Reganbooks
Barbara Parsons Lane.
Inmates Can Keep Money From PEN Literary Award
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: April 17, 2004
HARTFORD, April 16 - Barbara Parsons Lane will be one of the stars of the PEN 2004 Literary Gala, to be held at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday, honored for her starkly honest autobiographical essays at a ceremony emceed by Tom Brokaw and attended by a spectrum of celebrities from the publishing world, including Salman Rushdie and Tina Brown.
Ms. Lane, however, will not be able to attend the event. She is serving 10 years in a Connecticut state prison after pleading no contest to manslaughter for killing her abusive husband.
She will, however, one day be able to collect the $25,000 in prize money that comes with receiving the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award for her contribution to the book, "Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies From Our Imprisoned Sisters." Earlier this week, that was not so certain.
For more than a year, following news of the book project and the prospect of potential royalties it might earn, the state of Connecticut has been pressing a lawsuit based on the state's "cost of incarceration" law that would require Ms. Lane and the other inmates who contributed to the book to reimburse the state $117 for each day they have spent in prison.
That bill would exceed $330,000 for Ms. Lane, who has been imprisoned since 1996, and it would dwarf the royalties the writers have earned at this point.
Now, however, after PEN made Ms. Lane one of the literary world's newest faces of imperiled free speech by announcing her award last month, Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who filed the suit, says the convicts who contributed to "Couldn't Keep It to Myself" will get to keep their money after all. A settlement was signed late Friday.
They will not see instant riches: each has earned less than $10,000 from royalties so far.
"There are two very significant public interests that have run directly into conflict," Mr. Blumenthal said Friday. "One is to give prisoners the right and opportunity to express themselves and to rehabilitate in the best sense of the word. The other goal is to make prisoners pay for the expenses of their incarceration if they have the means to do it." He said the law should be amended to apply "only to windfalls, such as inheritances, benefits, lottery winnings or proceeds of criminal activity.''
Mr. Blumenthal said he had agreed to the settlement because it became clear in negotiations that the women were not profiting by writing about their crimes. "My ambivalence was that their achievement in this book was truly extraordinary and admirable, but the statute had to be enforced," he said. He added that he had been invited to the award ceremony but was not sure he would be able to attend.
Unlike New York, Connecticut has no so-called Son of Sam law, named for the 1970's serial killer David Berkowitz, which initially allowed crime victims to sue those convicted in their cases for any income from their crimes, like book-publishing deals. The [NY] law was expanded in 2001 [in NY] to allow lawsuits from crime victims seeking virtually any money prisoners receive.
The narrative generated by the creative writing students inside the York Correctional Institution for women, in Niantic, is rich with plot lines: a much-praised book, the PEN award, the suspension and now reinstatement of the writing class by corrections officials and a state legislature now considering an amendment to prevent such an episode from happening again.
And the program's most prominent supporter is Wally Lamb, the Connecticut author whose books "She's Come Undone" and "I Know This Much Is True" were best sellers promoted by Oprah Winfrey. Since 1999, Mr. Lamb has volunteered to help teach in the program at York, which led to the publication of "Couldn't Keep It To Myself" in 2003.
Mr. Lamb said the writing program was never about money, or the crimes the women committed, which ranged from homicide to drug dealing. It was about rehabilitation.
"It looks like maybe a middle-school classroom," he said in a telephone interview. "There are stacks and stacks of books. It's a very comfortable setting once you get past the guard at the front gate and the metal detectors. "Students are students, and once the work begins the class is much like any other class. I don't ever ask the women why they're there. The women were not particularly interested in writing about their crimes. They didn't want to go there."
Although a number of inmates contributed to the book, PEN rules allow only one person to win the First Amendment award, Mr. Lamb said. "I chose Barbara especially because of her work ethic," he said, "and because of the really dramatic evolution that's come to her because of her writing."
Larry Siems, director of the PEN American Center's freedom-to-write and international programs, said PEN chose Ms. Lane and the other York women because their work was threatened even as it was intended to speed their rehabilitation.
Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democratic state lawmaker from East Haven who is co-chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee, said the vagueness of the cost-of-incarceration law created the potential for arbitrariness in its application. Now 55, Ms. Lane is scheduled to be released in November 2006. At one point in the collection of seven essays she contributed to the book, called "Puzzle Pieces," in which she interweaves recollections of abuse she experienced in her childhood and her marriage, she writes, "Women like me don't hit back."
Ms. Lane shot her husband to death at 3 a.m. as he lay in bed.