Words Beyond Bars Brought Books and Hope Into Colorado Prisons

The End. That's the way all stories finish, whether they're typed out or not. And end is exactly what Karen Lausa’s Words Beyond Bars program did, after serving Colorado’s prison population through the discussion of literature for almost a decade. But while Words Beyond Bars has written its final chapter, Lausa's work is not done.

Back in 2010, Lausa, a librarian by trade, had just come off working with foster kids as a Court Appointed Special Advocate volunteer. “I became very interested in the juvenile offenders who had gotten life without the possibility of parole," Lausa recalls. “I think there were 45 or so. Generally, we as a culture are not overly concerned with the events in a child’s life that precede a crime. My work with Jefferson County CASA showed me the number of people suffering from abuse and neglect.”

That background was common among the juvenile offenders locked up for life. “No one had a pristine, perfect life who wound up getting a life sentence,” she notes.

To reach them, Lausa turned to what she knew: book groups, which she'd run in suburban public libraries over the years. “I was having lunch at the old Racines with Mary Ellen Johnson, who ran the Pendulum Foundation," she recounts, “and it just came to me: What if I started a book group in a prison?”

The Pendulum Foundation, at the time an influential nonprofit that supported incarcerated juveniles, had been started by the parents of Erik Jensen and was run by Johnson. Seventeen-year-old Jensen had been sentenced to life in prison in 1999 for failing to intervene in friend Nathan Ybanez's murder of his mother the previous year. (Erik Jensen was granted clemency by Governor Jared Polis in early 2020.) “By the time I pitched my idea for Words Beyond Bars, two of my first participants were Erik and Nathan,” Lausa says. “What I was looking for were readers and thinkers and people interested in discourse. And that’s not about your background or your education. It levels the playing field.”

So began her long string of twelve-week groups, organized seasonally: winter, spring, summer, fall. “When I’d meet my groups for the first time,” recalls Lausa, “I’d always tell them, 'I’m not a professor. I’m not an expert. I don’t know more about, say, Steinbeck’s East of Eden' — one of their favorites — 'than you do. Your opinion matters.'”
Lausa would sometimes bring in local authors whose books the groups were discussing. One of them was Peter Heller, who'd just written The Dog Stars; he accompanied Lausa to the Colorado Department of Corrections prison in Sterling. "He said that in his career as a writer, he had intersected with so many readers and book groups; he said he never had as compelling a discussion of his books as he had at the prison. It completely blew him away," she says. "I would bend over backwards to be grateful to these authors for sharing their time, while at the same time, they would wind up seeing their day with these groups as life-changing.”

And they could be life-changing for the prisoners, as well. “My mission was always to validate them as human beings,” Lausa says. “We read this wonderful book called Five Skies. My guys were shameless about calling out what they thought to be mistakes even in books they loved, and Five Skies had a scene where a guy is using a fishing reel, and one of my guys said, 'Nuh-uh, that’s not how you use that reel.'”

Lausa went home and looked up the author, Ron Carlson, and emailed him about how much the group adored the book; she also asked about the detail of the fishing reel, not thinking she’d hear back. But she did. “The next morning I got this gushing message from the author saying he’d asked his father, who lived in Montana, to give him a couple of pointers about that reel, and he’d clearly got it wrong," she remembers. "He said when the book goes back for its next publication, they’d get it right. Of course, I brought that letter to the prison. For somebody who feels like they’re the pariah of the world, that’s huge, that their criticism was welcomed like that. The whole point of humanizing people who’ve been judged by the worst thing they ever did is to show them how to behave as citizens. That was joyful to me.”

As the program rolled on, it was rolled out in other prisons across Colorado — and also earned Lausa a Westword MasterMind award, given to Colorado creatives who were changing the cultural landscape. Participation was always voluntary, and inmates often had to sign up for lotteries because spots were so popular. That energized the small squad of volunteers who loved both literature and sharing it with a population hungry for what it offered them intellectually and socially. “I had a posse of six unbelievable volunteers who for years went from Pueblo to Sterling to Limon to Buena Vista and more," Lausa says. "We had an incredible program that was thriving at a time when there was nothing else.”

But that changed in 2019. “The guys in my group in Sterling started telling me that I just had to meet this other person who’d been coming to the prison," Lausa says. "Her name was Ashley Hamilton, a theater professor at the University of Denver. Her mission was to start an arts program in the prisons with a heavy emphasis on theater. Her first big production was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest up at Sterling. She put on a full-fledged production that earned a feature article in the New York Times. It was extraordinary.”

When Lausa and Hamilton finally met, it turned out that Hamilton had been hearing the same accolades from the prisoners with whom she worked about Lausa and Words Beyond Bars. “It was serendipity, my introduction to Ashley and the DU Prison Arts Initiative she started," Lausa recalls. "I pitched the idea of working with her, and she immediately said yes, yes, yes.”
Hamilton had moved to Denver after getting her Ph.D. from NYU; she'd also taught in the New York prison system for nearly a dozen years. "I cut my teeth in that system," Hamilton says, "directing plays and teaching creative writing for several prison education programs. When I was interviewing for my job at DU, I said to the deans and peer faculty that I'd really like to start a program like that at DU." That program became the DU Prison Arts Initiative, which contracted with the Colorado Department of Corrections to generate "creative and collaborative learning experiences that enrich the lives of people who are incarcerated and shift the conversation about prison," according to its website.

