Jeremy Berlin, National Geographic

April 28, 2014

On a windy April day in central Indiana, six men enter a room.

Three are white, three are black. Two are over 50, the rest under 40. All of them wear khaki jumpsuits and carry books under their tattooed arms.

They are six of the 1,840 inmates at the Pendleton Correctional Facility, a Level 4 maximum-security prison. Built in 1923, its Spanish Colonial Revival buildings and grassy courtyards once housed John Dillinger.

The men sit in a semicircle, facing a chalkboard and two visitors. One is the instructor, a gray-bearded man with glasses. The other is a guest speaker: a tall woman in her mid-50s with keen blue eyes and flaxen hair streaked silver. This is her first time in Pendleton. But she knows one of the inmates, kept in another part of the prison, very well.

“Remember,” she tells the men in the room, speaking cheerfully with a Midwestern cadence, “make what you read today relevant.”

One of the youngest men, wearing a green knit cap issued by the prison, stands up. “Me and John have been practicing,” says Chris Lewis, smiling proudly. “We’ll be Coriolanus and Menenius.”

He and John Gray, a short, goateed young man, stand up and face each other. The other four move to the side and open their books.

“O sir,” says Gray, reciting the adviser Menenius’s lines from memory, “you are not right: Have you not known the worthiest man have done’t?”

“What must I say?” says Lewis, playing the proud general Coriolanus. “‘I pray, sir’—plague upon’t! I cannot bring my tongue to such a pace:—’Look, sir, my wounds!’ I got them in my country’s service, when some certain of my brethren roar’d and ran from the noise of our own drums.'”

“O me, the gods!” says Gray. “You must speak of that: You must desire them to think upon you.” […continued]

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