Rare meeting of the minds at Mississippi prison book club

Despite cuts to enabling programs, a prison book club expands its focus

On a recent April day, an unusual group of readers gathered via Zoom to discuss Ishmael Beah’s 2007 memoir A Long Way Gone, an unflinching account of his experiences as a boy soldier during Sierra Leone’s infamous civil war.

On the call were members of two profoundly different book clubs, one comprised of combat veterans from across the United States and another of violent offenders incarcerated in a rural Mississippi prison. I was on the call as facilitator of what’s known as the Inspired Readers book club at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, outside the town of Woodville, Mississippi. Also there was author Sebastian Junger, who covered the war in Sierra Leone for the magazine Vanity Fair.

The participants brought a broad range of perspectives about the book and, by extension, about how they have dealt with violent trauma. As Michael Jerome Plunkett, facilitator for the veterans book club, observed on its Facebook page, the call represented an opportunity for “a raw, honest conversation about violence, purpose, and what it means to change.”

Among the participants, one member of the Inspired Readers club drew everyone’s rapt attention with a heartfelt soliloquy about how Beah’s memoir had affected him. The man, whom I’ll refer to as J., looked the part of a maximum security inmate, with multiple face tattoos and wearing striped prison pants. Though J. has an ebullient personality and is typically outspoken in Inspired Readers meetings, he was uncharacteristically quiet during most of the hour-long Zoom call, listening as Junger described the chaos of the war, as the combat vets shared how they dealt with trauma during more conventional wars, and as other inmates probed corollaries between their own troubled histories and Beah’s horrific experiences. When J. finally spoke, his observations were a reminder that everyone knows something the rest of us don’t, and that there is no limit to the power of books to change the trajectory of someone’s life.

A Long Way Gone is a relentless first-person account of mass murder, mutilation and starvation, with Beah as a boy among the legions of drugged children terrorizing villages with machetes and AK-47s. The book is so intense that when I first proposed including it among the suggested titles for the Inspired Readers, I was warned off because it was deemed too harsh. I was told that perhaps I should instead focus on books that provided a kind of “escape” (an interesting choice of words, considering). My response was that these men know their way around harsh stories and I would let them decide. After a brief discussion of the books on the list, they ended up voting unanimously to read A Long Way Gone. During our subsequent conversations, they were more focused on Beah’s later rehabilitation than on the atrocities in which he was involved. This would be the nexus of J.’s commentary during the Zoom.

One Inspired Reader noted that reading about how Beah managed to turn his life around after such horrific trauma “made us believe in ourselves, even when no one else does. It put hope in us.”

There are currently 22 men in the prison book club, and about 50 more on a waiting list to join. Inspired Readers is among 16 such clubs sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council at 12 state prisons. Though the emphasis is on humanitarian goals — opening inmates’ minds through books, the clubs also hold the potential to interrupt the cycle of violent crime.

The prison book club endeavor seemed suddenly tenuous in early April when, without warning, the Humanities Council received notice that Elon Musk’s quasi-federal agency known as DOGE was cancelling all National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Though the prison book clubs are privately funded by the Mellon Foundation and the James and Madeline McMullan Family Foundation, the Humanities Council itself relies upon NEH grants to administer them. The crisis was temporarily averted when the Mellon Foundation, aware that humanities councils nationwide were in existential danger due to the draconian cuts, stepped in to provide partial emergency funding, which means that, for now, the programs that enable conversations like those that unfolded during the Zoom call are not threatened with cancellation.

The Inspired Readers club meets biweekly, with four sessions devoted to each selected title, with members bringing varying proficiencies in reading. Some are reading books for the first time while others profess to having read hundreds of them. They tend to be close readers, keen to even minor narrative details and unusually attentive to character development and plot. They often evoke their own histories during club discussions. Their assessments are fresh and sometimes provocative and raw, which was the case when they read one of my own books, Mississippi in Africa. During the original tour for the book, which took me from New York to California, I spoke with audiences of every imaginable background, and thought I had heard everything there was to say about it. Yet, in the hands of the Inspired Readers, it felt like a new and different story.

