Response to "Raw Material"

After reading "Raw Material" by Jane Maher, it left me curious and reminded me of a few things. When I was reading this text, it reminded me of the movie Freedom Writers. The movie is about a high school teacher who starts working at an intense racially divided school where the students had little motivation to do anything involved academically. Eventually she starts to change their attitudes and gets them to participate and enjoy school more while also discovering things about herself. This reminds me of "Rawl Material" because in it, Maher is put into an environment different that she is used to, a prison, presented with the challenge of teaching to emotionally damaged inmates. It was sort of comforting to know that women in prison wanted to be college educated and that there are people like Maher who are doing a good job to make them feel more fulfilled.This essay also made me feel more sympathetic towards women in prison. Especially when Maher wrote,"The statistics are staggering- 65 percent of women in prison have been abused before the age of twelve; the abuse begins in many cases between the ages of two and seven..." It proceeds to talk about how this leads to women engaging in vaginal cutting. It just makes you feel more sympathetic to women who have committed crimes because most of them have started their lives with personal trauma. This essay puts women prison inmates on a more humanistic level, rather than just reducing them to mere convicts.