By Mary Lohnes

This spring, Neal Dwyer and Maria Birnkammer will go back to the county detention center. The reason? To teach poetry to inmates.

Dwyer, an English professor at College of Southern Maryland, and Birnkammer, from the Calvert County Literacy Council (CCLC), last fall helped eight inmates at the Calvert County Detention Center learn about poetry and in the process a little about themselves.

Many of the prisoners had not finished high school. Some came from broken homes and others were young parents. Most of them could barely read.

Dwyer and Birnkammer used poetry as a way to connect with them.

"These are men who are down to nothing. They are in a place, physically and mentally, where it is difficult for them to find worth and value in their lives," Dwyer said.

"Poetry, at first, appears to them like a foreign language or something they only recognize in a Hallmark card," he added. "They don't recognize it as being connected to them, their world and their experiences. Our goal was to 'fan a flame' that is almost out, to show them that poetry could be used as a tool of communication and self-discovery."

Nationally, seven of 10 inmates read and write at a fourth-grade level, and only about half of them had complete high school, compared to 76 percent of the general population, according to the National Institute for Literacy.

Furthermore, a survey the institute conducted in 2001 in three states found that inmates who received educational assistance when in prision were more than 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated again than those who did not.

Despite the effectiveness of correctional education, inmate access to higher education has greatly decreased, according to national data. Prior to 1994, 300 colleges participated in prison degree programs, that number is now around two dozen.

Birnkammer approached Dwyer about teaching an inmate poetry workshop after she had read about communities that had recognized the link between education and crime and are now providing and developing inmate tutoring programs in GED, literacy and business skills.

CCLC already provided basic literacy, English as a second language and GED classes to adults in Calvert County, but the council wanted to make literacy services available to inmates that might not fall into those programs, Birnkammer said.

"Being able to put into words how you feel and sharing those emotions with others can be very therapeutic," Birnkammer said. "We also know that the ability to make connections between what you are reading and your own life is a higher lievel skill that most adult learners need to practice."

During each session, the class would read two or three poems including works from William Carlos Williams, Sekou Sundiata, Gary Soto, Robert Hayden, and Robert Reldan, an inmate in New Jersey, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, a former inmate.

Then the prisoners told their own stories through writing poems.

"Some of these men had trouble writing but they were amazing storytellers," Dwyer said. "We would read a poem about the relationship between a father and a child and these men would talk about their own childhoods, the ups and the downs, or relate their own relationships with their children."

Dwyer noted that there are skeptics who think prisoners can not connect with poetry to explore their own lives.

"Poetry can save lives, just like music and art. Words can touch people and remind them why they exist," Dwyer said.

Getting the inmates to write poems wasn't easy at first, as poetry is often seen as purely academic or high brow. But once they got over that, the men produced some great writing, Dwyer said.

"What the inmates produced wasn't the 'great truth' but it was a truth - an honest attempt to recreate their experience," he said. "When they read from their writing, they saw that their words and expressions had value. If only for a moment, they saw themselves as poets."

Lohnes is a media relations specialist at the College of Southern Maryland.