'Les Miserables': Is the story of Jean Valjean a model for newly released inmates today?

Asked about his conflicts, I would have tried to recall this:  “He might be said to carry two knapsacks:  In one he had the thoughts of a saint.  In the other, the formidable talents of a convict.  And he helped himself from one or the other as the occasion required.”
 
Asked what Valjean would do if released from the prison where we were standing, my reply was something along these lines: He would start a manufacturing business and be the kind of factory owner who would employ ex-cons. He would buy books to stock the prison library. He’d fund vocational classes and re-entry counseling, and anger management. He’d provide seed money for entrepreneurial efforts that would stabilize a neighborhood. He’d fund after-school programs, youth leagues, and vocational training programs. He’d probably channel bail money to those who had been wrongly accused and pay for appellate counsel for those unfairly prosecuted.
 
With the advent of the new “Les Miserables” my thoughts again turned to the possibility of promoting the novel. I would be tempted to pass over chapters in which Jean Valjean does not figure prominently. A literary trangression? I would think about making references to several of those “imprisoned” by Dickens: Abel Magwitch (“Great Expectations”) and Arthur Clennam (“Little Dorrit”). Literary conceits?
 
Assuming DOC readers might actually work their way through “Les Miserables,” the politics and Valjean’s abandoning the “law and order” legions for the rebels’ barricade might do in any proposal.
 
My pitches to the DOC spoke of individual responsibility and rectitude.  My reading lists include stories of reprehensible conduct duly punished and admirable conduct duly rewarded (in the end, anyway).
 
Once past the alarms set off by the title, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s  “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was usually a “go.” On the other hand, “Birdman of Alcatraz” would never fly.  Robert Stroud, murderer turned ornithologist, had a mean and violent streak: imprisoned for taking one life, he took another while in prison.
 
Yeah, Valjean’s story was one to promote. A hero who does not act out of heroism, but out of a desire to do good and a sense of duty, has a lot of appeal. In the early chapters, we learn about his path to theft and chains, and then as the story unfolds, there are five high-risk rescues: the children from a house ablaze; the fellow being crushed under his heavily-load cart; the man wrongly mistaken for and prosecuted as the recidivist Valjean, who is spared “the living burial of the prison galleys” by Valjean’s in-court absolutions; the topman dangling high above a ship’s deck and the harbor’s cold waters, “oscillating like a stone in a sling”; and the wounded young insurrectionist carried from the barricades to safety via the sewers of  Paris.
 
Few inmates speak of New Year’s resolutions. Their calendars count time served and days until their parole hearing. Their calendars mark a court date for a possible rehearing or an appeal – or a visit from the person they’ve been distanced from. They count the days until release, but “freedom does not liberate them from condemnation and shunning.”
 
They may not be hunted and haunted by a Javert (who Valjean could have shot but spares). Yet, they are – perhaps quite justifiably in some (many?) cases – condemned to the stigma of having been a convict.
 
Yeah, re-entry is no picnic, no walk in the park. Still, Victor Hugo’s observations might be worth lingering over: He likened remorse to a tide that returns to man’s shore (conscience) again and again: an upheaval of the soul. Valjean no longer has a taste for hate. He tastes “the bitter flavor of a wicked thought” and “spits it out with disgust.”
 
Maybe, just maybe, in some prison there’s “a white-hair” who, like Jean Valjean, will discover the alchemy of turning hate into service – with help (considerable help, to be sure) of Providence.
 
Joseph H. Cooper was editorial counsel at The New Yorker from 1976 to 1996.  In additional to his work in prisons and at community colleges, he teaches ethics and media law courses at Quinnipiac University.

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