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To date, no participants of RTA who have been released have recidivated. Rehabilitation Through the Arts has also spawned several similar efforts; in the past few years, theatre programs based on the RTA model have been established in three New York state facilities. This would make the program an intriguing study indeed, but unfortunately, the administration at Sing Sing so seriously limited access to the maximum-security participants that a thorough and responsible examination of Rehabilitation Through the Arts by the author was impossible.8
Shakespeare Behind Bars, which is the oldest of the two, is an outreach campaign of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, producing one of the Bard’s plays every summer with a cast of inmates at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky. SBB originally began as part of the medium security prison’s Books Behind Bars program, started by LLCC resident psychologist Dr. Julie Barto. Books Behind Bars was an endeavor to introduce greater literacy to the men while simultaneously helping them give something back to the community by contributing to the education system. The program involved the participants’ working with middle-school students; the inmates would rehearse scenes from Romeo and Juliet to present as staged readings for the adolescents, who in turn would then perform their own staged readings of scenes from the play for the convicts.9
Dr. Barto had invited Curt L. Tofteland, artistic director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, to lend his expertise as a leading Shakespearean actor/director to the project. Eventually, the performance component grew into its own entity, and Tofteland officially began Shakespeare Behind Bars as its own independent program at LLCC. It is one of the few companies in existence—and the only one in prison—to produce Shakespeare’s plays from the folio versions of the texts.10 It is also the only in-prison company that produces the plays with an all-male cast, having men play even the female parts. Tofteland’s approach is, to a certain extent, somewhat ethereal. He tends to treat Shakespeare’s plays as rubrics of universal human expression and the Bard himself as a cartographer of the human soul and psyche. The SBB rehearsal structure inter-weaves characterology, performance mechanics, and individual self-exploration and self-evaluation on the part of the participants, fluidly moving from actual rehearsal work to personal testimony or revelation.