People sometimes look at you funny when they hear you are an advocate for the incarcerated.  Less often, some begin a debate about the need for fire and brimstone.

Advocates don’t have time to get caught up in a debate.  Nobody will ever convince us caring about people is a mistake.  Those who stick with it – use the debates, the occasional ugly comments, the injustice we see – as inspiration.

Marianne Teresa Ruud is an English teacher in Norway and someone who cares.   This is why she does what she does…

A week before Christmas, 2013, one of my female students lost her fifteen year old brother to suicide. He had been bullied through elementary and middle school and decided he didn’t want to live anymore. My student, along with her family, found him dead in his bed – no note, no explanation.  Just gone.

She was devastated and didn’t know how she was going to get through the rest of the school year. Other teachers kept telling me not to bring up her loss, not to talk about it.  On the contrary, I knew this was what we had to do. It had to be addressed, not quietly hidden away.

That’s when we came across the documentary, Young Kids Hard Time, by Calamari Productions.  The students expressed a great desire to write to the two individuals in the movie, Colt Lundy and Miles Folsom.  The letters the students received in return not only contained the prisoners’ stories, but also poems they had composed, reflections on books they had read and some very beautiful artwork. The letter writing developed on its own over time, giving us knowledge and insight.

We are now in touch with many intelligent and talented young people on the inside. It has motivated students to reflect and ponder on their own lives, as the people on the inside have helped them put into words the emotions and burdens they carry. The project has been most successful with at risk students, those with special needs and our advanced students who seek more knowledge and opportunities to obtain it.

For the past five years my students at Nannestad videregående skole (upper secondary school) in Norway, have continued to write and receive letters from incarcerated individuals, all juveniles sentenced to life and life without the possibility of parole from all over the United States of America.  Their ages differ as some of them who were sentenced as thirteen and fourteen years old are now in their thirties. The youngest individual we worked with was sentenced when he was twelve. Others have only been in prison for seven to ten years. A few of them are intellectually disabled and others were sentenced not knowing how to read or write. Their crimes vary from parricide, to robbery and felony murder. Most of them are victims of abuse, poverty, neglect, social violence and drug use. For the moment we are only writing to males, however, we will be expanding our project to include females.

Over the years we produced a full album of music, composed to selected poems we received. This was done by our media and communication students. There is also an extensive project looking at food waste and food corruption that was carried out in cooperation with some of the individuals, as prison food is of a very low standard and private companies supplying food to prisons are not serving proper portions and nourishing diets. We have also researched various topics together, especially with those individuals getting their high school diplomas and those pursuing a higher education.

Greetings from Norway,
Marianne Ruud, English Teacher

In October of 2017, Part I and Part II of a report were aired in South Bend, Indiana, sharing how Marianne Ruud and her students began their interaction with Colt Lundy.

Marianne said something in that report that I liked.  She expressed that Colt Lundy needed to have people in his life with his best interests at heart.

If we all had each other’s best interests at heart the world be a much different place.