Devon Kurtz ’20 first became interested in prison volunteerism and prison reform while studying at Dartmouth. After graduating, he started a Quaker ministry at the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, Vt., a state prison and jail for the Vermont side of the Upper Valley. His book, Sketches from Behind Prison Walls, is the result of a collaboration with Rein Kolts, an incarcerated artist, and several incarcerated men. The book contains Kolts’s portraits of his fellow inmates as well as poetry and short prose from the men featured in the portraits. Kurtz joined The Dartmouth for a conversation on prison reform, the humanity of community members behind bars and the lessons learned while writing his book.
Where did you get the idea for your book, “Sketches from Behind Prison Walls”?
DK: I have been living in Woodstock, Vt. for the past five years after graduating from Dartmouth in 2020. While at Dartmouth, I attended the Quaker Friends Meeting, and they did a presentation from the American Friends Service Committee on prison reform. Over the course of the presentation, I found out that Hanover Friends had facilitated prison ministry about a decade ago in Windsor, Vt. I was interested in reviving that effort, and I ended up going to the prison in Springfield and starting a Quaker ministry there in February 2023. I met Rein Kolts, a Quaker who was incarcerated there, and he started attending services with me. A few months later, he presented me with this artwork and some of the writing that would later be featured in the book. He didn’t know what to do with all of this material, so he entrusted me with it. I promised to come up with an idea of how we could get more people to see it. From there, he produced some more artwork, particularly what became the fourth section of the book, dealing with faith, death and sin. That’s really when the book came together. Once I got that group of works, the structure of the book became coherent. I reverse engineered it around that fourth section of the book.
How did you go about organizing the rest of the book?
DK: A major motivator for me in putting this book together was to learn more about people who are in a spiritual crisis. The perspectives shared in the section about faith really moved me. People are grappling with death and what it means for them, especially those who are incarcerated personally.
Some of the other elements that contributed to people being in spiritual crisis ended up becoming the other sections. Another section is indignity, which really gets into the physical discomforts of prison. You have one person talking about being denied insulin. Another person talks about losing his teeth and not getting them back. You have another person being dragged — those sorts of physical discomforts and indignities. Then, you have a section about loss and the emotional side of prison. Separation is inherent in incarceration, and so are the milestones in other people’s lives that you miss. The third section, about silence, has two inspirations. First, Quaker worship is silent, so it is an homage to the origin of the book and the shared faith between Rein and myself. There’s also an element that is sort of symbolic of all of the voices that are stifled by incarceration. There is also this interesting aspect of prison where, even in solitary confinement, you don’t really get silence. A lot of the men who would come to my ministry were not Quakers and were not necessarily interested in the Quaker faith. They were interested in Quaker worship because of the silence.
What do you want readers who are less familiar with Quakerism to take away from this book?
DK: I would say that my book and its contents are a testament to the resilience of these men spiritually, physically and emotionally. Rein himself is a testament to that. This is a man who will spend the rest of his life in prison. Despite being incarcerated while elderly, he took this terrible situation and has turned it into something beautiful with the book that he created.
A lot of the different men in the book talk about their journey over the course of their incarceration and how their views or their relationships with themselves have changed. I think that, with a few exceptions, you get a testament to a tremendous resilience. The first portrait of the man is actually unnamed, but he signs it “poor fat guy.” And I began the book with that one because it’s actually a rejection of the project in many ways, and a rejection of our sympathies and our views of people in prison. He shares this wonderful poem about this pleasurable subversion where he is trying to become as fat as possible so that when he dies, it’s difficult to remove him from the cell. It’s this assertion of agency through his own self-destruction that I just found so compelling. It was, I think, the most honest piece in the book. He was not thinking about how to present himself as more human or dignified. Instead, it was sort of a middle finger to all of us.
When did you first begin thinking about the kinds of questions and issues raised in the book?
DK: That’s actually a really interesting question in the context of the Dartmouth community. When I was at Dartmouth, I was the editor of The other newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, and we tried to interview Robert Tulloch and James Parker — convicted of killing two Dartmouth professors — around the 20th anniversary of the horrible Zantop murders. The New Hampshire Department of Corrections said we were not allowed to interview Parker and Tulloch. Obviously, I was angry because the questions we were asking were not about the crime. They were about the people who had committed them and where they’ve gone since. That was part of what got me interested in asking these questions of those who are guilty of their crimes and of what comes after. I’m interested in what comes next, and how that person develops afterward.
Do you see the book aligning with any political efforts regarding prison reform?
DK: At its core, it’s not a super political book. That said, the first page of the book is the state of Vermont crushing a group of incarcerated men in a wine press or olive oil press. So there are some digs, but I was very upfront with Rein when we wrote the book that we should not give it a direct political message. Instead, we really wanted to draw attention to the lives of people in the facility. However, there is a broader Vermont context with prison reform. Vermont is an extremely progressive state and, unfortunately because of that, doesn’t really want to invest in their facilities at all. These facilities are quite old and decrepit. It ends up being a really complicated issue that at the core comes down to the fact that we don’t spend enough time with the people who are in these facilities.
Do you have any advice for those who read this book or are interested in prison volunteerism?
DK: The system makes it very challenging. The process to become a volunteer for the Department of Corrections is onerous. It takes a lot of time to drive down to the prison in Springfield, and many people don’t want to spend a Sunday doing that. There are a lot of barriers, but there’s also a high need, especially after the pandemic. The pandemic shut down programming, so pretty much the only people who have gotten back in the facilities are religious volunteers and a handful of other programs now that have kind of percolated.
There are also great organizations that are doing other types of work in the Upper Valley — the Hartford Community Restorative Justice Center, for example. I was a long-time volunteer for them, and I was until recently on their board. They do amazing work with alternatives to incarceration.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
