Amanda Gray, an American Studies graduate and current reporter for the South Bend Tribune, wrote a feature in the Tribune detailing her work in a Shakespeare class at the local Westville Correctional Facility. Below is an excerpt from Gray's feature.
Stepping off the elevator at Westville Correctional Facility, just a gate separating us from an entire unit of prison inmates, we turned to each other, both nervous.
We didn't have our usual armor, the notebooks and cameras that separate us from the rest of the world when we are on assignment. We were taking this course as fellow classmates. We needed the inmates to trust us, or they wouldn't have opened up to us in the ways they ultimately did, when those tools came with us in the following weeks.
Read the full story and watch a video about the Shakespeare program here.