Helping young criminal offenders find their way out of troubled pasts and into productive healthy futures is a constant struggle for the American legal system. One unique program in Boston is trying something different to help these kids – sentencing them to Shakespeare. The Shakespeare in the Courts program is celebrating it’s 10th year of leading young offenders, found guilty of crimes like fighting, drinking, stealing and destroying property, in an intensive study, and performance, of the Bard.
This year the program is performing Henry V. The actors are all under 17, and they’ve all been sentenced to be there by Berkshire Juvenile Court Judge Judith Locke. The program is run by Shakespeare & Company. It began when the troupe’s educational director, Kevin Coleman, and Paul Perachi, Locke’s predecessor on the bench, put their heads together and came up with the idea a decade ago. Since then more than 100 kids have participated.
“I am going to say this right now, really clearly, on a billboard: This does not fix them,’’ Coleman told The Boston Globe on Friday. “Do they get back in trouble? Yes, they do. But maybe less often and maybe not as deep. This extreme experience that they’re having starts to change them.’’
What the program does is give these kids a new sense of self esteem, of confidence. It also helps them learn how to work with other people and control their impulse to pull away from learning new things. Coleman told the Globe that kids often react poorly in the first week.
“Oh my God, they’d rather go to jail,’’ he said. “They find this really bizarre, that they have to do it. ‘This is so unfair.’ ‘I’m not going to do this.’ ‘You can’t make me.’ That lasts into the second week.’’
Then it begins to change. “When they come in, their language is hopeless, and it’s blaming and posturing,’’ Coleman said. “Now they seem to have more flexibility, more resilience. They’re becoming much less judgmental, more hopeful, taking more delight in each other.’’
We can only hope that Shakespeare in the Courts inspires others to offer troubled kids everything that speaking the words of the Bard has to teach them.