Being observant, and in some cases hypervigilant, is a survival skill in prison, and it informs the members’ reading and manifests in careful attention to each other’s related commentary. Owing to their incarceration, they are also removed from the distracted society that most of us inhabit, in which conversations are routinely interrupted by checking emails and texts or scrolling social media. This constant connectivity has trained our minds to make erratic attentional segues and to process an endless barrage of bite-sized information, which has undoubtedly shortened our attention spans and contributed to declining book sales. None of which applies to the Inspired Readers club. Many members are serving life without the possibility of parole, and all have limited opportunities for diversion, particularly during prison lockdowns when they are generally confined to their cells without access to internet or TV. As a result, they highly value books. One member said he had read one of our selected books three times before our first meeting to discuss it. Twice, a member has asked for a replacement copy because his book was stolen – an adverse endorsement, given that book theft is vanishingly rare on the outside.

The meetings, which take place deep within the bowels of the prison, beyond six electronic gates or doors, were originally scheduled to last an hour but have since been expanded to an hour and a half, and sometimes stretch to two. Even then, it is sometimes difficult to draw the meetings to a close. The members are essentially on a group search for truth, in which clues can be found in books and in each other’s assessments of them.

The club members have experienced and inflicted their share of violence and trauma, which likewise informs their literary assessments and came into play during the Zoom call with the combat veterans. Many of the inmates were personally familiar with a world in which children are given drugs and weapons, though as they read Beah’s memoir, they recognized that their own experiences paled in comparison. They focused on the fact that Beah had managed to extricate himself from the endless violence to create a productive life, and they wanted to talk about that with others — to compare notes about how he did it and how they might do the same.

During one of our discussions, a member said he wished he could discuss Beah’s book with a group of combat veterans, to see what they thought about it as former participants in more conventional forms of warfare, as well as with members of a more “privileged” book club who knew little or nothing about mass violence. This seemed like a good idea, so I began to explore the possibilities. When I mentioned it to Junger, who is an old friend, he put me in touch with Plunkett, whose Zoom book club is part of the organization Patrol Base Abbate, which helps former soldiers address personal traumas back home (the organization is named for a fallen soldier, Sgt. Matt Abbate).

Plunkett immediately embraced the joint Zoom idea, and after we nailed down the particulars, we held it on April 24. The Inspired Readers gathered in the prison’s cavernous visitation area, seated at individual desks, while the P.B. Abbate members appeared on a big screen, beamed in from parked cars, offices and kitchens across the country.

The call began with two Wilkinson members offering their takes on Beah’s book and posing related questions to the vets. A member who had lost a brother to gang violence, and who, along with another brother, had gone to prison after exacting revenge, asked how the vets dealt with the violent loss of someone with whom they shared a close bond. One P.B. Abbate member responded by telling the story of a friend’s death in Afghanistan, which, he said, “was a very surreal experience.” What struck him, he added, was that, “The world doesn’t stop moving.” He said he felt strangely guilty for still being there. Others described personal losses and stressed the importance of keeping their friends’ memories alive without becoming consumed by anger and grief. One veteran who fought in Iraq observed, “A cohesive unit deals with it collectively. Every story is different but you can lean on each other.”

For an observer, this deeply personal exchange of information, among strangers who had just met, was unexpected and revelatory.

A Wilkinson member then asked how the veterans managed to navigate two overlapping yet often conflicting worlds – one in which they did things they knew were wrong to survive, and another back home, where their lives were anchored. This went to the heart of what P.B. Abbate is about, and evoked the enduring challenges faced by the incarcerated. A P.B. Abbate member observed that when he went off to war, “The depths of what we were going to encounter were unfathomable for us.” But, he added, “You find the same issues on the streets of America. These are the things society needs to talk about.”

In that way, the hour sped by.

As the clock began ticking down, J. finally spoke up, bringing the focus back to Beah’s book and describing a crucial lesson he had learned from it.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah recounts his determination to nurture his love for his lost family even when he was in the throes of violence, and how that became his lodestar and eventually helped him find a better life. That is what caught J.’s attention.

