Mary Frances Bowers, a petite, elegant, retired college professor with a soft voice and an air of calm assurance, has been calling, writing and visiting one of her former students in prison for the past 23 years, ever since he was incarcerated for aggravated rape and murder.
“He’s been in every medium and maximum security prison in Oregon,” said Mary, who taught for years in some of Portland’s toughest schools and, until 12 years ago, was a professor of education at Lewis and Clark College. She taught her student, whom we’ll call David, in eighth grade.
“I’m not his mother,” Mary said. “He has a mother. I’m not his teacher. I’m his friend.”
But from the beginning, Mary recalled, he’d been a challenge.
“He was skipping school, writing gang signs. He was, at heart, a good boy, but he was angry.”
She’d taught his brother and had a relationship with their mother, a hard-working woman raising seven children. Mary learned over the years that rather than criticizing the parent of a troubled child, it’s better to build an alliance. She proposed to David’s mother that he make up for skipping by spending time with her after school. His mother agreed.
David came in to do make-up work and ended up helping Mary clean desks and talking.
“He asked what I thought about rap music. He could sing. He was creative,” Mary said. “From that day washing desks, we were two friends talking.”
After he went on to high school, Mary lost track of David.
“I didn’t stay in touch with him,” she says. “There were some big issues. I didn’t understand his life. He outstripped my limits.”
Then his brother was killed in a gang shootout. Mary went to the funeral, and what she saw worried her.
“I approached David and asked if we could get together because the look on his face was truly murderous.”
He agreed to meet her, but then he called and said he couldn’t come. She didn’t hear from him again until she got a letter from him addressed to her at school. He was locked up in the Multnomah County Justice Center. He had just turned 18 and was facing the possibility of the death sentence. His court-appointed lawyer advised him to take the deal, life in prison. As in more than 97 percent of criminal cases, there was no jury trial.
Since that day, almost a quarter of a century ago, Mary has been visiting David, now 41, in prison, writing letters and talking with him on the phone about once a week.
“He called on Christmas Day,” she said. “That was a nice surprise.”
The Christmas before that, she’d gone to visit him.
“He was in the mental health infirmary. Seeing the look on his face when he saw me was well worth the trip.”
Sometimes David can’t call; he’s in isolation.
“If you are in prison, especially if there are no college courses and you don’t have work, you bedevil each other all day. You are so bored you just get ugly, you have no friends. You masturbate in someone’s food, you spit in it, you go into their cell and take their little glass they like. He went over the edge with the games,” Mary said.
After serving 20 years, David came up for parole.
“He thought he’d get it,” she said. “He had worked very hard for that. He attended classes, he attended therapy, and he had taken whatever coursework they offered.”
But David’s parole was turned down, and the boy Mary had known in middle school seemed to disappear.
“He fragmented,” she said of that time. “He was full of stories and illusions of fearful things.”
By then, David had been diagnosed with three mental illnesses. It got so bad, Mary hardly recognized him anymore. She sensed she was losing him, but Mary wasn’t about to give up.
“People think I’m harmless because I’m small and white,” she said.
But there is a steeliness to this quiet, cultured educator. Whether teaching children with serious emotional and behavioral problems at a mental health treatment facility or wannabe gangsters in inner-city schools, she has always known where to draw the line.
“As a teacher you have to have that edge of toughness; someone has to be the adult, the boundary setter.” She wasn’t going to let David slip away.
“One day I said, ‘David, are you in there?’ He started to laugh and I said, ‘What shall we talk about?’ Venice, Mary, have you been to Venice? I said, ‘Yes, I’ve been to Venice.’ That’s how it goes with us. We get back to talking about stuff.”
That “stuff” can range from the Civil War to mystery writers. They share a love of books.
“He’s intellectually curious,” she said. “He’s a lover of literature and history. When they offered classes, he took them.”
Over the years that she has been friends with David, Mary has seen a decline in the number of educational programs offered in Oregon state prisons. At his current facility, there are no classes available at all.
Some inmates in the Oregon prison system can take college courses. College Inside, a program run by Chemeketa Community College in Salem, offers two-year college degree programs in general studies, business or automotive technology at three prison facilities. And the classes aren’t watered down.
“Each instructor says that they do not change their expectation of what is required of their campus students and their inside students. In fact, some have said they have to add more because the students are so focused on learning,” said the director of the program, Nancy Green.
Correctional education works. College Inside’s recidivism rate is 3.8 percent, whereas the state average is 26 percent.
But if the inmates aren’t getting out, why educate them? If they can’t rejoin society, what’s the point? For those whom society has deemed to be the worst of the worst, the lifers, giving them the mental relief of a long-term goal like a college degree could be viewed as a luxury — one that many citizens on the outside can’t afford. Essentially, the question becomes, is prison primarily for punishment or rehabilitation?
“We are Calvinistic,” Mary said of Americans’ attitude toward inmates. “They deserve to be there. They need to be there.”
But Mary, the pragmatist, looks beyond the moral debate over the purpose of prison. She knows that if prisoners, even those with no hope of release, can become engaged in learning, the atmosphere improves for everyone behind bars.
“They need an occupation of the mind,” she said of the constant conflicts between inmates. “Largely the drama is to have action in their lives.”
Mary is no stranger to drama. Now a respected academic who collects art, travels and writes, she recalls a chaotic childhood.
“I was raised in a violent house,” she said. “Poverty, too many kids. Going to college was not in the game.”
But school provided an escape.
“For me, it was the nuns. They asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be one of those people,” she said of the teachers who were her role models. “Do what good I could.”
Yet the reality of life in prison is grim, and unlike most people, Mary doesn’t look away.
“People in prison live in a different world,” she said. “It’s not like on TV where they dramatize big moments. The numbing days become months and years. How do you get up every morning and live knowing you could get hurt? You do get raped in prison.”
Mary struggles to come to terms with the conditions of David’s life.
“I did once talk with my priest.” She knew him to be a man familiar with prisons, intellectually aware and with a good heart. He tried to temper her hopes about David’s release. What she wanted to talk about was the spirituality of serving people no one else is serving, of not forgetting people, not throwing people away.
When the monotony, boredom, provocations and hopelessness of prison life threaten to overwhelm David, Mary does what any friend would do: She tells him the truth. “I tell him, you have to get ahold of yourself.”
“We all have a choice how we respond,” she said of life inside and outside prison. “We can develop inner strength. We each have a path.”
The Nothing More Hopeful series originates from a workshop taught by Martha Gies to highlight the unseen acts of good all around us. Gies resolved to enlist some writers who would hunt down and write those stories.