Q&A with Devon Kurtz ’20

Devon Kurtz (Class of ’20) first became interested in prison volunteerism and prison reform while attending Dartmouth. After graduating, he founded a Quaker community at the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, Vermont, a state prison and jail serving the Vermont side of the Upper Valley. His book, Sketches from Behind Prison Walls, is the result of a collaboration with Rein Kolts, an incarcerated artist, and several incarcerated men. The book includes Kolts’ portraits of his fellow inmates, as well as poems and short prose by the men depicted in the portraits. Kurtz joined The Dartmouth for a conversation about prison reform, the humanity of community members behind bars, and the lessons he learned while writing his book.

How did you come up with the idea for your book “Sketches from Behind Prison Walls”?

DK: I have lived in Woodstock, Vermont for five years after graduating from Dartmouth in 2020. While at Dartmouth, I attended the Quaker Friends meeting, and there they gave a talk by the American Friends Service Committee on prison reform. During the talk, I learned that the Hanover Friends had supported prison ministry in Windsor, Vermont, about a decade ago. I wanted to revive that effort, and eventually went to the prison in Springfield, where I began a Quaker ministry in February 2023. I met Rein Kolts, a Quaker who was incarcerated there, and he began attending services with me. A few months later, he presented me with this artwork and some of the texts that would later appear in the book. He didn’t know what to do with all this material, so he entrusted it to me. I promised to think of an idea how we could show it to more people. From there he continued to create more artwork, particularly what became the fourth section of the book, which deals with faith, death and sin. That’s when the book really came together. Once I had that body of work, the structure of the book became coherent. I rebuilt it around that fourth section of the book.

How did you go about organizing the rest of the book?

DK: A major motivation for me in putting this book together was to learn more about people who are going through a spiritual crisis. The perspectives presented in the section on faith really touched me. People are grappling with death and what it means to them, especially those who are in prison themselves.

Some of the other elements that contributed to people going into spiritual crises ended up becoming the other sections. Another section is humiliation, which really deals with the physical inconveniences of prison. There’s a character talking about being denied insulin. Another character talking about losing their teeth and not getting them back. Another character being dragged — those kinds of physical inconveniences and indignities. Then there’s a section on loss and the emotional side of prison. Separation is associated with incarceration, as are the milestones in other people’s lives that you miss. The third section, on silence, has two inspirations. First, Quaker worship is silent, so it’s an homage to the origin of the book and the shared faith of Rein and I. There’s also an element that’s kind of symbolic of all the voices that are suppressed by incarceration. And there’s this interesting aspect of prison where even in solitary confinement you don’t really experience silence. Many of the men who came to my parish were not Quakers and weren’t necessarily interested in the Quaker faith. They were interested in Quaker worship because of the silence.

What do you hope readers less familiar with Quakerism should gain from this book?

DK: I would say that my book and its contents are a testament to the mental, physical and emotional resilience of these men. Rein himself is a testament to that. This is a man who will spend the rest of his life in prison. Even though he was incarcerated at an old age, he turned that horrific situation into something beautiful with the book he wrote.

Many of the different men in the book talk about their journey while incarcerated and how their views or their relationship to themselves changed. I think that, with a few exceptions, you get a testimony of enormous resilience. The first portrait of the man is actually unnamed, but he signs it “poor fat guy.” And I started the book with that one because in many ways it’s a rejection of the project and a rejection of our sympathies and our views of people in prison. He tells this wonderful poem about this lustful subversion where he tries to get as fat as possible so that when he dies it’s difficult to remove him from the cell. It’s this assertion of agency through his own self-destruction that I just found so compelling. It was, I think, the most honest piece in the book. He wasn’t thinking about how he could present himself as more human or more dignified. Instead, it was a kind of middle finger to all of us.

When did you first start thinking about the questions and issues raised in the book?

DK: This is actually a really interesting question in the context of the Dartmouth community. When I was at Dartmouth, I was editor of the other newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, and we were trying to find Robert Tulloch and James Parker – convicted of the murder of two Dartmouth professors – around the 20th anniversary of the horrific Zantop murders. The New Hampshire Department of Corrections said we were not allowed to question Parker and Tulloch. Of course I was angry because the questions we were asking were not about the crime. They were about the people who committed it and where they had gone since. That was one of the reasons I wanted to ask these questions of those who were guilty of their crimes and what comes afterward. I’m interested in what comes afterward and how that person develops afterward.

Do you think the book is consistent with political efforts towards prison reform?

DK: At its core, it’s not an overly political book. However, the first page is about the state of Vermont crushing a group of incarcerated men in a wine or olive oil press. So that’s a couple of digs, but I was very upfront with Rein that we shouldn’t give the book a direct political message. Instead, we really wanted to draw attention to the lives of the people in the facility. However, there is a broader context in Vermont with prison reform. Vermont is an extremely progressive state and so unfortunately doesn’t want to invest in its facilities at all. These facilities are quite old and run down. It’s ultimately a really complicated problem that at its core comes down to the fact that we don’t spend enough time with the people who are in these facilities.

Do you have any advice for those reading this book or interested in volunteering in prison?

DK: The system makes it very difficult. The process of becoming a volunteer for the Department of Corrections is arduous. It takes a lot of time to drive to the prison in Springfield, and a lot of people don’t want to give up a Sunday to do it. There are a lot of obstacles, but there is also a high need, especially after the pandemic. The pandemic shut down programs, so the only people coming back into the facilities now are religious volunteers and a handful of other programs that have sort of taken hold.

There are also great organizations doing other kinds of work in the Upper Valley – the Hartford Community Restorative Justice Center, for example. I volunteered there for a long time and was on their board until recently. They do great work with alternatives to incarceration.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.