San Quentin Film School
Discovery Channel
Fridays 9 AM
The Discovery Channel is broadcasting a show on the San Quentin Film School, which follows a film program where 9 students create their own personal films through guidance from instructor Pepe Urquijo. The second episode was on March 27h, and there are 4 more installments.
You can check out the previous episodes on youtube.
by Julia Taylor
For the past five months I have been writing with a group of women at the Otter Creek Correctional Facility in Wheelright, KY. Located in an historic coal mining camp town, the prison was built as a source of jobs and is run as a private prison by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). After the consolidation of two local high schools, the CCA facility is now the largest employer in the town and has contracts to house women from Kentucky and Hawaii.
One of the women in the group wrote: “They built a prison inside an old mine—a hole where men took out what they wanted and threw back in what they didn’t.” Many of the women come from Kentucky, some from the Eastern Kentucky coalfields where the prison is located, and others from the urban centers of Louisville and Lexington. Still others flew across the ocean from Hawaii for their incarceration.
We, as a group, have explored what it means to call a place home, and how we, as writers, fit into that picture. While challenging each other artistically these over these months, we have also struggled to understand our identity as writers. I proposed to the group that I might not include my writing in the anthology (though I write as part of the group every week, and read publicly at our reading). I felt that it wasn’t appropriate to include my own work in an anthology of writing “by incarcerated women.” The group became furious. How dare I separate myself from them now, after we had spent these months breaking down those barriers. “You’re just as bad as everyone else,” one woman exclaimed. “I thought that you were past putting labels on us.”
I was struck by their words and felt humbled. How dare I. We decided to write the introduction to The Concrete Rose Garden together, as a group of women writers, who just happen to gather in the visiting room of a prison every week.
Drawing by Iwalani Meyer
Check out the Thousand Kites Project’s website to download “The Concrete Rose Garden.”
This Saturday, March 28th fifteen battered women who have been released from California’s state prisons are holding a community event to celebrate their freedom and to call for the release of others who remain in prison. The women served between three and 30 years in prison, the majority for killing abusive partners when defending themselves or their children from ongoing violence and abuse.
Most of the women served life sentences and were released on parole by Governor Schwarzenegger and the parole board. Others were freed after successfully challenging their convictions in court under a unique California law that allows domestic violence survivors to petition for new trials if they did not have expert testimony on battering and its effects when their cases originally were prosecuted.
This community event, Our Voices Within: Internally Free, features formerly incarcerated survivors performing poetry about their experiences of incarceration and domestic violence and will feature visual art, music and testimonies to celebrate their freedom from prison and call for other survivors’ release. The event includes a silent auction of art and crafts and a book of writings created by currently and formerly incarcerated battered women.
The event is being held at the Women’s Building, which is located at 3543 18th St. (between Valencia & Guerrero), in San Francisco Saturday, March 28th, 2009. Doors open at 3:30pm for the public. The program is from 4:00 – 6:00pm.
The majority of women in prison experienced domestic violence before going to prison, and many are serving life sentences for crimes directly relating to their experiences of abuse. In a time of rapid prison expansion, prison overcrowding, and a crumbling state budget now more then ever these women should be freed.
To learn more about Free Battered Women and the event visit www.freebatteredwomen.org
To see footage from Sin by Silence a documentary about some of the survivors being honored visit http://www.sinbysilence.com/silenced/
Read a great New York Times article on Spel, an artist at the prison in Grateford, PA here
Read Phyllis Kornfeld’s “Digging for Gold: Finding goodness, autonomy and great art” here
And do check out Kornfeld’s important book on her work sharing visual art with people in prison, Cellblock Visions
(“Robin” by John Schiavron, pastel)
While I was working as an artist/facilitator with California’s Arts in Corrections program, I often wished there were a reentry arts program that I could refer paroling inmates to, a place where they could find a creative community and continue on a path many of them had begun only after coming to prison. About four years ago, I got a call from a parole agent who suggested I go to the local theater. When I arrived, the play’s director told me that John, a former student who’d paroled four months earlier, had presented himself, saying he had a background in designing and painting sets, but it was all at prison.
