Father Charles-August Darian had a sharp-planed face below a frosting of silver-white hair. His gray beard swept out to a point, improving on his chin. The pockets of his cardigan were weighted down with golf balls and a cell phone, which he showed me to make the point that he was busy, couldn’t spend all day, but would gladly spare a few minutes for someone in the education business.
He received me in his office, a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled affair with a latticed window that looked down on the softball diamond across the street. An avid Blue Jays fan, the father had found space for a pennant and an autographed picture of himself and John Olerud, amid the commendations that dominated his walls. My impression of him was of someone very comfortable with being well thought of.
Once we were seated and he’d rung for coffee, he asked what he could do for me.
I took a deep breath and said, “I work for an attorney who’s handling the paperwork for a teaching institute doing outreach to prisoners.” As proof I placed one of Shauna’s cards on his desk. “We’re interested in the Late Start program you pioneered. We believe there are advantages to your model over the current ones.”
He nodded as if that went without saying.
“We’d like your reflections on the program, and of course any advice you could share. We’d also like to follow up with some of its beneficiaries, assess their progress.”
“The inmates, you mean?” Reclining in his chair, Darian furrowed his brow. “When I started the program, I’d been visiting prisons for a while. I realized, talking to them, how intuitive and perceptive they are. Not dumb men, not all of them.”
“Sure.”
“I believed that if I could harness those smarts for education, I could cut down on the misery they might create, trying to express themselves without the proper intellectual and emotional tools. Maybe we could change the trajectory of their lives.” He seemed to speak without thinking back on the events—this was a sermon he’d given before.
The coffee came, delivered by an assistant about the same age as the priest, who poured silently and left us to perform our own additions. The father took cream and brown sugar.
“You can’t judge our success only by the people we worked with,” he said.
“Goes without saying.”
“Late Start made other correctional education initiatives step up their game, so to speak. We wanted to help people who everyone said couldn’t be helped. Some couldn’t, of course. My feeling was, if we could help just one.”
I nodded.
“Truth be told, I think the full effects of our work have yet to be felt.”
“It must have been intense,” I said.
“Like you wouldn’t believe. Just imagine it.” He sipped his coffee, leaving me time to imagine it. “You’re in a small locked room with a violent offender, someone who might not have passed high school. A murderer, a rapist, who can barely read a Dr. Seuss or calculate a tip. And it’s your job to challenge him, focus on the areas where he’s ignorant, where he feels most vulnerable.”
I marveled at that, and asked if there had been incidents.
“One or two. We were usually well supervised. One instructor was present during a riot, another threatened with a knife. We all received threats, of course. That went with the job.”
I drank some coffee. It was caramel-hazelnut infused, not my thing. “I’d be keen to see your reports. We’re interested in how you negotiated between results-oriented testing and customized learning objectives.”
“We preferred tailoring the program to what they needed. Maybe to a fault. Without test score improvements, diplomas, and whatnot, it’s hard to get administrators on board.”
The father leaned forward to drink, a few drops pattering on his saucer.
“What really did us in, apart from funding, was students trying to involve us in their legal troubles. My name carries some small amount of weight, and I was asked repeatedly to serve as a character witness.”
“The others must have been approached, too,” I said. “Though obviously not to the extent of yourself.”
He nodded. “And that’s what scuttled us—too much working at cross-purposes, people getting a little too friendly. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited a prison, but those people are sharp. Uneducated, maybe, but savvy, on the lookout for weaknesses to exploit.”
“Was there a specific incident?” I asked.
“I can’t go into details.” I waited him out, and he added, “It’s neither here nor there, really, but we found one instructor had gotten a little too close to one of her pupils. I’m talking about an ethical breach, you understand. Nothing tawdry.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Was she disciplined?”
“We separated them, of course.”
“But nothing beyond that?” I realized that might sound confrontational and pulled back. “Under those conditions, discipline must be hard to enforce. How did you manage it?”
“Some advice,” he said. “Make sure your own group lays out ground rules, and properly trains its educators. In our case, we were working on a shoestring, all volunteers. How can you discipline someone who’s not getting paid?”
“It must be tough,” I said. “I’d still like to see those reports, see how you managed. Did you keep lists of which volunteers worked with which inmates?”
“That I can’t help you with.”
He pointed his coffee mug toward the computer on his desk, its screensaver a slowly-undulating school of neon fish.
“A couple of years ago I had someone digitize the archives, scan all our papers—field reports, lesson plans, assessments. It’s a jumble, and I haven’t had time to go through it.”
“We could help you with that,” I said. “We have a number of employees with filing experience—”
“I appreciate the thought, son, but I can’t do it.” He stood, a sign for me to do the same.
Father Darian told me to call if I had more questions. He didn’t walk me out. I drove off in my rental car, wondering how well the priest had password-protected his computer.