Voices from Behind Prison Walls

“I was fired by the Vermont Department of Corrections for having written a poem,” wrote Ben Mitchell, an educator at Southern State Correctional Facility, in the Fall of 2024. Mr. Mitchell had penned an elegy to an inmate, Gary Patridge, who had died in the facility earlier that year, one of more than a dozen deaths in a strikingly short period of time. Soon after, Mr. Mitchell was terminated from his position at the facility.

Had the same thing not also happened to me just four months prior, I would have been surprised by the violation of free speech. For several years, I served as a religious services volunteer at the same prison as Mr. Mitchell, organizing a Quaker meeting for worship among the inmates. A book emerged from that meeting for worship. It was published under the title Sketches from Behind Prison Walls by the Quaker Institute for the Future in the spring of 2024. By July of that year, I was dismissed from my volunteer position on vague grounds related to the publication of the book.

Like Mr. Mitchell’s poem, the book contained some measured criticisms of mass incarceration, Vermont’s justice system, and prisons generally. The book was written in collaboration with inmates and contained their artwork, poetry, and prose. It testified to the complex experience of incarceration. My contributions to the book shared the indignities and hopes of life in prison, as I saw them, among the men I worshipped with.

I was surprised that the Vermont Department of Corrections, which prides itself on being among the most forward-thinking prison systems in our country, fired me and Mr. Mitchell for writing and publishing written work. Perhaps the spike in mortality among inmates had officials on high alert? The message from the state was clear: don’t talk about our prisons. I believe that the fundamental promise of freedom of speech is: no criticism of our government is so strong as to merit censorship.

So, I sued the Vermont Department of Corrections. Working with the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell Law School, we aim to end Vermont’s unconstitutional overreaches and protect the voices of imprisoned people.

Much of my professional and spiritual life is devoted to the study of crime, advocacy for criminal justice policy, and engagement with people within the criminal justice system. Alongside many Quakers, I share a deep commitment to criminal justice reform. Arguably, no other government institution represents as serious an incursion on the rights of its citizens as prisons. Unlike many Quakers, I do believe that prisons are a necessary institution, but one that merits substantial oversight and protections for those incarcerated within them. Voicing criticism of prisons is essential to their oversight and as protection against their abuses. Civic-oriented criticism is at the core of Sketches from Behind Prison Walls.

But Sketches from Behind Prison Walls also aimed to project the voices of those whom we otherwise tend to forget—the margins of our society, who we keep locked behind walls of metal and concrete until we release them into a new prison of social ostracization. Simply reading the poems and prose of inmates and seeing their faces through the portraits included in the book was an end in and of itself. And I fear that it was that end—the humanizing of people in prison as worthy of being seen and listened to, of having the Light of God within them—which the Vermont Department of Corrections sought to silence.

But it is also that most precious end which I aim to fight passionately to protect in federal court.

Devon Kurtz attends Salt Lake City Monthly Meeting. His leading towards criminal justice is connected to his family’s experience on both sides of the criminal justice system. He joined the board of the Quaker Institute for the Future (QIF) in 2025. He published Sketches from Behind Prison Walls with support from QIF and New England Yearly Meeting in April 2024.