Sketches from Behind Prison Walls

Illustrated by Rein Kolts, introduction and commentary by Devon M. Kurtz. Quaker Institute for the Future, 2024. 104 pages. $40/hardcover; $20/paperback.

After helping start Quaker worship at Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, Vt., Quaker Devon Kurtz collaborated with Quaker inmate Rein Kolts to create this slim collection of Kolts’s sketches of his fellow inmates. The book project was funded by a grant from New England Yearly Meeting and published by Quaker Institute for the Future, which offers a free PDF version on its website (quakerinstitute.org/books). Kurtz also acknowledges support from Friends at Hanover (N.H.) Meeting, where he is a member and where there has been a long tradition of prison ministry.

Kolts was an artist well before his incarceration in 2014; he continued his creative pursuits behind prison walls “mostly as a way to pass my time productively and bring a modicum of joy to the other men and their families,” he writes in the “Illustrator’s Note.” In Sketches, his simple but profound penned portraits catch something of each subject’s inner self, thankfully with zero sentimentality. Each drawing is accompanied by a brief statement, reflection, or poem by the subject; these written contributions are all interesting and mostly heartfelt. I wish there were many more. Kurtz’s musings throughout are in defense of the inmates and often critique the prison system.

Readers will notice that neither the writer, artist, nor inmates mention the crime that sent the person to prison in the first place. Kurtz addresses this omission in the preface, noting how little attention is paid by the public to “what one’s life is like in prison, rather than how he got there.” Even still I would be interested in a companion book that interviewed the inmates’ victims about whether the incarceration of the accused had eased their own pain or felt like justice.

The inmates’ collected statements are all fascinating, often moving, and sometimes quite beautiful. Inmate Roger Deas (whose illustrated portrait from the book is below) has two entries, including a free verse poem called “Death” that ends with this:

I believe that our Creator made a 
way for an individual to be part of a
grander scheme: to teach and rule a
resurrected civilization that would not
only repopulate a renewed earth, but
would spread love and peace to the stars.

I can only imagine.

Amen.

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Signe Wilkinson is a cartoonist and member of Chestnut Hill Meeting in Philadelphia, Pa. She has served for seven years on the Board of Trustees for Friends Publishing Corporation.