With a knife in his pocket, Karter took his place among the one in three adolescent boys who, in 1993, were armed when they went to school.1 Some students felt that school had become a frightening place and saw weapons as the answer to bullying; others carried a knife to harass or to intimidate; still others relied on weapons to please their friends or to command respect.2 Before the proliferation of security monitors, metal detectors, and emergency notification systems in schools, a few students in the nearby town of Mattapoisett kept sticks with a ball and chain in their lockers.3 Across the country, others stashed guns in their cars.4 While Karter was fascinated with guns, he wrote in 2008, that “to get one in his neighborhood, you needed money and to know the right people.” Thus, he settled on a knife in his pocket, making what he later called in an essay he wrote behind bars, “a devil’s bargain.”5
In January 2008, when I first visited Karter in prison, I knew little about knives and even less about the rough-and-tumble lives of teenagers from New Bedford. I had received five letters from Karter in which he wrote freely about all that he had done to transform himself in prison over the past fifteen years. In one of his letters, Karter invited the community college class I was teaching, Voices Behind Bars: The Literature of Prison, to visit him in prison. Several of the students, a culturally diverse group struggling financially as well as academically, agreed to take the hour trip, in spite of the fact that the semester was close to ending. They wanted to meet Karter Reed, a convicted murderer. And, I have to admit, so did I.
It was a bitterly cold winter day and we were bundled up in parkas, boots, and an abundance of wool as we piled into cars to head for the Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Shirley, forty-two miles northwest of Boston. At the time, MCI-Shirley held 1219 of the approximately 11,000 men and women serving state sentences in Massachusetts; the facility was meant to accommodate slightly more than half that capacity.6 The prison had opened its doors in the 1970s, and by 1991, it housed prisoners who were considered minimum- and medium-security risks.7
My students and I had been invited by Karter to take in a presentation by Project Youth, a statewide program run by prisoners. The program functioned as a more civilized version of the popular 1970s documentary Scared Straight!, which aimed to frighten kids from committing crimes by having them come face to face with prisoners. Participants in Project Youth meant to educate, they told us, not terrorize. Karter was one of the organization’s leaders at MCI-Shirley. The visit was authorized by prison authorities who wanted the public to believe that the punishment system was able to rehabilitate prisoners. But, as former prisoner Ronald Day said to graduates at a 2014 Cornell prison education ceremony behind bars, “Few people are rehabilitated in prisons. Fewer still are rehabilitated by prisons. But a few rehabilitate themselves in spite of prison.” 8
The prisoners gravitated to Project Youth for several reasons: to face their crimes; to gain value from teaching others; to experience humanity amid the prison’s stone walls; and to share remorse. Prisoners told their stories to students, who, frankly, were some of the only people who would listen to them. Correction officers allowed the programs, though some quietly sent the message that we should be suspect of everything we were told. I was fairly certain the participants in Project Youth would be forced to screen out any controversial comments that disparaged the prison. Still, I hoped that the men might dispel the stereotypes of hardened convicts, and that my students might see the faces behind the crimes.
Upon arriving at the prison, we found a squat building that served as the entry point where visitors were searched. My students joked with one another that they were grateful not to be asked to lock up their hats, gloves, and scarves along with their jewelry and wallets. Crossing a patch of frozen yard, we entered the main prison block. Inside, the space was boxy and barren, far from noise and commotion; more like an anteroom, but typical of the undistinguished modular units popular these days in prison construction. Nothing but an occasional instructional poster hung on the walls. Cold light shone on the row of hardback chairs set up for the prisoners. In this no man’s land, between inside and outside, the prison held programs with students from the free world.
We took our seats across from a row of nine prisoners who sat about twenty feet away, all dressed in prison blues. Karter sat at the end of the row. I recognized him immediately from photos I’d found while searching the Internet about his crime. At thirty-one, he was not much older than my students, though his face had aged from that of the fair-skinned, sandy-haired boy he was when he was first sentenced to life in an adult institution. He watched us with curiosity.
The event began with a man who identified himself as “Boogie.” Boogie strolled back and forth in the space in front of us, and, like a comic, tried to loosen up the somber-faced audience with a few jokes about being incarcerated. He said he was a thirty-eight-year-old, 100-percent black man—that made everyone laugh. He then gave us a rundown on what we were going to hear. We settled in, enrapt, as if watching a show. Boogie didn’t say why he had shot and killed a rival gang member at age nineteen in a turf war over drugs. Just that he had done it. Then he said he had been sentenced to life with no opportunity of parole. That revelation took the air out of the room, the fact that this man in front of us would likely die in prison. That year, 8.7 percent of state prisoners in Massachusetts were serving a life sentence without parole, four times the national average.9 By 2015, 1009 prisoners out of 9670 were serving a first-degree life sentence in the state, close to 9.5 percent.10 It was difficult for some of my students to comprehend death, much less death behind bars.
After Boogie was finished, an Asian man stood. I guessed him to be about twenty-two, though his unravaged face suggested that he could have been as young as seventeen. At that time, Massachusetts still prosecuted seventeen-year-olds in adult courts, and if found guilty, the boys did their time in adult facilities.11 This would change in 2013, when the criminal age of responsibility would become eighteen.12 (As of 2015, nine states are still holdouts on this point.13) The young man did not move from the front of his chair as he unwound a story of gangs, guns, and drugs, and of being turned in by his buddies, who made a deal with the federal authorities. I’d heard this story before, of young kids who got involved in drugs, with one tapped to turn in the supposed kingpin. He also said he had shot someone in a drive-by in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The admission elicited audible gasps in the room, as Lawrence was next door to Lowell, not far from many of my students’ homes.
We heard several more stories like this. Some of these men had been incarcerated for more years than many of my students had been alive. Most had come from poor families; drugs and alcohol permeated their lives. Almost all had been abandoned by someone—parents, children, or spouses. They were not making excuses. They recognized that their actions had killed another person. But it was hard to know the losses they caused and to see their humanity at the same time. A kind of grief permeated the room as the stories unfolded. One speaker stated it simply when he said that if he had only one word to describe what prison life was like, that word would be loneliness.
Karter watched each man closely, and I watched Karter. He alternated between nervously hunching over in his chair, eyes darting around the room, and seeming relaxed and comfortable. He nodded and smiled when a fellow prisoner’s line provoked laughter, enjoying this space outside his daily life, away from the early wake-up, chores, chow, and isolation.
By the time Karter rose, the last to tell his story, everyone knew who he was. He moved silently to the center of the room. He had rolled up the sleeves of his light-blue shirt very precisely. He still looked so much like the boy in the courtroom whose picture I had seen—a teenager in an overly large striped shirt, with a shock of hair almost covering his eyes. He spoke without really looking at anyone. But as he eased into his talk, I detected waves of vulnerability in his choked-up voice. He took