Desperado

Saturday's "This American Life" was called "Act V," as in Act V, the final act, of Shakespeare's Hamlet, as performed by inmates of a high-security prison in Missouri. The cast included men who had committed violent crimes—first-degree assault, rape, murder. Most, if not all, had never seen or read a Shakespeare play. To hear their impressions, their reflections on the characters and motivations of Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, et al, was to hear Shakespeare interpreted as I've never heard it before.

It was hard for me to continue thinking of these men as not nice people, as people who need to be locked away for a long, long time. In talking about their crimes, they sounded compassionate, self-aware, resigned, remorseful. They talked about what prison life feels like--dehumanizing, demeaning. And yet their crimes were horrible, and they did do them. They learned to act, to interpret Shakespeare; was all the other talk an act, too?

Some years ago, I was on a ferry in San Franciso Bay that passed close enough to San Quentin that I could see the exercise yard, prisoners in their orange jumpsuits standing at the fence, looking out toward the boat as I was looking over at them. "They were all once 3 years old," I thought. What had happened to them between age 3 and that moment of my seeing them from the ferry?

Why do we put people in prison? To keep them away from us? Certainly. To teach them a lesson? That, too. To purge them of their "badness" and rehabilitate them? Not so sure about that last one; seems like that ought to be part of it, but how can any rehabilitation occur in such a place? I don't know the answers to these questions, and it seems pretty clear that the people in charge of running our prison system don't, either. Maybe, though, we need to start with the 3-year-olds.

The cast and director of Hamlet, Act V

Missouri Eastern Correctional Center