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The City Inside

2 Feb

By Hakim Bellamy

About the guest blogger: Hakim Bellamy became the inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque on April 14th, 2012, at age 33. He was the son of a preacher man (and a praying woman). His mother gave him his first book of poetry as a teen, a volume by Khalil Gibran. Many poems later, Bellamy has been on two national champion poetry slam teams, won collegiate and city poetry slam championships (in Albuquerque and Silver City, NM), and has been published in numerous anthologies and on inner-city buses. A musician, actor, journalist, playwright and community organizer, Bellamy has also received an honorable mention for the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize at the University of New Mexico. Bellamy is the founder and president of Beyond Poetry LLC. For more information on the author, please visit www.hakimbe.com.

The City Inside Me

I want to think about my future.
I want to put my past behind me,
but my heart is in the streets.
I am away from my seeds,
aggrieved,
praying to God on my knees .

I want to succeed.

I am tired of making mistakes.
My mind is in a place it cannot escape.

My son looks me in the face.
Is it a man he sees?

I tell him about the streets and the damage it brings.

Rochester, New York is where you find me.
Rochester,
filled with so much pain.
Rochester, the city inside me.

Manuel, Monroe Correctional Facility

Courtesy of the New York State Literary Center

It’s a simple prompt, or so I thought. Describe the city inside of you. What is the weather like in that city? What are the people like in that city? What are you like, in that city? Having served on the Governing Council of Gordon Bernell Charter School inside of Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) I have a fairly nuanced understanding of corrections and incarceration in this country. Enough to know that many of these men at Monroe Correctional Facility where probably not even from Rochester, NY. They’d likely been displaced from their hometowns and families, moved like chattel, but no matter where they go there is a piece of their city inside of them.

I was so fortunate to be invited into the Monroe Facility by Dale Davis of the New York State Literary Center and poet John Roche. I had roughly 90 minutes to work with about 30 men. At 35, I was one of the youngest Black men in the room. And most of these men were black. Incredulously, I find the same overrepresentation of Black bodies in the pods at MDC in New Mexico. The only difference being that New Mexico has a 2% African American population per the last Census.

So we went to work on that right away. When teaching artists go into correctional facilities we are not there to entertain or be part of some enrichment programming, we are there to transform. We are transformed. Because the best way to teach is by example, so I shared with them some tough poems about identity and a rap or two about fear and fatherhood. I used the first 30 minutes to tell them Where I’m From (sans the poem prompt by George Ella Lyons), and also share with them this transformational arc in my own life, that I document through my practice of poetry. And for the last hour of the workshop, I give them that practice. Together we remember, reflect, write, reflect, share, reflect and let that resonate.

Sure, they learned (or were simply reminded) that the weather inside them, is changing. Just like weather is always changing in a city, just like people are always changing in a city. That’s inspiring when you are inside and “outside” is something that is rationed to you. But what they really learn is community. As a group they took a risk with me. They decided to share some of where they are from and some of who they are inside with each other and some dude they barely met (me). In that short period of time, we established a space where folks felt safe to take risks (whether that be reading in front of the group or sharing personal thoughts) and we brought people together through the practice of listening. Frankly, adults on the outside need these skills as much as these men did. And skills like these, like empathy, like compassion, like communication and understanding, take practice.

My job is not just to help Manuel imagine a city inside of him, my job as a teaching artist is to help him create that world around him. Poetry is just one tool to help that process of reconstruction.

Hakim Bellamy at the Monroe Correctional Facility.

Hakim Bellamy at the Monroe Correctional Facility

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Poets-Behind-Bars: An Opportunity for Poets Inside and Out

20 Sep

Sherry Reiter is the founding director of the Creative Righting Center in New York and the co-author of Writing Away the Demons.

