As more than a dozen women listened in, Pamela Smart was reading from her essay about her foolish affair with her student, Bill Flynn, that led to the murder of her husband in a highly publicized case.
“I will forever be haunted by the knowledge that had I never gotten involved with Bill, Greg would still be alive today,” she said. “Even though I didn’t pull the trigger, my bad choices helped load the gun.”
Her confessional essay epitomizes “What I Want My Words To Do To You,” a documentary about a writer’s group at a women’s prison. The participating inmates–many of them killers–bared their scars, their crimes, their remorse with a poetry as powerful as it is surprising.
“I hope it allows people to see women in prison differently, to see their potential for change,” said Eve Ensler, creator of “The Vagina Monologues,” who led the group and served as an executive producer for the documentary.
The movie, which airs 9 p.m. Tuesday on WTTW-Ch. 11, features the inmates as they go through writing about their lives, and actresses Glenn Close, Rosie Perez and Marisa Tomei as they re-enacted some of the women’s stories in a reading before a prison audience.
Ensler said her only criteria for the 15 prisoners she selected was that they seemed willing to examine themselves and to write.
In the film, Monica Szlekovicswrote a letter to her mother, stressing the length of her sentence, which shattered her mother’s hopes for an early release. Cynthia Berry, a former prostitute, expressed near-suicidal guilt over killing a 71-year-old john of hers. And Keila Pulinario told of her decision to shoot a person she had considered her best friend before he allegedly raped her.
“It’s a brilliant, brilliant look inside the human heart,” Perez said. “I think it’s a necessity for everyone to watch. … Hopefully this can be a tool to help women not to get to that place of snapping and making a wrong decision because of abuse and neglect they may encounter.”
Ensler said she plans to continue to work with the prisoners indefinitely and said her participation has changed her as well.
“I think it’s really made me examine the American prison system deeply,” Ensler said, “and wonder why 2 million people are in prison and wonder what we’re doing in so-called correctional facilities.”
At the end of 2002, about 97,500 women were imprisoned by state or federal authorities, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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