Re: SL with prison inmates?

I'd like to hear more about the work you all are doing.

I have mentored a community service learning program in the prisons in 
WAshington DC area for 18 years. We have not done letter writing as a 
formal outreach effort, though, many of our tutors from the outreach 
program (tutoring in our college courses and GED and Computer classes 
for inmates) do maintain correspondences for years with the inmates. 
One of the students I taught about 10 years ago has written from all 
over the world (while she studied abroad, finished law school, married, 
moved, etc.,)  to an inmate who has been moved from prison to  prison 
all over the U.S.---a feature of incarceration for DC inmates now that 
the US Congress closed the major prison here and we "export" our 
inmates. 

I have written a sociolingusitic anbalysis of the life story narratives 
I elicited from the prisoners, if you or your students might be 
interested: Speaking of Crime. 2000. Univ. of Nebraska Press. 
(Available online at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com ) Our GU Prison 
OutreachPrograms can be looked at from the websites below. Your 
students may want to contact our student coordinator Alex Belser: 
belsera@georgetown.edu (also on the website):

--patricia


Patricia E. O'Connor, Associate Prof., English, 312 New North, 
Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057    oconnorp@georgetown.edu  
202 687 7622  
FAX: 202 687 5445   websites: http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/oconnorp
http://www.georgetown.edu/outreach/vps/pops/