the men. Sure enough, Carol wanted to appoint a cadre of book club “ambassadors” to recruit members and encourage current members to finish the book. Not the typical recruitment and enforcement that happened in the prison yard— recruitment and enforcement for a good cause.

“I just want to be there when it happens,” I told her, curious about her bravado.

The next book group had been scheduled to meet later that month, but was postponed until May because of a break in the water main at the prison. I had driven the two hundred and sixty kilometres to be there and a plumbing problem had botched it. Despite my disappointment I managed to joke to the prison chaplain before I drove back to Toronto that a water main without water would make a great tunnel. Everyone was aware that earlier that week about five hundred prisoners, mostly Taliban, had escaped from Sarposa Prison in Kandahar through a three-hundred-metre tunnel into a nearby house.

When we reconvened in May, Carol issued a
mea culpa
that we had not anticipated the men's reactions to
The Boy in the Moon
. “I'm sure that for you, Ian Brown, who had a nanny and access to all sorts of resources, wasn't the man of courage that we saw him to be,” she said to the men. “What we'd like to say to you is that we really salute you for your courage, for getting through day by day in this place, with all of its challenges, many of which we don't know. As well, many of you are making plans for your lives, and trying to keep that glimmer of hope up is a very courageous act.”There were murmurs of acknowledgment, and I could tell that she had won their hearts again.

That month we were reading our second book about disability, but in the form of fiction. I had suggested
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by British writer Mark Haddon, for its journey into the mind of someone with what appeared to be autism spectrum disorder. The book is narrated with subject-predicate simplicity by Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy who has difficulty interpreting facial expressions and understanding idioms of language. He has an aptitude for math and science, and lives according to a strict routine in order to avoid sensory overload. But when Christopher finds his neighbour's poodle impaled with a pitchfork, he travels outside his comfort zone to search for the killer, using the detective skills he has learned reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries. The boy's investigations unveil some adult secrets at home and in his neighbourhood, including the fact that his mother is not dead, as his father has led him to believe. In fact, just about everything in adult life appears deceptive and irrational when viewed through the absolutely factual and literal lens of a person with autism or Asperger's. And what made it worthy of the prison book club, I thought, was the book's insights into the loneliness of a person who finds himself approaching the world differently than others.

Derek, who was leading the discussion that day, kicked it off by saying that it took him a long time to like the protagonist.

Graham agreed. “The writing style drove me absolutely crazy. If I saw the word ‘and' one more time, I was going to go totally insane.” It was true that large parts of Christopher's narrative were told in a breathless “And I said … and he said … and I said,” but it was damned believable.

Carol always sympathized with readers' frustrations. “Well, the first time I read it I really liked it,” she said. “But the second time, it drove me bonkers, and perhaps it was all the ‘ands.'” She went on to give the men a brief primer on autism, including that those on the autism spectrum could be very quick to anger and had enormous difficulties with social interaction.

“I liked the part where he hit the cop,” said Frank, which got a hearty laugh from everyone. The scene comes early in the novel, when the police pepper Christopher with questions about why he was found holding the dead dog. The boy went into sensory overload from the interrogation and lay on the ground groaning. As a rule, he didn't like being touched, so when a policeman took hold of his arm to lift him to his feet, Christopher hit him.

It's a tribute to Haddon that, just as we're laughing at that situation, Christopher's next line in the novel tells the reader that the book will not be funny.

It was Derek who advanced the idea that we could all in some way identify with Christopher. Not that any of us is autistic, he said, but, “We're all in some way standing on the outside of the circle or the periphery of life.”

“Oh yeah,” said Ben, wearing a toque despite the warm May day. “Especially being in here, I guess we can all get to where he's at sometimes.”

Graham picked up on Ben's point and said that just as Christopher was living in his own little world, the men in the prison live in their own little world “separate from everybody else.” He said that whenever he had to leave Collins Bay for a supervised hospital or court appointment, he felt uncomfortable. “Suddenly you're in the midst of things, and then when you come back you're almost exhausted. I am anyway. I go to sleep for the day.”

Carol reiterated that we are all on the margins in some way. She told the men about her visit to Jean Vanier's community in France, and about one developmentally delayed resident who approached her and asked, “Are you normal?”

