From reporter to teacher: Helping prisoners find their voice

It is a Monday at Everglades Correctional Institution (ECI), a place few outsiders want to – or ever will – visit. 

Incarcerated men line up for a head count against the Brutalist beige backdrop of the state prison west of Miami, not far from the glowing neon of the Miccosukee Tribe casino.

Grackles flit and chatter beyond the razor-wire fences. Some of the almost 1,800 people housed here trudge along, staying between red lines painted along sidewalks that cross meticulously manicured lawns. 

Inside the prison library on a December morning, the mood is ebullient. There is not a computer screen in sight. Nor a typewriter.

Pens and paper, however, swish on cafeteria tables as about two dozen writers try out for a special event: the graduation ceremony for Exchange for Change, a Miami-based nonprofit that brings writing classes into prison and pairs incarcerated writers with writers on the outside.

Adorned with NFL team logos, the book room simmers with mumbling and ribbing. As men in prison blues read their poems and essays, a participant nicknamed Panda clocks their time. At the request of Exchange for Change, all of the participants are referred to by either their first name or a nickname. Many have been convicted of serious crimes, including sexual assault.

Kathie Klarreich, the founder of Exchange for Change, jots it down. Without fanfare, she calls out, “Who is next?”

They take turns, exploring topics from the perfect day – a beach, a surfboard, aloneness – to the primacy of numbers, including an inmate ID stitched to a shirt. 

One launches headlong into an essay, and a fellow writer pipes up: “Hey, hey, hey, take a breath, man!” 

Gustavo steps up. “He entered a world where he spent most of his time: the moonless landscape of his melancholic thoughts,” he reads from a short story.

These incarcerated writers are part of an innovative rehabilitation program in one of the most progressive prisons in Florida. The state houses the third-highest number of incarcerated people – some 80,000 – in the United States, just behind Texas and California.

After ballooning 700% between the 1970s and 2009, U.S. prison populations have declined about 7%. But while overcrowding has lessened, overall conditions, by some estimates, are at their worst in decades. Many states have seen a rise in prison deaths. Guard shortages are endemic. 

That reality has put a new focus on prison nonprofits that focus on the humanity in the individuals who inhabit them. For some at least, writing can feel liberating, if not essential.

“If we want to succeed as a society, as a human race, we need to recognize that humanity in each other,” says Marc Howard, a professor of government and law at Georgetown University and the founder of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice. “There’s now a much greater realization of the capacity for change.”

The writers’ words also flit over the razor wire, informing Americans about larger issues inside the U.S. criminal justice system. One recent visitor called her trip to ECI revelatory, in terms of seeing the people in prison as fellow humans: “Any one of us could end up in here.”

“If you can write about it, you can survive it,” says Miami poet George Franklin, author of “Travels of the Angel of Sorrow.” The general counsel for Exchange for Change, Mr. Franklin facilitates inmate classes. Nodding toward the class, he says, “Yeah, my life is on the outside, but this is my community.”

Having grown from one class in 2014 to 33 classes across half a dozen south Florida prisons before the pandemic, Exchange for Change has rebounded to over 350 students.

“We don’t think about people who are incarcerated – that’s by design,” says Ms. Klarreich, a former journalist. “But they all have stories. And as a journalist, we tell people’s stories. That’s what we do.”

Another poet, Mike, hobbles up in front of the group on a cane. Straightening his broken frame – he says he was brutally beaten as a child – he clears his throat. The room is rapt as he reads from a poem called “You Haunt Me.”

My eyes go deaf at what you sing,

My feet crumble when I see you run,

My fingers crawl before the light,

My ears go blind at the words you bring.

Ready to quit after writing his first poem, Mike had, by Dec. 5, 2022, penned 677, all hand-scrawled in worn notebooks. A teacher calls him “one of the most accomplished poets I know.”

Some of his poems delve starkly into the abuse he endured as a child. “I was forced to do things that were dirty / as I told men I was good,” he writes in “Abused No More.” 

Panda looks at Ms. Klarreich when Mike wraps up: “A minute-five.” The applause is a light flourish, accompanied by finger snaps.

During a break in the program, Panda muses about the changes he has witnessed among the class, including Mike. 

“Kathie’s program is the most important one we have in here,” he says. 

“In [prison], we do have voices, but they are muffled,” says another incarcerated writer. Writing for an outside audience, even of one, “unmuffles us.”

A self-described “bulldog,” Ms. Klarreich spent 24 years working as a foreign correspondent, reporting primarily from Haiti.

Ms. Klarreich, who has worked for ABC, Time, and The Christian Science Monitor, returned to Haiti in 2010 to report on the massive earthquake. “Your life gets turned upside down by major events that you’re reporting on,” says Ms. Klarreich. “I can’t think of one that was more like that than the earthquake. The house where I had lived toppled. ... I didn’t recognize anything.”

That resonated deeply, she says, when she returned to the U.S. and resumed teaching incarcerated people to write: “When I came back to Miami, these women’s lives looked exactly the same: same uniforms, walking the same paths, eating the same meals. But it’s not true. Everything wasn’t the same. Their lives had evolved. We just don’t know it, because nobody pays any attention to them.” 

The program expanded in 2014 when a professor from Florida Atlantic University wrote with an offer to partner people in prison with the professor’s writing students for a course on the rhetoric of incarceration.

“We hashed out what turned out to be the basis of Exchange for Change,” says Ms. Klarreich. “Her students and my students read the same thing, and write responses to what they read, and then exchange papers. So all semester we have an exchange of papers between two sets of writers and two different institutions.”

Collaborating with the Frederick Douglass Project, which facilitates prison visits, Ms. Klarreich found traction.

Today, ECI is part of a broader prison reform movement that creates incentives for incarcerated people – including those in prison for life – to pursue projects and goals. Participants have to be discipline-free for four years to qualify for ECI.

Originally from Massachusetts, one writer nicknamed Boston now lives in what he calls an “artist colony,” a dorm replete with art supplies and work. The collective had a charity art show at a Miami art gallery last year. Other dorms are built around themes like religious studies or leadership training. (The leadership dorm supercleans the prison kitchen every day as an expression of professional pride.)

“Believe it or not, I wake up every day excited,” Boston says. “I find a lot of inspiration in prison.” 

When it comes to potential publication, he admits being afraid to submit his work to outside journals. “It feels like ... [the words] will just fly away,” he says.

Mike is trying out for the upcoming “showcase graduation,” which is expected to draw some 50 community members. About 12 out of 100 students are chosen to perform their work. It would be Mike’s first event. 

“I really like being a writer,” he says. “It’s a way to work through my past.”

Suddenly, the poetry tryout is broken up by a head count. Several times a day, the men march outside and line up. There are always discrepancies, so they stand and wait – and wait – until the count is right. The Exchange for Change team takes the break to huddle about who will perform at the graduation. 

As Ms. Klarreich reads off the names of the winners, Mike waits, stone-faced. His is the final name called.

He balls his hands into celebratory fists, closes his eyes, and tilts forward, as in prayer. “Yes!” he says.