Archive | February, 2011

Learning with the Incarcerated Drives Students to Action

8 Feb

This article by Wendy Jason was originally posted on Change.org on 2/8/11

Since 1990, University of Michigan students have been offered unique, transformative opportunities to learn and create side by side with incarcerated youth and adults. Through coursework that often leads to participation in the university-sponsored Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), undergraduates have collaborated with professors, alumni and community members to facilitate arts-based workshops in 24 prisons, six juvenile facilities and seven under-resourced high schools across the state.

Professor Buzz Alexander, founder of PCAP, had been teaching a class, English 319, about the intersections of theater and social change for six years when two lifers at the Florence Crane Women’s Facility asked to register for the course. He consented, and each week during that semester traveled to the facility with two students to meet with the incarcerated women. During these meetings, students and professor engaged in improvisational theater activities, analyzing the racial, class and power dynamics at play in the situations they confronted. They explored their shared space, including the similarities and striking differences in the contexts of their lives.

Alexander quickly realized the power of this experience. A longtime proponent of supporting students to engage directly with communities in activism, he rejected the elitism of academia and its withdrawal from public discourse. He sought to provide students, faculty, and community members a forum for engaged, collaborative dialogue and action. And his class provided a venue in which all involved could expand their perspectives, challenge mainstream perceptions, and connect across differences.

Within a year, the course was completely dedicated to prison theater, and through English 310, Alexander began offering students the chance to facilitate workshops in creative writing, visual art, dance, music and drama at juvenile facilities and high schools. It didn’t take long for these courses to get the attention of curious students; the 25 seats in each class fill up every semester.

Emily Harris, who now serves on PCAP’s National Advisory Board, took Alexander’s English 310 class back in 2001 during her sophomore year. She was placed at a boys’ detention facility, where she facilitated a mixed-media workshop. The next semester she signed up for another class with Alexander.

“It was a formative experience for me,” Harris reflects. “I had the chance to grapple with my own privilege and look at the world in a new way. It was the first time I had seen the impact of institutionalized racism so explicitly and close to home.”

Jaime Nelson, PCAP’s statewide coordinator, became involved by taking 319. “The way [Alexander] taught and interacted was unique,” she recalls. “We learned what it means to actually bare witness, rather than just studying something. And we learned about what it means to facilitate rather than teach.” Nelson calls her experience in 319, and with PCAP, “the single most informative, influential experience I had [in college]. It politicized me,” she says, “and taught me the philosophy of how I want to live my life and be in spaces with people.”

In his new book Is William Martinez Not Our Brother: Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project, Alexander outlines the foundation he provides for his students: “I ask them to respect the youth and adults they will work with … I ask them to respect everyone at the facility … I ask them to believe in the youth and prisoners … [and] I ask them to practice a process of discovery.” He readies his students for the pain they will experience when they get up close and personal with “the economic injustice of their country.”

Many of Alexander’s students, having been so affected by their experiences, join PCAP upon completion of his classes. PCAP allows them to continue on as facilitators, and participate in the organization’s annual exhibition of art by Michigan prisoners. Last year, 236 artists from 36 prisons exhibited 422 works of art. The event, like the culminating performances that result from each workshop, is an integral opportunity for prisoners to share their stories and talents with the outside world.

Though PCAP was formally founded years ago, it is reborn, writes Alexander, “whenever youth, adults, and students step forward together in institutions where there is much pain and little trust, to risk collaboration and creativity. To begin to laugh, imagine and play, and to take ownership of their voices.” This is education that truly inspires, that nurtures the kind of independent, critical thinking that ignites social change.

PCAP members and students become more critically aware of issues relating to incarceration and the criminal justice system as a result of their participation. Many take action through supporting campaigns like this one, demanding that the poor — who fill our prisons in disproportionate numbers — be provided competent legal defenses.

Wendy Jason is a writer for Change.org and a passionate advocate for restorative justice who has worked on behalf of prisoners across the country.

An Intricate Part of the Whole

4 Feb

This article on Black History Month by Judith Tannenbaum was originally posted on AOLNews.com on 2/4/11

Say how ya doing
Outside world?
Do you remember me?
I’m that intricate part
Missing from the whole
The one y’all decided to forget …

Coties Perry wrote these words 25 years ago at San Quentin. For more than three decades, I’ve shared poetry in public schools and state prisons, and because the youngsters and prisoners I’ve worked with are most often unheard and excluded, I cherish Coties’ poem.

Who do we (those of us with some power) forget when we talk about history, public policy and what it means to be human? Which children do we nurture? Which do we shun?

These questions led me to say yes when Spoon Jackson — like Coties, my student at San Quentin long ago — suggested that we write a two-person memoir.

Spoon grew up in the 1960s in a cement shack in Barstow, Calif. The second youngest of 15 boys, he was beaten both at home and at school, by white teachers and black teachers. As he writes in “By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives,” the book that we wrote on his suggestion, “It was equal opportunity paddling on me back in those days of the Civil Rights Movement.”

I grew up 10 years before Spoon, in a large, extended Jewish family. Los Angeles isn’t that far from Barstow, but we were worlds apart. Our mothers both loved us, and we were both children with lots of curiosity and imagination. But my life was filled with opportunity, whereas Spoon’s elementary school principal pulled the little boy aside to tell him, “Boy, you will never graduate from high school.”

The adults around me talked all the time — stories, questions, musings, opinions — and they wanted to hear what I had to say.

Spoon, on the other hand, writes, “Pre-prison, my life had never been one of words. I could barely read, and I spoke as my father did to me, in one-word sentences, shrugs or by nodding my head.” 

But then:

During the months I was on trial, I sat stunned by all the words the DA used. I had no idea what these words meant, and I told myself then that I would not let unknown words trap me. I started studying the dictionary in the county jail and reading all I could. I began to awaken the sleeping student inside me and took my first steps on my journey.

Spoon’s journey forced him to “wake up”:

I checked out all the books I could get from the prison library and education department. In one notebook I wrote down definitions. I used my favorite words in sentences in another notebook. I became enraptured with words and reading. I said certain words aloud many times and pondered a word in the way I thought of the garden in front of the prison chapel, or a sparrow singing in the tree by the captain’s porch.

As Spoon says, “All rehabilitation is self-rehabilitation.” But self-rehabilitation is nourished, as Spoon’s was back when our prisons offered a wide range of programming, by opportunities like the ones I was given as a child. Opportunities all children deserve; opportunities that would certainly lead to fewer people in prison.

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Black History Month honors the forces and flows that shape a people and our nation. Coties Perry and Spoon Jackson — along with Elmo Chattman, Smokey Norvell and so many more former students — are part of black history. Not only as representatives of statistics about black men in prison, but also as individuals with particular human experience — the child each was, the adult he’s become.

Each man: an intricate part of the whole.

Judith Tannenbaum has been a community artist for 40 years, sharing poetry in a wide variety of settings from primary school classrooms to maximum security prisons. She has written widely about this work, most prominently in the memoirs “Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin” and, with Spoon Jackson, “By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives.” She serves as training coordinator for San Francisco WritersCorps. Read her blog on Red Room.

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