One of Hamilton's DU PAI projects is the With(in) podcast, a collaboration with the DOC produced in-house at three state correctional facilities and now in its second season. "It's such a strong body of work," Hamilton says. "We were actually able not only to keep it going during the pandemic, but to grow our reach. It's wild. We found a way. We got super-creative, which is what our team does best." 

Lausa became part of that PAI team just before the pandemic hit. But in order to facilitate the new relationship, she had to face a “hard day” that saw the dissolution of her nonprofit. Words Beyond Bars shuttered, and Lausa became a part-time affiliate faculty member at DU, a job that came with more paperwork and greater oversight — but also new opportunities.

“I began expanding from the original book group discussion into new areas: creative writing, narrative photography," Lausa explains. "I was able to be flexible about my programming in response to what I’d come to learn about the prisoners and their artistic personalities. There were other ways to access their hearts and souls than just through the buffer of a good novel.”

The contract between the DOC and the DU Prison Arts Initiative “shifted everything," according to Lausa. "Suddenly the programs became financially supported, politically approved. All of my struggles for validation and acceptance kind of became a thing of the past.”

She credits Governor Jared Polis’s hiring of Dean Williams as state Director of Prisons for much of the change. “The guy is utterly brilliant," Lausa says. "He’s done more to raise the bar on education programming and opportunities in his short tenure than I can even describe. The culture that I met face to face ten years ago and the one that exists now? There’s no comparison.”

She doesn't have to fundraise or fight with bureaucrats to introduce her programs. Instead, the process has come full circle, with easy acceptance of new prison initiatives and even the Tattered Cover embracing a Prison Book Club drive. “It’s nothing short of extraordinary,” Lausa says. “Of course we have a lot of work to do still. The biggest obstacle is like everything else in our country: the divide between people who understand brain science, forgiveness, redemption, the human capacity for change, versus those people who are still thinking ‘Do the crime, do the time.’ That thinking is shifting now. DU, Tattered Cover, Dean Williams, Governor Polis — all these people willing to go out on a limb to humanize an otherwise pretty brutal system."

Concludes Lausa: “Words Beyond Bars ran its course. I’m grateful that I was able to carry my rickety rolling-file cabinet out to Limon Correctional Facility to talk to a bunch of men around a conference table, none of whom could imagine what I was pitching. What I started back then is still going, just under a new name. It’s still going and growing.”
Ten Life-Changing Books From Words Beyond Bars

How did Karen Lausa make her book selections for Words Beyond Bars? “It was almost always books that knocked me out,” she says. Here, in no particular order, is her list of the top ten:

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
“American publishing rights wouldn’t allow it to be released in paperback for three or four years, but it was published in paperback in the U.K. right away,” recalls Lausa. “So I ordered them through Amazon UK and was able to bring 24 copies of that fabulous novel to the prison before anyone else in the United States could get it.”

East of Eden, John Steinbeck
The connections to the Bible in the Steinbeck classic were probably what her group responded to most. “These guys were always very embedded in faith,” Lausa says, “and I was always respectful of that, while also introducing the human condition and the fallibility of great characters. That’s how they were able to understand that in themselves, and to understand their own stories.”

I Know This Much Is True, Wally Lamb
“This book is about twins, one of whom is schizophrenic,” Lausa says. “We had unbelievable conversations about mental illness, which they were very familiar with in their own families and sometimes in themselves.”

City of Thieves, David Benioff
“Top, top book,” Lausa says of this World War II book set in Leningrad. “One of their favorites that they still talk about. Larry Yoder from the Bookies was my history guy. All things history. He’d come to the prison and tell these animated stories, and Benioff’s book, which was fabulous, was made even better by Larry’s presence.”

Broken: A Love Story, Lisa Jones
This locally authored book takes place on an Indian reservation in Wyoming. “There are unfortunately quite a number of Native Americans incarcerated,” Lausa says. “I sought out Lisa Jones, and she came to the prison, and we all fell in love with her, and the book. She was the one who introduced me to Peter Heller.”

The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
“They loved this book,” Lausa says, “and this was the time that Peter Heller came out with me and had the time of his life.”

The Martian, Andy Weir
“I loathe science fiction,” Lausa admits, “but they were always jonesing for it. So I brought this book in, and they rhapsodized about it. They loved it, I hated it, and it turned out to be a wonderful discussion.”

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
“Complicated book,” says Lausa, “with a little bit of magical realism. It really pushed them, but they loved it. We’d just read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which prepared them to dig a little deeper to really understand a book.”

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
“You can only have fifteen books in your cell,” Lausa says, “so you have to be judicious about what you keep. This book was one that got kept."

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
“We read this one laughing and confused,” Lausa says. “They discussed a lot about being a loner, being a loser, being misunderstood and brilliant. They loved that book.”