“I think the biggest thing about the whole story is acceptance,” he said. “That’s what stuck out the most to me. You’ve got to accept everything that comes into your life, whether it be good or bad. And the things he accepted that were good allowed him to have the hope to go on in his life and rehabilitate when he had the chance to do so. But he also accepted the bad things within his life to be able to move forward and survive in those type of environments.”

J. recalled having seen his share of violence in prison and said he had watched fellow inmates succumb to despair, with some committing suicide, “or they develop real severe mental issues, or they begin to talk to themselves, or let their hygiene go, or things like that, or accept a lower point on the totem pole of life, because they cannot move forward.”

J.’s words were spontaneous and searching, and at times he struggled to find the right one. At one point he fashioned his own word to describe a source of stability.

“What gave me a lot of hope, and allowed me to be accepting of the situation I am in, and what I have been through, is someone that’s experienced mass trauma and mass death, someone that’s been forced to kill, rob, pillage or whatever -- things that would have him locked away in some of the worst prisons in other countries,” he continued. “You know what I’m saying? Like, he didn’t have an option. He was forced into that aspect of life. Someone that went from being tore down, to where they couldn’t stand death when it first arrived, to the point where they were having competitions to kill people… to being able to be integrated into America and have a success story.”

That last part, he said, “actually gives me hope to be able to go into the world and stand firm on something – anything stabilitable that will allow me to move forward in life. Because if someone can come from that type of background…” His voice briefly trailed off. Resuming, he said, “We’ve been incarcerated inside prison, we’ve done questionable things. We’ve been in questionable environments. We’re in a questionable situation. We will go back out there into a free world where people don’t know us, nothing but what’s wrote on a piece of paper. They don’t know us by who we truly are, what our mind is set on, what our hearts are really like. They’re gonna automatically question us about what somebody else that they did not know wrote on a piece of paper about us. But someone that’s been through something like that, if they can do it, I’m pretty sure that any man that’s in here that has any type of knowledge and firm ground to stand on, with some kind of support system, will be able to step out there into the world and make their own success story.”

With that, the visitation room and the video screen fell momentarily silent, after which the inmates broke into applause and several called out, “Well said.”

The faces of the P.B. Abbate members appeared rapt on the overhead screen, and for a moment it looked as if no one was sure how to respond. Then Plunkett offered, “Acceptance is the foundation. It really resonates.”

The conversation itself clearly resonated. As the call began drawing to a close, a member of the Inspired Readers asked, a bit plaintively, “This won’t be the last time, will it?”

Plunkett said the P.B. Abbate club meets once a month and its members would very much like to Zoom with the Inspired Readers again. I had mentioned that Junger’s book War was next on the Inspired Readers list, and Plunkett suggested it could be the focus of a followup group conversation.

In a later email, Plunkett told me that he had been fascinated to see the members of both the P.B. Abbate and the Inspired Readers clubs “be candid and vulnerable with each other despite it being their first time meeting and virtually, no less. I have seen this dynamic time and again leading the book club -- veterans come to us from all different experiences (branches, time periods, etc.) and they quickly find common ground. But it was the first time I witnessed it occur outside the ‘tribe’ of veterans. I was amazed at the level of mutual respect and curiosity from both sides of the screen.”

During the call, a member of the Inspired Readers had summed up the importance of probing sometimes horrific stories for signs of hope. He said he pictured Beah escaping the war and finding himself walking among throngs of people in New York City who knew nothing about what he had been through. This image prompted the member to consider the world differently.

“We really have no idea what affects a human being until we hear their story told,” he said. “It’s important for us to develop compassion and awareness of people’s experiences, not only around the world but also here in America. We have no idea what someone’s been through. We have no idea what’s contributed to who they are and what they’ve become.”

Or, he could easily have added, to what they might become.

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Image: Facebook post announcing the joint Zoom call (via P.B. Abbate)