“Writing has made me feel like a human being again.” –

Participant in the Poets-Behind-Bars program, Indiana State Prison

I’m the developer of Poets-Behind-Bars – a unique long distance program in which a dozen poets/inmates at Indiana State Prison (maximum security) are matched with either a poet or poetry therapy trainee who “coaches” or mentors the writing of the poet. It is a project born out of The Creative Righting Center. As suggested by the term “Creative Righting,” the chief goal is to achieve emotional balance, a sense of well-being, and a unique expression of individuality through writing. A great poetry therapy pioneer, Dr. Art Lerner, often stated, “The accent in a poetry workshop is on the poem, while the accent in a poetry therapy session is on the individual” (Lerner, 1993, p. 169). Poets-Behind-Bars is different than a class in poetry where the aesthetic product of the poem is of primary importance. The volunteers/trainees who serve as writing mentors serve a dual function — they are writers who are trained in the art of poetry as well as a respect for creativity and the unique expression and psychological well-being of the person. We function as educators of the arts, not as therapists.

There is a well-established precedent of the power and value of poetry in prisons. In the past ten years there have been numerous fearless poets who have gone into prison and published the work that resulted. These include Disguised As A Poem: My Years Teaching at San Quentin by Judith Tannenbaum (2000), Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters by Wally Lamb (2004) and True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman (2004). There have been exceptional poets and teachers like Richard Shelton (2007), who was contacted by a prisoner on death row who wanted feedback regarding a poem he had written. As a result of his interchange, Shelton ended up teaching a weekly poetry group at the Arizona State Prison for the next thirty years, and shared his experience in Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as Prison Volunteer (2009). If only there were such great talents who could go into every prison in America and do such work. There is not. That’s why Poets-Behind-Bars was created.

I received a letter from a poet in the Indiana State Prison, pleading for a writing program for himself and a group of inmates. After receiving three such letters, and thinking, “What can I do? I’m such a long distance from Indiana,” I received the message. Exactly. Long distance could be possible. This is how it is possible.

Every 2-3 weeks, an assignment gets e-mailed to a coordinator on the inside, who “launders” the communication of any personal e-mails, gives it to the poet, who has about 10 days to do the assignment via computer in the library on a disc, and return it to the inside staff person, who then e-mails it to me. I forward it to my writing coaches, have a group supervision and the mentors forward responses back to me, and I forward it to the prison. Got a headache? No, it actually does work, and has operated at Indiana State Prison for the past four years. I have a curriculum and we are slowly expanding. Perhaps at some point in the future, you will want to initiate this program in the prison where you work. I can be reached at [email protected].

“There’s no greater agony than carrying around an untold story inside yourself.” — Maya Angelou

To see the full article about Poets-Behind-Bars, please click here.

Between the Bars Blog: A Space for Stories, Dialogue, and Opportunity

5 May

Charlie DeTar, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, and social justice activist, has been concerned about our criminal justice system for many years. He has watched the prison population skyrocket to over two million, and the gap between the number of African Americans and Caucasians behind bars grow exponentially. Knowing that one in three Black men will be incarcerated at some point in their lives, DeTar can’t help but draw parallels between the prison system and slavery. “The Fourteenth Amendment only outlawed slavery for those not being punished for a crime,” he says, “but what we have here is a dramatic accounting of the same practices of slavery that were going on 200 years ago.”

DeTar also recognizes the significant challenges that men and women face when they return to their communities after being incarcerated. Finding housing and employment can be quite a challenge for those with criminal records, as can accessing public assistance of any form. With so few resources available to formerly incarcerated men and women, it’s no wonder that the recidivism rate is over 50%.

Armed with this information, and passionate about providing a forum for the voices of incarcerated people, DeTar decided to create a blog where prisoners could post their stories. Between the Bars was initially launched as both a service and research project last October, and was met with an immediate influx of letters, stories, and poems from incarcerated writers. However, DeTar and his colleagues ran into some barriers to the research aspect of their project, and had to temporarily shut down the site. They re-launched in April, and already have been contacted by between 400 and 500 prisoners. Nearly 200 have sent in at least one post or profile.

When DeTar and his team of volunteers receive a post from someone in prison or jail, they scan it to the blog. Visitors to the site can assist in the transcription of the post, and are encouraged to comment on the posts that speak to them. These comments are then sent back to the writers, creating an opportunity for dialogue. For those behind bars, this is a valuable opportunity to feel connected with the world outside the razor wire. By “giving people a platform where they can speak in own voice,” the blog enables writers to form “a personal identity outside the dynamic of prison.” This identity, as well as the social ties they have fostered through Between the Bars, can be carried with prisoners when they are released, helping them to feel more connected to their community and more prepared to face the challenges that await them on the outside.

