From Pen to Paper

Twenty-four prisoners--mostly lifers--sat across from a dozen college students on a maximum security prison yard in southern California as part of an innovative and inspiring creative writing program. For 14 weeks, prisoners learned to express themselves openly and honestly, many for the first time in their lives, to a group of strangers, in a setting where survival often demands alienation, disaffection, even violence. And the students--at first apprehensive, even hateful--discovered that the men across from them were far from the callous and unfeeling monsters they had expected to meet. Though their often intimate collaboration, both groups found hope and humanity in a place where they had expected neither.