John had spent most of his adult life behind bars. Before he paroled, he told me that until he began working in a collaborative creative environment, he’d never thought of himself as anything but a criminal. But while he was still in prison, he began to imagine a different sort of life, a life that included art and theater and a commitment to his community. Within a year of paroling, John showed his work at a local gallery. He went from decades in prison to an artist’s reception, from criminal to community theater volunteer. This is what John says about his art education in prison: “It would prove to be a life saving experience. I became involved in many aspects of Art. Poetry, painting, drawing, writing, acting, singing. I learned how to collaborate with others. I was learning a new lifestyle and it gave me a good feeling to be doing something different with my life. I learned that I could do something besides being a prisoner. I started feeling confident. I started feeling proud of this transition that was taking place in me. The experience for me was dramatic. When I paroled, I knew it would be different for me. I am changed. I am off of parole now and continue to be involved with productive projects to continue my transformation.”
One of his colleagues, Cliff, a writer, says: “I can testify that the single most challenging aspect of my incarceration, as well as my release, was a sense of belonging. While incarcerated I got involved in Arts In Corrections. In the program we wrote and produced theater plays with fellow inmates. Our first play, Blue Train, about a father and son who meet for the first time in prison, turned out to be a life-changing experience. Inmates who were usually separated by race, gang affiliation and social status worked together for the first time. While producing Blue Train, I watched hard men become like children again. That is when I knew the power of art. That is when I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”
Jorge, a gifted young poet, writes about his first encounters with literature: “I began to read and write while I was in a juvenile detention camp, and this habit went with me to prison when I became an adult. First I would read novels and fiction and even from these novels and fictions books I would learn a few things from, soon after I began reading other books like self-help and books I can learn from, my eyes opened to a new world to the real world, I realized that the small world where I was a small legend where a lot of other small and limited people came from was just a grain of sand compared to the giant world that really existed.”
John and Cliff and Jorge are just a few of the men whose talent and determination to succeed inspired me to leave the Arts in Corrections program and begin a new path myself, as program director of the William James Association’s Poetic Justice Project. The Poetic Justice Project helps ex-offenders come back into their communities through engagement in the arts, including workshops, mentorship and public performances. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
I’ve always needed to write – to think out loud across the page, agonize over the smallest turn of a phrase, edit the same stanza over and over until I’ve come as close as I can to perfection or abandoned it in favor of some fresher verse. But it wasn’t until my incarceration that I developed the corresponding need to be heard. Whereas before I was content with private journaling, with English as catharsis, now I required an audience, an energy to bounce my ideas off of. At the bottom of the social casserole, I suddenly needed assurance that I was worth something – on paper, at least.
So I met with fellow poets on the yard to share our prose aloud. I sought out prison creative writing programs and worked to start them where none existed. I found publication for my own writing and that of my peers. With the assistance of people like Buzz Alexander, Suzanne Gothard, Eric Gadzinski, Judith Tannenbaum, and others directly or indirectly involved with Michigan’s PCAP, I learned methods not only to refine my own writing, but also to help others improve their own.
Through forums created by prison arts programs (and a few willing publishers), I’ve been able to remain a part of the reality outside these fences by sharing my view from within them, and that connection has enabled – more than any other aspect of this experience – my development into a socially-mindful (I hope) human being.
Listen to an essay of Sean here.
The Building of Ladders
I have seen first hand how the streets eat childhoods.
There is no discrimination
just randomly picking whatever is around,
devouring it in one full swallow, and
spitting out any bones of humanity.
And I ask why,
and I rage at what I see,
and I cannot stop thinking why does this happen.
And I cannot stop thinking
why do we let this happen.
I have seen the dreams in your eyes,
way back where you think you have hidden them,
I see them trying to grow,
trying to find light.
Where is the ladder for your dreams to climb?
I think what I mostly do is try to show you how to build ladders
that your dreams will be able to climb.
Dale Davis
How It Began
It began with an Empire State Partnership (ESP), funded by The New York State Council on The Arts, between The New York State Literary Center and Rochester City School District’s Youth and Justice Programs in collaboration with the Office of The Sheriff, County of Monroe.