For those visiting the blog from the comfort of home, Between the Bars provides an opportunity to learn about life inside our nation’s correctional institutions from the perspective of those most affected by them. DeTar hopes the site will help “break through the tendency people have of viewing people in prison as “untouchable class”, and inspire more compassion and activism. Prior to creating Between the Bars, DeTar spent a great deal of time reading work by incarcerated writers, and was “fascinated by their inside perspective. Even the most mundane stories,” he reflects, “drive home just how unproductive the whole experience of prison is…if people on the outside can see what life is like in prison, if they see prisoners as humans, as complex individuals with hopes and desires, they might start working against the sense that tells us to treat them as the fearful other.”

DeTar reports that Between the Bars now has a waiting list of almost 150 prisoners. Due to the tremendous success of the project, he and his colleagues (all of whom are volunteers) are exploring ways of more efficiently managing the site so that they won’t have to turn anyone away. In the meantime, they will continue to post letters and send every comment back to the writers. The most important thing supporters of the blog can do, says DeTar, is post comments – the writers long for the chance to connect with us.

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Denney Juvenile Justice Center Poetry Workshop Launches New Blog, Downloadable Poetry Books

3 Apr

Denney Juvenile Justice Center Poetry Workshop founder and facilitator Mindy Hardwick writes,

In 2005, I volunteered to facilitate a poetry workshop with youth at Denney Juvenile Justice Center, located in Everett, Washington. Each week, I meet with a group of young men and a group of young ladies and we write poems which are based on the young people’s experience. As a part of the poetry workshop, we’ve published four books of the youth’s poetry. The poetry books are distributed, free of charge, to the youth themselves, as well as to others in the community. The youth always ask, “When is the next poetry book coming out? Is my poem in it?” The poetry workshop gives the teens an opportunity to express their stories and to be heard in their community. We are thrilled to have our new blog as a means for publishing the youth’s poetry, and hope the blog gives the teen writers another opportunity for their words to be heard.

Each Wednesday, one of the youth’s poems is published on the blog, and Hardwick blogs about the writing process for that particular poem on her personal blog. Here is the most recent excerpt from Hardwick’s blog, which is a fantastic resource for facilitators:

In the Eyes Of…

We have a new post on the Denney Poetry Blog. The poem, “In the Eyes of My Mother,” was first published in our second book of poetry, I Am From.

One of the poetry books I like to use with the teens in the detention center poetry workshop is, You Hear Me: Poems and Writing by Teenage Boys, edited by Betsy Franco. The collection includes poems, stories, and essays from boys across the country. Sometimes there can be a misconception that boys don’t talk about feelings, and what I’ve found working in the poetry workshop, is that boys can and do express their emotions. Very well!

In the collection, You Hear Me, there is a poem which is entitled, What I Am (In the Eyes of My Father). When I work with the teens at Denney, we read this poem, and then I ask them to think of someone important in their life. It could be a parent, teacher, best friend, girlfriend, or sibling. Or, it could be something larger such as a community, society, or world. I ask the question, who are you in the eyes of that person?

“In the Eyes of My Mother” is the response from one young man.

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The Restorative Revolution

11 Mar
This essay by Elaine Shpungin, Ph.D. was originally posted on 2/15/11 at http://www.improvecommunication.net/. We hope it will inspire some dialogue about the intersections of prison arts and restorative practices. Please share your thoughts.

Call me crazy - but I think we are ready for a Revolution.

I’m talking about a revolution in the way we approach justice, transgression, punishment, crime, and every day conflict among ordinary people. I am talking about the way we treat each other after we hurt each other - even in very deep ways - and the way we treat those who are less powerful than us when “justice” is placed in our hands.

I am talking a transformational, society-wide, lens-shifting, all-affecting revolution the scale of the 1960’s civil rights and women’s rights movements, a revolution in how we think about who we are and how we live, work, and love together.

