The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley

school work.
    â€œYou look pretty calm now,” kidded Graham.
    â€œWere you a troublemaker?” Derek asked Seamus.
    â€œNo. They just put me in a special needs class my whole life,” he said. His candour was touching. By then I was starting to understand how even we volunteers were outsiders. While Seamus was an outsider at school and Graham felt like an outsider when on hospital leave, as volunteers we were outsiders in the prison.
    What I failed to understand when I proposed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was how uncomfortable most inmates are with the idea of other inmates who have certain neuro-developmental disorders or mental illness. “Bugs” is prison slang for the mentally ill, and bugs are generally avoided in the yard because they are perceived as unpredictable. The book club members could sympathize with the kind of extreme neurological disorder that afflicted Walker or with the kids in the Exceptional Person Olympiad, but not with mental illness.
    Graham highlighted this in a brief essay on mental illness in prisons that he had written, which he shared with Carol and me in the wake of our book club discussions. “Imagine living in a world where a variety of mental illnesses were rampant and patients received little or no treatment,” reads the opening line. “Now imagine that you weren’t allowed to leave this world for any reason. Imagine that violence was common and the population extremely unpredictable. Such a world exists right here in Canada and I live in it every single day.”
    The essay went on to describe an inmate who drinks his own urine, one who snorts coffee grounds, others who don’t shower or who hear voices. He cited the suicide rate among federally incarcerated inmates in the country as 84 per 100,000, versus the rate of 11.3 for all citizens. I thought I’d check his data since it wasn’t footnoted and found that he was correct: the figures aligned with those in the Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator covering 2009–2010.
    Graham was quickly becoming one of the most interesting members of the book club.
    Within a few days I was back at Collins Bay to accompany Carol for a meeting with four of the inmates: the men she wanted to deputize as ambassadors. The speed and urgency with which she acted to “fix” the book club was like that of a chief executive officer conscious of the need to improve next quarter’s results. I concluded that there were no back burners on Carol’s stove.
    Her idea was that the ambassadors would pre-read books to be sure they were right for the guys, encourage others to read and recruit new members when old members left. They would shepherd the other men.
    â€œWho have you chosen?” I asked her, when she picked me up at the Kingston train station.
    â€œGraham, Frank, Dread and Ben,” she said. No surprises there. They always finished the book. They always had something to say.
    When we met with the men, they were pleased to be asked to help, but candid about the problems with the book club. Graham and Frank complained about some members not reading the book. How many times had I heard that complaint in my women’s book groups when we were all young mothers juggling work and child rearing?
    Carol wanted to know why some took a book but then didn’t show up. Some of it was logistics, according to the guys. The men had to have a pass prepared the day before in order to attend the meeting. Since the book club meetings were held in the chapel, it was up to the chaplains to issue the passes. Then the day of, it was up to the guards to use the PA system to call pass holders to the meeting. Frank pointed out that the guards usually called out “Chapel” not “Book Club,” because technically that was the inmates’ destination. Whether the guards were being literal or ribbing inmates for being religious, some guys who