Brandywine Hundred couple offer hope for those behind the razor wire

Prison.

It's a place that most have no interest visiting. Its razor wire, heavy brick walls and keyhole-sized windows confront us menacingly whenever we might pass by, as if to warn us to steer clear of anything that might land us behind its walls.

So what would posses a Brandywine Hundred couple, both in their sixties, to visit prisons at every opportunity - even schedule vacations around opportunities to speak to inmates?

It all started in 1992 for Tom and Laura Lagana. Tom, an engineer who was heavily involved in a local Toastmasters chapter, was reading the club's magazine on a cross-country flight when he came across an article written by an inmate in Oklahoma about his experiences behind bars.

The story moved him to tears, and just weeks later Lagana was corresponding with an inmate at Gander Hill who, coincidentally, was requesting a Toastmasters club be started at the Wilmington prison.

"The prison was 1.1 miles from where I worked," he said. "But I had no idea it was even there because I never went down 12th Street."

The club was an instant success at Gander Hill, helping more than 50 inmates sharpen their public speaking skills in preparation for their release. It also was the catalyst that thrust Tom and his wife Laura into a whole new career.

A few years later, Tom was the victim of a corporate downsizing at Hercules. He latched on temporarily with another firm, but after the layoff he and Laura began seriously discussing starting their own motivational speaking business.

In 1997, the Laganas began conducting regular seminars at Gander Hill, to further help the inmates in the prisons' pre-release program.

It was at that point the need for a book became apparent.

"When you do a seminar for an hour and then you're gone, you don't have anything residual that they can rely on," said Laura, a registered nurse.

Tom then began collecting prison stories from everyone he could - from inmates to family members to corrections workers.

A few months later, the couple attended a seminar in

California, conducted by Jack Canfield, co-creator of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series. It was there Tom pitched an idea he had for a compilation of stories for prisoners. With Canfield’s blessing, the seeds of “Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul” were planted.

For the next three years, the Laganas collected material for thousands of prison stories. The book was finally published in 2000 and to date, more than 150,000 copies have been distributed in prisons around the country.

The book quickly made the Laganas a household name in big houses everywhere, prompting seminars at some of the most notorious prisons in the country, from Riker's Island in New York to Folsom Prison in California to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. To date, they have conducted seminars for inmates in 37 states.

All the while, the mail kept rolling in.

"There are people in prison everywhere who love to read and love to write, and in a lot of cases they had nothing else to do," Tom said. "So the mailbox was always full."

The Laganas estimate as many as 6,000 entries made their way to their mailbox over the years. And that's where Laura came in.

"They're not on email, they're all handwritten," she said. "But I took typing in high school, in part because my handwriting was so bad, and I also have a passion for writing...and began slightly editing some of the stories."

Laura never got a co-author credit for "Chicken Soup for the Prisoner's Soul" even though she was responsible for much of the editing, but she did on the couple's two subsequent prison books, 2003's "Serving Time, Serving Others" and their 2009 release "Serving Productive Time."

The Laganas pen some of the stories themselves, offering an outside perspective and occasionally some advice, but the heart and soul of the book is the contributions of inmates and ex-inmates -- like William Francis.

The 38-year-old Wilmington man spent 18 years in various state and federal penitentiaries after being convicted of armed bank robbery.

"When I was just two years in, I knew prison wasn't the life for me and I started preparing for life outside prison," he said. "When other guys were out playing basketball or watching TV, I was spending most of my time reading, writing, studying and practicing public speaking."

His entry, entitled "My Personal Protector," describes how his intuition, should he adhere to it, allows him to decide his own fate and make his own legacy.

"A lot of times, you hear people say things happen for a reason," he said. "But I don't necessarily think that way. Everything that happened to me was within my control and it was up to me to learn from my mistakes and move forward."

Francis, who now works at a senior care facility in Glen Mills, Pa., as a utility supervisor, said he learned most of his job skills working various jobs in prison.

“A majority of prisoners will be released," Laura said. "They’ll need all the tools they can get to adapt and survive. We want to feed their minds, hearts and spirits with positive words and thoughts from a diverse array of people, to read about the possibilities for their future from others who have ‘been there and done that’ and who are now living successfully on the outside.”