Not a solution to everything. Not panacea, utopia, peace and love for all. But a fundamental shift in the collective understanding of what might be possible.

I feel it in my bones, like the rumble of a train coming down the tracks way before you see its lights appear from behind the bend.

People are sensing the heavy creaking of the current justice system, the way it is over-burdened and under-humane, the way it takes our sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and puts them back into our communities more hardened and less integrated than they were before, the way it creates rifts among us, decreasing rather than increasing the sense of safety for which we all long.

And people are becoming dissatisfied with the way we inadvertently replicate that same model in our homes, with people most precious to us, and in our communities, the places where we spend our waking hours.

I work with a lot of communication modalities and I have been talking to people about empathy and healing and dialogue for a long time.

But when I mention the restorative practices work in which I am involved, people respond with the kind of excitement, the kind of energy I have not seen before. Their eyes light up. They smile. They want to learn more. They want to get involved.

I am talking about people across all economic, class, age, and race differences: administrators working in the formal justice system and grandmothers of boys in the local jail, academics and activists, rabbis and conservative ministers, teachers and parents, college students and poets. When I share what might be possible, there is a spark, an electrical surge of hope.

And what is possible is a way of doing conflict and justice in which each voice and each side gets heard, in which people who have been hurt get to ask their toughest questions and those who have caused pain get to experience the impact of what they have done and come out feeling more human, not less. What is possible are solutions to conflicts that are not believable until you hear them, that stem from human creativity that is untapped by the current way we do things, and are agreed upon by everyone who is impacted by the conflict.

Restorative practices, as ancient as human society, have been making their way back into our collective knowledge. Some of them, like the Restorative Circles practice which I have been learning, are laced with a modern edge, an edge forged in the fires of inner-city Brazilian favelas where drugs, gun violence, racialized tensions and numbing poverty overlay the struggle for daily survival.

And that is what makes the possibility so palpable. There is another way and it works. It works to re-humanize people to each other in the most trying of circumstances across deeply etched lines. In a place where unbelievable beauty and unbelievable disparity go hand in hand, restorative practices are growing and being embraced by school districts, youth courts, youth prisons, neighborhoods and homes, presidential candidates and major news networks. Restorative Circles are winning awards and changing circumstances, changing lives, changing how people think about and live with conflict.

Not a solution to everything. Not panacea, utopia, peace and love for all. But a fundamental shift in the collective understanding of what might be possible.

A Restorative Revolution. It’s coming.

Wanna get on board?

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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.

Sponsored Links

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.

Art and Incarceration Series from Change.org

13 Dec

We are excited to announce that several of the organizations connected to the Prison Arts Coalition including Judy Dworin Performance Project, Inc., Shakespeare Behind Bars, Stephen Hartnett of The Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education Collective have been reviewed by Wendy Jason on Change.org. We are grateful to Wendy for helping to get the word out about our important work and for her other articles on important criminal justice reform issues.

Some Day I Won’t Be Alone: Building Bridges with Children of Incarcerated Parents

This article was originally posted on November 29, 2010.

There are over two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. Most people never think about these men and women. Some of us do, often considering their plights and advocating for a more humane and equitable criminal justice system. But even the most impassioned activists often forget the other lives involved in prisoners’ stories — that the effects of incarceration reach far beyond the razor wire. In fact, some of those most impacted are the children who wait for the return of their imprisoned parent. According to a study by The Sentencing Project, in 2007 more than 1.7 million children in the U.S. had a parent in prison or jail.

Judy Dworin and a team of teaching artists at the Hartford, CT-based Judy Dworin Performance Project, Inc. (JDPP) are utilizing the arts to provide members of this oft-ignored group with a forum for self-expression, trust-building and restored family connection. While providing collaborative arts residencies for women incarcerated at York Correctional Institution (YCI), Dworin began to understand how traumatic the forced separation of parent and child is for all involved.

