Time Well Spent Volunteer Work Helps Inmates Turn Lives Around

It’s Saturday morning. Russell Bratlie could be playing cards, lifting weights at the prison gym or sleeping in his cell.

Instead, the inmate at Airway Heights Corrections Center is reading aloud in one of the prison’s classrooms.

With a U.S. history book in front of him and a view of the prison’s massive brick buildings outside the window, Bratlie, 42, sits at a table and speaks into a tape recorder.

John Kangas, another inmate, sits across from him, making sure he pronounces each word correctly and with proper inflection.

They receive neither money nor early release benefits for their efforts. They both want to change, they said, and volunteer work is a start.

“I’ve had a lot of time to reflect. I want to help and give back now,” said Bratlie, who has been involved in the program for nearly three months. “There’s a blessing to all this, too. I’ve learned to read better and articulate myself.”

Some weeks he and Kangas spend about 15 hours reading and recording textbooks, as well as articles on topics such as herbs and polio.

The program started about two years ago when prison Superintendent Kay Walters approached the Airway Heights Lions Club to see if they would be interested in a reading program.

Since then, Lions Club members Mel McCoury and Ed Baker have come to supervise inmates once a week.

“It broadens their minds,” said McCoury, a retired Marine. “It gives them something to do and they’re learning. That will help them become better citizens when they get out.”

More than 25 inmates have participated in the program. Six men currently are reading on a regular basis.

The “Reading for the Blind” program is different from others because it encourages inmates to help others, said Rich Hewson, the prison’s public information officer.

“We don’t make it a Utopia for these people. We’re trying to establish a positive attitude for inmates so that they can go out and succeed,” said Hewson. “Some will never change. But a lot of inmates want to get out and change. Programs like this can help.”

Bratlie and Kangas take turns when they read. Between frequent gulps of coffee, they work on reading with feeling and inflection, trying to be consistent with their pronunciation and dialect.

If they make a mistake, they stop, rewind and start the sentence over.

“I imagine myself as the speech giver. I change voices and try to build up intensity,” said Bratlie, who wants to look into storytelling when he is released in two years. He is in prison for selling drugs.

The tapes go to the Lilac Foundation for the Blind and the special education department of the Central Valley School District.

Feedback from the people who listen to the tapes has been positive, said Peggy Swanson of the Lilac Foundation.

For 30-year-old Kangas, volunteering has become part of his “spiritual program.”

“I’ve been such a taker all my life. This is a start,” said Kangas, who is interested in Buddhism.

The volunteer work and the prison time have given him a lot to think about, he said.

Like most of the 760 inmates at Airway Heights, Kangas either works about 40 hours a week or attends class. Right now, he spends his week digging ditches for the city of Airway Heights.

“The weight hurts. The depravation hurts,” he said. “This is lonely. You’re buried here alive.”

In three years, when he finishes his sentence for burglary, Kangas wants to continue volunteering. He wants to help drug addicts by sharing his experience with them.

“Now that I’m here, I have to accentuate the positive: I could be dead or insane,” said Kangas, who is from Minnesota. “Now I know that as long as I stay away from drugs, I can do anything.”

The inmates who show up every Saturday morning are serious about their work, said McCoury.

”(The readers) are well-groomed, well-mannered, there’s a good chance that (once they leave the prison) most of them won’t come back,” he said. “You just treat them like normal human beings.”