Changing lives

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Winter 2003

Ten years ago, a Bay State district court judge and probation officer teamed up with University of Massachusetts Dartmouth English Professor Robert Waxler for a novel undertaking.

Judge Robert Kane began screening offenders who came before him to determine their readiness to change and their reading ability. Then he'd sentence the promising ones to Waxler's "Changing Lives through Literature" program. The offenders would read novels and short stories by authors such as Ken Kesey and Norman Mailer and meet every two weeks at UMass-- Dartmouth to talk about how the books relate to their own lives.

A study commissioned by the Gardner Howland Shaw Foundation, which funds the Changing Lives initiative, found the rate of recidivism among those who passed through the program to be 18 percent, compared with 43 percent among other offenders. No wonder criminal justice officials in six other states, including Connecticut, have adopted similar initiatives.