The room is mostly silent as two players muse intently over a chessboard, pondering their next moves.
They take time to pause, think and strategize while their instructor watches.
“I was always an impulsive decision maker,” said Danielle Palmer, one of the players. “I’d always think … two steps ahead of myself and get myself into trouble because of that.”
Palmer and her opponent are inmates at the Nova Institution for Women, a federal prison in Truro, N.S. Both players are serving sentences after being convicted of serious crimes involving trafficking.
Through lessons offered by a volunteer, they’ve been learning how to play chess for the past few months and reflecting on the principles of the game.
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“It’s actually really helpful. I think that when you sit back and actually think about your decisions, you make better choices,” said Palmer.
“Because if you go too fast in the chess game, you’re probably going to lose because you’re not making the right choices at the right time.”
She adds that having a skill to hone while incarcerated has been beneficial, especially compared to her time spent in another institution where such a program wasn’t available.
“It’s really debilitating, like you just sit there and you have too much time for yourself and you start to overthink,” she said of her previous experience.
Instructor Remi Petch says the program’s goal is to help inmates with their rehabilitation. The skills acquired through chess, he says, can be applied to life outside the institution’s walls.
“You learn a lot of soft skills through playing chess: patience, creativity, strategy, and those are directly transferable to outside the community,” said Petch.
“When you’re in an institution like this one, for better or worse, you lose a lot of the freedoms that you had previously. And so when you’re playing chess, you really become the master of your own destiny again.”
He says he hopes the program can expand to other jails and prisons and foster a love of chess among more participants.
“My hope is that this program will eventually lead to a lot of these inmates experiencing improvements in their overall mental health, their state of mind while in the prison,” he said.
“That they can then take that improvement and apply it to the outside community and that they become better citizens for it.”
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