Few girls who danced as one of Colorado Ballet’s Claras in “The Nutcracker” end up in San Quentin Prison,the strange career path traveled by Megan Comfort.
She came to San Quentin, one of California’s most notorious correctional facilities, as a sociologist, not as an inmate. Her new book, “Doing Time Together,” examines the impact on 50 wives and female partners of men serving prison sentences at San Quentin — an effect, Comfort suggests, common in their peers throughout the U.S., including among the women connected with Colorado’s 23,000-plus inmates.
Comfort will read from her book at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 2526 E. Colfax Ave., a site she knows intimately.
“My earliest ‘Nutcracker’ was in the Lowenstein Bonfils Theater, before the ballet moved to the new complex downtown,” she said.
“And my dad is Josh Comfort, the architect who wound up renovating the Lowenstein for the Tattered Cover store where the reading will be.”
Her interests shifted from plies to prisons when Comfort took a job at the San Quentin visitors center. Initially interested in the prisoners’ circumstances, she shifted her attention to the women and children who regularly showed up to visit.
“Hundreds of women and children were coming in every day, and I became interested in the family ties that people have and maintain during incarceration,” she said.
Comfort became so intrigued that she returned to the prison when she was a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics. Her dissertation is the basis for “Doing Time Together,” which articulates the enormous efforts required of women who want to maintain relationships with their incarcerated partners.
“The title really sums up what these women feel they’re going through,” Comfort said. “It’s not just the man who’s doing the sentence, but the woman, too. The women find ways to support the men and help them through that sentence.”
In her book, she cites an example. As Comfort eats lunch with a prisoner’s wife, the woman props up her husband’s photograph against a salt shaker when she eats lunch with Comfort: “There,” she smiles, “Now we can have lunch together.”
Another prisoner’s wife monitors the upcoming movies on San Quentin’s in-house television channel so she can rent the same film that her husband will be watching, and watches it at the same time of evening that it’s being broadcast in the prison.
“The next day, during her visit, they can talk about it — and that was a great example of what women do to pull their men into the social fabric of their lives,” she said.
“Before, I’d thought of the prisoners as distant, isolated, remote loners. I didn’t think of them as men with families. That changed. Even for families who feel guilt or shame around someone’s crime, they still know that person as a son or brother or husband, and they still love him.”
It was a revelation to her. So was the diversity among the women Comfort interviewed: Anglo, African-American, Latina; white-collar workers and welfare mothers; and college graduates and women who never attended high school.
“Prisons are microcosms of society,” Comfort said.
“We think of the prisoners as the only ones being imprisoned, but there are all these other people — the guards, the visitors who spend a lot of time in prison, and other people who haven’t been convicted of anything but who must meet the rules of being in the prison.”
