“My breakfast doesn't consist of scrambled eggs and toast, pancakes or sausage. There is no orange juice and coffee. No, I start off each day with a different sort of buffet.”
At a conference table in a well-lit but windowless room in the Barnstable County Correctional Facility, Jess Hutchins reads from an autobiographical essay.
“I have multiple options,” she read. “Should I use a straw? Should I break out the tin foil? Or do I feed my addiction with an overused needle to curb the hunger pains my body has come to be acquainted with each day like clockwork, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”
Hutchins is from Maine. As she puts it, she came down for a funeral two years ago and never left.
She was jailed in Boston, where, at the time, Essex County housed female inmates. She was later sent to Cape Cod to make way for renovations at the Boston jail.
“Coming here was where I really decided to work on myself,” she said in an interview after reading her work. “I'm 41. … I had a lot of childhood problems that, you know, is where all of my issues stem from. And then it just got worse and worse. I created my own problems after that, you know?”
The memoir class for women in the Barnstable County jail started in 2023, when an inmate told the sheriff’s communications director, K.C. Myers, that she wanted to write a book.
She asked for help from the former journalist, who got the idea to run a class.
“So, we talked about her life stories,” Myers said, “which is really what kind of opened my mind to the amount of trauma that she went through, and that I was soon to learn that so many people in here, most people in here, have gone through.”
Childhood trauma and abuse, generational substance use, and mental illness: Myers said those are some of the most common elements of the women’s stories and often the root of what landed them in jail.
County jails in Massachusetts confine people with sentences up to two-and-half years for each offense, plus many people not yet convicted, awaiting trial.
Memoir behind bars has been used as a therapeutic tool for years, often in prison, where people are serving longer sentences.
Michele Tarter, an English professor at The College of New Jersey, has been teaching a memoir class in a women’s maximum-security prison for 25 years.
“The value of this work is that it changes the whole narrative,” she said. It changes an incarcerated person’s path and leads to rehabilitation.
“Education is the surest means to reduce recidivism,” she said. “With that, they will read, they will write, they will reflect. They will look at their lives and take stock. And studies show that they will also change.”
In the Barnstable County class, the group of about 10 students is always reading a published memoir — recently “Finding Me” by Viola Davis.
Each week, they talk about what they’ve read, and they read their writing aloud.
Teri Hathaway, who grew up in Bourne, wrote about being abducted outside a convenience store when she lived in California.
“I'm going to call my uncle, because the hair on my neck was raising, and I had a weird feeling,” she read. “My uncle's phone rings once, twice. He or the machine — I'm not quite sure — picks up, and at that exact moment, the two guys grab me, pulling me from the phone.”
She’s screaming and punching them as they push her into the back seat of a brown Cadillac.
“All I can see, or remember seeing, is my blue raspberry slushie abandoned at the pay phone.”
Hathaway said the men thought, incorrectly, that she was carrying drugs. She made it out of captivity without serious harm.
In class — a world away — she got positive comments about her writing.
Myers, the teacher, said she liked the detail about the slushie.
“I was trying to pick up on some details,” Hathaway said.
“Yes, details.”
“Good job,” a classmate said, to which Hathaway gave a quiet, “Thank you.”
So far, the class has produced two booklets of written work by incarcerated women.
Barnstable County Sheriff Donna Buckley supports the class as a way of reducing a person’s likelihood to reoffend.
Most people in the community understand that human beings are not defined by their mistakes, she said. But others think once a crime is committed, we should put people behind bars and forget.
“Well, that doesn't make our community safer, because everybody that's here is getting back out,” she said. “And if public safety is the name of the game, and decreasing recidivism is what we're aiming for, then everybody in our community has a responsibility to understand that, and to be part of the support and the solution for people who are getting out of jail.”
Doing so, she says, also serves the interests of crime victims.
Teri Hathaway and Jess Hutchins were weeks away from release at the time of this recording, and they’re now out.
Hutchins had delayed her parole so she could finish a vocational class in home construction. Through the sheriff’s reentry center and nonprofit partners, she can get further training and help with job placement.
Whatever comes next, she’ll take with her the experience of the memoir class.
“I think there's more therapeutic value in this little room than … This is the deep stuff, the really deep stuff,” she said.
After spending much of her life trying to survive chaos, she said, writing her story is healing.
