The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison

While on sabbatical from teaching, Brottman (literature, Maryland Inst. Coll. of Art; The Great Grisby) started a book club for nine inmates at Jessup Correctional Institution, MD, a maximum security prison for men. She assigned ten classics including Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, recording their comments about each work. Brottman doesn't make entirely clear what she hoped to pass on from the meetings. Was it to show teachers the no-nonsense approach that the inmates took toward these books which have been discussed in depth by scholars? In her afterword, the author talks about a situation that many people who have worked in prisons have experienced. She met a couple of the men who had been discharged and found that they were different people. While in prison and in her book club they were compliant. This was a way of surviving. But outside, they returned to their own personalities. Brottman concludes by writing, "On the inside, I'd loved those men. But on the outside, I'd lost them." Readers can judge for themselves.