Carol's story inspired Frank to describe the Exceptional Person Olympiad that the prison sponsors each summer, bringing in people with intellectual disabilities to have two days of games and sports with the inmates. “One of them gave me a hug!” he said. Several of the other men had positive things to say about those two days. One large man with a sleepy voice said, “You're in an institution. You're surrounded by hate. You're surrounded by opinions. Everybody in prison has an opinion. At the Olympiad you're with people who don't. They're very loving, very outgoing, very easy to be around.”

Graham had one more gloss to add on the subject of autism in the novel. He suggested to the others that maybe autism was a metaphor for a failure of communication between all the members of the family and the chaos and suffering that ensued from that breakdown. With that comment he came closest to Mark Haddon's own declaration about the book—that it was really about everyone.

With all the empathy being expressed, Seamus, who worked as a chapel cleaner, volunteered that he'd been put in a special needs class in school, with kids who were “drooling and stuff.” Seamus said he was diagnosed with ADD and was less proficient than the other students at school work.

“You look pretty calm now,” kidded Graham.

“Were you a troublemaker?” Derek asked Seamus.

“No. They just put me in a special needs class my whole life,” he said. His candour was touching. By then I was starting to understand how even we volunteers were outsiders. While Seamus was an outsider at school and Graham felt like an outsider when on hospital leave, as volunteers we were outsiders in the prison.

What I failed to understand when I proposed
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
was how uncomfortable most inmates are with the idea of other inmates who have certain neuro-developmental disorders or mental illness. “Bugs” is prison slang for the mentally ill, and bugs are generally avoided in the yard because they are perceived as unpredictable. The book club members could sympathize with the kind of extreme neurological disorder that afflicted Walker or with the kids in the Exceptional Person Olympiad, but not with mental illness.

Graham highlighted this in a brief essay on mental illness in prisons that he had written, which he shared with Carol and me in the wake of our book club discussions. “Imagine living in a world where a variety of mental illnesses were rampant and patients received little or no treatment,” reads the opening line. “Now imagine that you weren't allowed to leave this world for any reason. Imagine that violence was common and the population extremely unpredictable. Such a world exists right here in Canada and I live in it every single day.”

The essay went on to describe an inmate who drinks his own urine, one who snorts coffee grounds, others who don't shower or who hear voices. He cited the suicide rate among federally incarcerated inmates in the country as 84 per 100,000, versus the rate of 11.3 for all citizens. I thought I'd check his data since it wasn't footnoted and found that he was correct: the figures aligned with those in the Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator covering 2009–2010.

Graham was quickly becoming one of the most interesting members of the book club.

Within a few days I was back at Collins Bay to accompany Carol for a meeting with four of the inmates: the men she wanted to deputize as ambassadors. The speed and urgency with which she acted to “fix” the book club was like that of a chief executive officer conscious of the need to improve next quarter's results. I concluded that there were no back burners on Carol's stove.

Her idea was that the ambassadors would pre-read books to be sure they were right for the guys, encourage others to read and recruit new members when old members left. They would shepherd the other men.

“Who have you chosen?” I asked her, when she picked me up at the Kingston train station.

“Graham, Frank, Dread and Ben,” she said. No surprises there. They always finished the book. They always had something to say.

When we met with the men, they were pleased to be asked to help, but candid about the problems with the book club. Graham and Frank complained about some members not reading the book. How many times had I heard that complaint in my women's book groups when we were all young mothers juggling work and child rearing?

Carol wanted to know why some took a book but then didn't show up. Some of it was logistics, according to the guys. The men had to have a pass prepared the day before in order to attend the meeting. Since the book club meetings were held in the chapel, it was up to the chaplains to issue the passes. Then the day of, it was up to the guards to use the PA system to call pass holders to the meeting. Frank pointed out that the guards usually called out “Chapel” not “Book Club,” because technically that was the inmates' destination. Whether the guards were being literal or ribbing inmates for being religious, some guys who didn't want to ruin their reps as hard-asses wouldn't respond to the call. Others just might not clue in that the call was for book club.

“Make sure the chaplain calls every block,” suggested Graham.

“Also some books are harder,” said Dread. “And men get distracted watching TV, working out or sleeping and don't want to show up to book club looking like a fool with the book unread.”

How about the guys who showed up without their books, Carol wanted to know. Did they sell them for drugs?

“That would be some very cheap drugs,” said Dread, laughing hysterically.

Carol showed them a mock-up of the certificate that would go in their files for acting as ambassadors.

“I think ours should be backdated,” negotiated Dread, implying that he'd been acting as an unofficial ambassador for months.