Wanting to create a space for incarcerated parents and their children to explore their feelings and nurture their relationships, JDPP collaborated with Families in Crisis (FIC) and the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central CT State University (IMRP) to lead a pilot project consisting of a series of eight simultaneous workshops in which mothers at YCI and their children in Hartford communicated through dance, song, poetry and visual arts.

At the end of the series, the children and their caregivers were brought to the prison to share in a memorable day of collaborative arts engagement with their mothers. After the final session, the children expressed a strong desire to continue the process and to involve more children in it. They wanted others to experience the sense of belonging and acceptance that came with their participation in the JDPP collaborative, as they were all too familiar with the silence and loneliness that often sets in when one’s parent disappears behind bars.

The children that JDPP engages are part of a hidden population that Dworin believes has been “overlooked and under-represented.” The criminal justice system pays little mind to the familial needs of those it incarcerates, and the fear of stigma prevents both parents and children from telling their stories. A National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated fact sheet shows that as a result, children often internalize the feelings of guilt, shame, fear, anger and sadness that result from a parent being locked up, and in turn can experience anxiety, depression, isolation and attention problems. Many have difficulty controlling aggressive, self-destructive and disruptive behaviors that are deeply rooted in their pain.

There is a very strong chance that these children will follow their parent’s footsteps right into the criminal justice system. However, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has found that interventions that strengthen family ties can have a positive impact on incarcerated parents and their children. When parents return home with strengthened relationships the chance of recidivism declines, and children who have the support they need in order to cope with their parent’s incarceration are more likely to succeed in school and undergo healthy child and adolescent development.

Understanding the unique needs of incarcerated parents and their children, and having experienced the power that involvement in arts-based initiatives has in fulfilling these needs, JDPP and its partners sought funding for a three-year program that would allow them to continue the work that began with the pilot project. Last year, they were awarded a grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, providing a partial base of support from which they developed a comprehensive program involving after-school workshops for youth ages 7 – 19, and in-school workshops for elementary and high school students. After these 8-week sessions, seven of the younger children and four high school assistants took part in an intensive one-week camp in which a performance piece was created and performed for caregivers and friends. Additionally, a group of incarcerated mothers came together with their children for a special arts-based weekend retreat.

Dworin has found that “there is an enormous silence that exists” among those directly impacted by incarceration, and “an enormous need for this silence to be opened up.” The arts, she believes, “is a special vehicle for them to find trust and tell their stories.” By engaging children with incarcerated parents, JDPP and its partner organizations have begun to address some of their most pressing needs.

Please support their efforts by sharing this story and visiting the JDPP website to see how you can get involved. And sign the attached petition to encourage your legislators to acknowledge the needs and rights of children with incarcerated parents. By maintaining a criminal justice system that disregards fragile family ties, our society has enforced the kind of separation that has lasting negative impacts. “What responsibility,” Dworin asks, “do we then have to restore connection?”

A Chance for Prisoners to Act Like Human Beings

This article was originally posted on December 6th, 2010.

Now in its 16th season, Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) has produced 16 plays within the confines of Kentucky’s Luther Luckett Correctional Complex. William Shakespeare, says SBB Founder and Producing Director Curt Tofteland, was “all about this journey of what it means to be human.”

Shakespeare never shied away from expressing every dimension of human emotion through his stories. Though there isn’t much space or tolerance for the expression of feelings other than anger in prison, SBB actors get the rare opportunity to fully embody raw emotion by taking on the roles of Shakespeare’s characters. Quickly the line between acting and reality begins to blur.

Tofteland sees the work of SBB as being “fundamentally about transformation and change of the human heart, soul and psyche.” Like all of us, incarcerated folks have stories to tell – ones of happiness, suffering and survival. For most of those behind bars, these stories remain locked away, suffocated by silence. “The moment an individual enters the correctional system they begin the journey as the voiceless other,” laments Tofteland.

But through their participation in SBB, prisoners begin to find their voices. SBB was founded on values that affirm the humanity and inherent goodness of those who engage in the program. When a prisoner joins SBB, they enter a realm in which it is safe to be completely honest, sincere and vulnerable. They are challenged to look deeply within themselves to take responsibility for who they have been, who they are and who they wish to become. It is because SBB acknowledges that those who are incarcerated have the power to recreate themselves that Tofteland sees, time and time again, participants “enter the cocoon of SBB and come out as butterflies.”

