These men, along with six students from Wesleyan University who were also in the room, were participants in the Dante Project, a series of workshops that, through reading, analyzing, adapting and performing, explores the connections between Dante’s 14th-century epic poem and the lives of incarcerated men and women. The workshops were created and are led by Ron Jenkins, a professor at Wesleyan University who has used theater as a catalyst for social change throughout his career.
“In ‘Inferno,’ Dante tells the story of a journey through hell, from a dark place to the light,” Dr. Jenkins, 58, said. “Everyone who reads it can identify with it, but the inmates can identify in a more powerful way, because they’ve gone through hell more than the rest of us. In our classes, they aren’t identifying with the sinners; they identify with Dante. They’re taking Dante’s journey, learning how to get out of a difficult place into someplace better.”
Dr. Jenkins, who has taught in Wesleyan’s theater department for 11 years, introduced prison outreach into the curriculum in 2007, bringing students to the York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Niantic, to work with inmates on literary classics. In 2009 and 2010, they began concentrating on “Inferno”; this year, because of construction at York, the class took place at the men’s facility in Niantic, the J.B. Gates Correctional Institution.
“Students need to get outside the academic bubble of the campus and engage with the community,” said Dr. Jenkins, who described his course as interdisciplinary, combining literature, theater and sociology. “They can read about the criminal justice system, but they’ll never learn what it’s really about without these kinds of personal interactions. And they’ll never learn what Dante was really talking about in a classroom.”
Separate from Wesleyan, Dr. Jenkins has been conducting similar workshops with inmates at Sing Sing since 2008. Beginning in January, he will spend a semester-long sabbatical in Bali, using Dante to work with men and women in the maximum-security Kerobokan Prison there.
This fall, Dr. Jenkins’s students, incarcerated and not, worked with Cantos VI, VII and XXXIII of “Inferno,” which focus on gluttony, avarice and betrayal. Like Dante, who was accompanied by the Roman poet Virgil, the inmates chose guides with whom they would wish to make their journey. One picked his grandmother, another chose Mike Tyson, another the Angel of Compassion.
The semester culminated with performances. The Gates inmates presented their work to their peers, and at Wesleyan, the students performed the writings of the inmates for the college community. In the classroom at Sing Sing, the inmates performed for the Wesleyan students, and then the students presented the Gates men’s words, for which they received a standing ovation from the inmates. All of the performances ended with the same line, the last of the poem: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” “And then we emerged to look again at the stars.”
For everyone involved, the transformative effects of these experiences were manifold. Of course, there was the increased understanding of and appreciation for “Inferno.” “By investigating the text collaboratively,” Dr. Jenkins said, “students, teachers and incarcerated individuals can learn more about its contemporary relevance from each other than any of us could reading it alone.”
This was echoed by Howard Needler, a professor in Wesleyan’s College of Letters and a Dante scholar for 45 years, who joined Dr. Jenkins in his classes at Wesleyan and Gates. “What was revelatory for me,” he said, “was how the prisoners found in this complex, difficult, medieval poem a new way of reinterpreting their own lives.”
For the Wesleyan students, the course provided a glimpse into the prison system. In a discussion after the Sing Sing performance, Sydney Hausman-Cohen, a sophomore, said: “Before this, what I knew about prison came from movies — ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ and ‘Prison Break.’ This class humanized prison for me.”
The inmates’ comments reflected a growing self-awareness. Johnny, 27, an inmate at Gates (where a reporter was given only first names), said that over the course of the semester he had “lost a lot of fear — of standing up and reading aloud, of putting my work out there.”
“I didn’t want to get judged,” he continued. “I was afraid of failure, and now all that’s gone.”
Speaking about his writing, Dennis Woodbine, 34, a Sing Sing inmate, said: “In the section where I say, ‘Halfway through the course of my pathetic life, I woke up,’ it was about becoming conscious. I wrote a poem about coming to realize that I’m better than this, that I don’t belong here.”
Among the more dramatic journeys made by Dante Project participants were those of three women who took the workshop as inmates at York and then, after their release, were hired as teaching assistants in the Wesleyan classes. Deborah Ranger, 45, who was paroled at the end of October after nine years in prison, attested to the role that the program had played in her rehabilitation. “I think I’d have gotten out sooner if these classes had come around earlier,” she said. “I looked forward to them every week, and when I left York, there was a huge hole in my life. When Ron contacted me about working as a teaching assistant, I thought, ‘Thank God.’?”
Now, she said, “I’m on a new train in my life, with better conductors and a better road.”
But the road is difficult for the prison population, its members often defined solely by their label as inmates. Dr. Jenkins’s program offers alternatives. “In their collaboration on the Dante Project,” he said, “they have the opportunity to redefine themselves as scholars, playwrights, performers, poets and teachers, who are listened to and respected by audiences at the university and beyond.
“This is not just a class,” he added. “It’s something that changes perceptions in very deep ways. On both sides of the bars, people are responding.”
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