It began with funding from the Palma Foundation for the establishment of a library, writing, and publishing center to reward students / inmates who have demonstrated participation, follow-through, and commitment. It began with students / inmates participating in NYSLC’s ESP who continually asked for a writing center in the jail.
It began with the words of Jimmy Santiago Baca in his memoir, A Place To Stand.
“Language gave me a way to keep the chaos of prison at bay and prevent it from devouring me; it was a resource that allowed me to confront and understand my past, even to writing from it some compelling truths, and it opened the way toward a future that was based not on fear and bitterness or apathy but on compassionate involvement and an belief that I belonged.”
It began with the Sheriff’s Department finding a room on the fifth floor of the Monroe County Jail. The room was being used as a storage room for everything and anything, boxes, storage cabinets, filing cabinets. It began by working with Sheriff’s Deputies and trustees to clear the room and clean it. It began by finding tables, chairs, computer cabinets, book cases that were not being used and moving them in. It began with an installation on the wall, a marriage of hip- hop, African American history, and the work of contemporary writers and artists. It began with placing the artwork and writing of students / inmates on the walls.
It began with the belief that learning is exciting and that a library of books relevant to the students’ / inmates’ identities, histories, and inspiration by inmates who have turned their lives around through writing is important. It began with the belief that a space where students / inmates can come and read and write and be human, a place where the dreams in their hearts can grow and be nourished as they learn technology skills will increase literacy.
Dale Davis
What Happens There
I feel my life is a war, living in a place that is really crazy. People die every day in Rochester, and all I can do is hope that it’s not someone from my family or a close friend. Coming to jail has made me want to change my life around. I am happy to be where I am and not dead or hurt. I am learning new things. When I was going to school, I was mad at the officers for making me go to school everyday or locking me in. Then one day I came to school and a woman by the name of Dale Davis was there. She was talking about a lot of things, and I was like “She really doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” She was a white woman talking about rappers that I thought she didn’t have a clue about. The I went to The Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center. For the first time it felt like I wasn’t in jail the whole time I was there, but I was in jail. I learned there are really people who care about us young men. I didn’t think people cared that much. It’s not like our schools outside of jail. In The Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center I see what I am really able to do and there is help there when I need it. It is easy to learn things there that I never in my lifetime thought I could do.
Clarence Cooper
The Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center makes me feel comfortable because it fills me with joy and happiness. For example, if I am sad and ready to fight, I go to the fifth floor, and I feel like a different person inside. I feel like I’m no longer in jail. This is why I appreciate what Dale Davis has done for us because we are in jail. The Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center keeps me going while I am in here with knowledge and support and lets me know my life is not over.
Jamar
In the Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center, Dale Davis taught me to never give up on myself. In the short time I have been in this program, I have learned to express myself and share my feelings and my still developing thoughts through writing. I have learned to release the feelings, aspirations, and dreams I have. Please read this with your minds and hearts to understand.
Deep, deepest, yet deeper,
far beyond the plains of poverty, destruction, misery, and lost dreams,
I descend into my soul,
my all, my nothing, my everything,
an island
within this dark cavern,
a vast ocean of hope, dreams, and desires,
an island in a whirlpool of confusion, lack of understanding,
and the child lost in the world
searching, yearning, and longing for love.
Malcolm
The Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center is a good idea because incarcerated young men like myself get to go up there to express what we feel is going on in the world and how we feel about being in jail. It’s kind of like a get-away where I can express my feelings and not be ignored or taken for a joke.
Being in that room is like being a deaf person learning to talk. What I mean is usually I am not heard but in that room I am heard, understood, and my opinion does matter. With Dale Davis’ help my point gets out where usually I am trapped like a bird in a cage waiting to be released.
What I am trying to say is the library is a good way for young men to learn to express themselves and their views on life and our world. There should be more programs like this to help young men be heard.
Quinjavis
Dale Davis
Executive Director
The New York State Literary Center
http://www.nyslc.org/
[email protected]