SBB actors spend nearly 500 hours in workshops and rehearsals during the nine months it takes to produce a play. They do not receive any “good time” (time taken off a sentence as a reward for engagement in educational, therapeutic, or other programs), and nobody is mandated to take part. When participants opt in, they do so with full knowledge that they are making a huge time commitment, and are going to be expected to maintain SBB’s values. They also know that they are entering a space in which their humanity will be acknowledged and they will be treated with respect and care.

It is in such a space that true transformation can occur, and Tofteland has the experience and the data to back it up. Indeed, while the recidivism rate across the county is a dismal 65 percent, the rate among SBB participants is 6 percent. In fact, in 16 years, just three men who have gone through his program and have later been released were locked up again. “You cannot take someone who has done an inhuman act and put [him or her] in an inhumane environment,” says Tofteland. “You have to put them in an environment that exudes everything you want them to be.”

Check out the trailer for Shakespeare Behind Bars — and ask educators in your area to consider adding it to their curriculum:

Writing for Redemption

This article was originally posted on December 9th, 2010.

In his 20 years of work within prisons, Stephen Hartnett has learned that if we really want to know how to deal with crime, we need to start listening to prisoners. When we do, he says, “we find that they have stories to tell, and from these stories we can learn all we need to know about fighting crime and poverty.”

Hartnett, who is Chair of the University of Colorado Denver Communications Department and founding member of the Prison Communication, Arts, Research, and Education network (P-CARE), provides those behind bars with opportunities to tell their stories by facilitating writing workshops. He calls his work “community empowerment through the arts,” because by sharing their stories, incarcerated people can “engage with their communities like never before.”

For the last three years, Hartnett has been bringing students from his UC Denver Communications classes into the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility (DWCF), where they provide tutoring support to incarcerated learners. For the students, just as for the prisoners, this experience is always life changing.

According to Hartnett, virtually all of the women his team works with at DWCF have something in common – they “never had a shot at the American Dream.” They come from broken homes and have survived some form of abuse. Though they have a variety of backgrounds — African American, Chicano, Latino, American Indian and White — they all come from poverty, and all have experienced what it feels like to exist in the margins of American society. But Hartnett and his team are committed to empowering students to explore their own voices, and in doing so creating bridges between these women and the communities to which they will some day return.

Hartnett and his students offer prisoners three classes, each running for eight weeks. Along with two levels of composition classes, there is a public speaking class in which learners get to write speeches and practice useful skills such as creating resumes, as well as composing cover letters, memos and emails. All too often, Hartnett notes, the vocational training offered within prisons provides few truly marketable skills that enable those returning to the free world to find lasting, meaningful work. However, when those in prison are supported to develop their own voices, and acquire the ability to connect with others via the written and spoken word, they have a much greater chance of finding success when they return home.

At the end of each eight week session, Hartnett weaves the student’s writing and art, as well as submissions from other prison writing programs, into a Zine entitled “Captured Words/Free Thoughts.” There’s also a celebration in the prison, during which students can read what they have written in front of an audience of fellow prisoners and invited guests. Every couple of years Hartnett organizes a community event as well, where the incarcerated writers’ work is read aloud.

“It is both challenging and rewarding,” says Hartnett. All of the incarcerated learners he’s worked with are “super hard working, and super motivated,” and the classroom has “unbelievable energy — students understand that knowledge is power, and they want some of it.” These are students who know in their hearts that they have hurt people, and they’re looking for redemption. “Here’s a generation of Americans we’re told are monsters. But with just a little love and guidance, they begin to blossom. It is an honor to share a classroom with those who want to reclaim their lives through education.”

There are resources that can help us to offer a little more guidance, and to nurture the energy that so many of our nation’s prisoners have to change their lives, their communities and our society. One easy step in that direction is to reinstate access to Pell Grants for prisoners, which would be a small step in the right direction — one toward empowering those most directly affected by the cracks in our society to be involved in their repair, and our restoration.

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