[New-Poetry] CD Wright's body count

[TheOldMole]

When I taught in the NYS prison system, I was doing a class in public 
speaking, and I assigned a persuasive speech -- standard assignment. One 
guy gave a speech advocating the opening of factories in prison, where 
the inmates could work for pay. During the question-and-answer session 
after the speech, the rest of the class ripped into him mercilessly. 
They all thought it was a horrible idea -- "You're encouraging people to 
commit crimes so they can go to prison and get a job." I let it go on 
for a whole, because I thought it was a good lesson we could talk about 
after -- what do you do when you really misjudge an audience and your 
speech goes totally wrong. I asked the class afte -- "Why the strong 
reaction?" They said, "We don't identify ourselves as prisoners. This 
isn't our life -- that's why we're taking college courses to prepare for 
our future. If you gave this speech to a bunch of lifers, you might get 
a different response."

Roger Day wrote:
> In the UK, you'd be on a sticky wicket morally if you re-imburse
> prisoners for being, well, prisoners. There might well be a state or
> federal law *against* prisoners making money out of their status as
> prisoners. In the UK, I think it's the case that prisoners cannot make
> money out of selling their life-stories to newspapers.
>
> Roger
>
> On 7/2/08, Rsgwynn1 at cs.com <Rsgwynn1 at cs.com> wrote:
>> http://edelmangallery.com/lusterp.htm
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-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford