Doin’ Time and Razor Wire Women in the News

UNC Chapel Hill’s Arts and Sciences Magazine has done a feature story about both Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass and Razor Wire Women.  Check out both the print article and the accompanying video story.

We Mourn Troy Davis and Call for Abolition of the Death Penalty, a post by Jodie Lawston and Ashley Lucas

On September 21, 2011, Troy Davis was put to death by the state of Georgia by lethal injection.  He was accused of the shooting death of Officer Mark MacPhail in 1989.  Throughout his years on death row and during the execution procedure, Troy Davis maintained his innocence.  In fact, this case was wrought with doubt about his guilt: seven of the nine witnesses in the case recanted or changed their testimony about his guilt, and there was no physical evidence found at the crime scene linking him to the death of Officer MacPhail.

On the same day, Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist gang member who was one of three men who dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death in 1998, was executed in Huntsville, Texas. Byrd’s death received national attention due to not only the racist roots of the crime, but its brutality: he was tied to the truck bumper with a logging chain, and dragged three miles until his body was shredded.  Brewer’s execution received scant media attention, no doubt because of the utter brutality and racism involved in his crime.  What has become news is his last meal request, which included an array of foods from chicken fried steak to a triple meat bacon cheeseburger.  This request led Texas authorities to end the last meal request for prisoners on death row.  From now on, they receive what the kitchen offers and nothing more.

While the death of Officer MacPhail is undoubtedly an unjust travesty, and while it is difficult to sympathize with the white supremacists in the Byrd case who were brutally violent, we are left with the question of what good comes from capital punishment?  Who does it serve?  Does it make society safer?

As Death Penalty Focuspoints out, capital punishment has been eradicated in the vast majority of countries in Western Europe, North America, and South America.  Studies have confirmed that the death penalty does not deter people from committing crime, and that one of the most important factors that determines whether someone receives the death penalty is the quality of their defense.  Racial disparities exist, with those who murder white people being more likely to receive the death penalty than those who murder blacks (the case of James Byrd, Jr. notwithstanding).  Moreover, the possibility of executing an innocent person is always present.  Just last week, two North Carolina men were exonerated for a murder they did not commit ten years ago.  Kenneth Kagonyera and Robert Wilcoxson, two innocent men, were pressured to plead guilty to second-degree murder so that they would not face the death penalty or life in prison.  Clearly, our criminal justice system is nowhere near flawless.

Despite the fact that federal and state governments in the U.S. have convicted and executed individuals who were later found to be innocent, we continue to practice the death penalty.  According to the Death Penalty Information Center, as of January 2010, out of the total death row population of 3,261, there were 61 women awaiting execution.  With the exception of women like Aileen Wuornos and Karla Faye Tucker who make media headlines for deviating from gender roles, many of these women are invisible to the larger society.  The website “Women of Death Row”  is one of the few sites that are devoted exclusively to women facing capital punishment; it features their artwork and stories so we can contextualize their lives in more than their crimes.

While we do not condone murder on an individual level, we also do not condone murder when it is committed by the state.  Capital punishment does not bring victims back to life, it does not curtail crime, and it costs society more than life imprisonment.  Troy Davis’ wrongful death should be a wakeup call to all of us.  The death penalty needs to be abolished immediately.  May Troy Davis rest in peace, and may the rest of us not rest until the bloodshed has ended.

Prisoners Family Conference, Feb. 22-24, 2012, Albuquerque, NM

Registration is now open for the Prisoners Family Conference.  Jodie and I will be speaking about Razor Wire Women, and we look forward to meeting other prisoners’ family members at the conference.  This is not a scholarly conference (though scholars besides the two of us will be in attendance); it is a gathering for primarily for prisoners’ family members, activists, and community service organizations.

Serving Life: A Documentary about Angola Prison’s Hospice Program, a post by Ashley Lucas

Louisiana has some of the harshest sentencing laws in the United States, and as a result the state has an increasingly large group of elderly prisoners who grow ill and die behind barbed wire fences.  The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola houses the majority of the state’s incarcerated population; 5, 108 prisoners–most of whom are black men–live with the knowledge that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of those who serve a sentence at Angola will die there.

A former plantation, which sits on what the prison’s website declares to be “18,000 acres of the finest farm land in the south,” the Louisiana State Penitentiary is a world unto itself.  In fact, the entire town of Angola is surrounded by the prison’s fences.  Residences for the guards, including a school and baseball diamond for their children, lie inside the boundaries of the prison.  The prison fences also surround a fully operational farm and the warden’s personal golf course–both tended by prisoners laboring on the same land their enslaved ancestors were forced to farm.   Angola is  so geographically isolated that many prisoners’ families cannot afford to visit regularly or at all.  Many of the men at Angola are so cut off from the outside world that no one claims their bodies when they die.  Even some who do have family willing to bury their remains ask to be put to rest at Point Lookout, Angola’s cemetery, because after having spent decades in this prison, they know no other home.

Faced with the logistical, financial, and psychological toll of a high number of aging and infirm prisoners, Angola’s warden Burl Cain instituted a hospice program.  A trained staff of hospice nurses and volunteers from outside the prison work with both dying prisoners and incarcerated volunteers who wish to add meaning to their lives behind bars by helping others.  The Angolite, a news magazine entirely written and produced by Angola prisoners, has provided very moving coverage of the hospice program.  Angolite staff writer Lane Nelson volunteered for many years in the hospice program and wrote about his experiences in the magazine.  (Nelson has since earned his release from prison.)   In July 2011 the Oprah Winfrey Network aired an original documentary about Angola’s hospice program.  Produced and narrated by Academy Award winner Forrest Whittaker, Serving Life follows four new prisoner volunteers in the hospice program through their training and first few experiences with terminal patients.  The film’s narration falls into some stereotypical descriptions of the patients and volunteers as “hardened criminals” and often identifies the prisoners speaking to the camera by both their names and their crimes.  Despite this unhelpful reinforcement of the idea that each man is irrevocably criminal, the film ultimately argues that both the dying and their incarcerated caregivers are vulnerable and compassionate individuals, strong in their humanity and fragile in their inescapable corporeality.  They are, in fact, just like the dying and the care-giving who are not in prison.

Prisons have many rules about physical contact.  Sexual relations among prisoners or between prisoners and guards are prohibited, though, of course, such things happen regularly in secret.  Physical fighting, too, is against the official rules but happens with a certain regularity in all prison populations.  Even hand holding and hugging are off limits in most prisons.  In hospice care the rules change dramatically.  Patients have to be touched for reasons of medical necessity and the principles of compassion which form the foundations of hospice care.  Incarcerated volunteers must bathe the ill, moisten their dried mouths as they gasp for breath, change their diapers, and hold their hands.  Those deemed to be in their last days of life are put on vigils where prisoner volunteers keep watch at their bedsides around the clock in four hour shifts until the patients expire.  Touch in these moments becomes essential to human dignity, and no hospice patient dies alone.

The incarcerated hospice volunteers also design and sew personalized quilts for the patients, to keep them warm in their last days and to drape over their bodies when they die.  The quilts viewers see in Serving Life are adorned with butterflies soaring above open hands with handcuffs at the wrists–a suggestion that even those in prison will fly free in the next life.

To say that the labor and the extraordinary strength of the hospice workers are inspirational would be both trite and a drastic understatement.  Hospice care providers do incredibly difficult and sensitive work, and those who do this work in prison with people who will not live to see their freedom must face not only their patients’ deaths but the stark reality of the lives they’ve lived as well.  This film brings into focus the experience that many prisoners’ families fear most–watching their loved ones die in a place where we cannot be the ones to keep vigil.  At least the families of those at Angola know that someone will be with their fathers, brothers, and sons when they pass from this world.  My gratitude extends to the incarcerated and free hospice workers at Angola and to the prison administration that enables them to serve their fellow men in this most significant manner.

Watch the trailer for Serving Life, and look for it in your local TV listings.

Untitled artwork by Valencia C.

I apologize for having to break this image in two.  The drawing was so large that I could not scan it all at once.  Thank you, Valencia, for continuing to share your powerful artistry. – Ashley

The Importance of a Letter in Prison, a post by Ashley Lucas

Many editorials and news articles have wistfully mourned the current state of the United States Postal Service since the Postmaster General announced in January 2011 that over 2,000 post offices will close in the next two years.  With the agency’s significant debt mounting each year, many have begun to question whether or not we need a postal service, which many now see as an antiquated means of sending and receiving communications and news.

Lovers of old-fashioned letter writing are waxing nostalgic in op-ed pieces all over the country, and  I certainly cast my lot amongst those who believe that we express ourselves in a different, often fuller, way when we put ink to paper and compose a message meant for a reader to hold and keep.  My concern about the US Postal Service is tied to this but has more to do with people who have much less access to other forms of communication than I.

Rural postal customers and those who live on remote islands, in the Alaskan tundra, or on isolated reservations places harbor real dread of becoming even more cut off from the rest of the world.  This subject has had some news coverage, usually accompanied by a human interest story about a community of devoted letter writers who use the post office as a place for socialization and the keeping of traditions.

What I have not yet seen in the news about the postal service is any coverage at all about how the timely and consistent delivery of mail effects prisoners and their families.  Prisons are truly the last great bastions of letter writing in the U.S. and perhaps the world.  Though some prison systems now enable prisoners to receive messages sent via email, the vast majority of communication between those in prison and those of us who are not occurs through the hand written word.  The cost of visits and telephone calls are prohibitively expensive for many prisoners’ friends and families, but even indigent prisoners can usually find a way to lay hands on pen, paper, and postage to get in touch with the people they need to reach outside the walls, including their lawyers, prisoner advocacy groups, and journalists.

Though I have not seen any studies documenting this, I highly suspect that the necessity of letter writing in prison has a significant impact on improving literacy among a great number of prisoners and on encouraging intellectualism among certain members of incarcerated populations.  Countless prison memoirs and essays attest to the fact that receiving mail in prison fortifies the soul, taps into the wellspring of hope in the most desolate of places, and staves off feelings of isolation and abandonment.  Often mail in prison is delivered by guards calling out the names of those receiving mail as they walk down the tiers of cells, and to have one’s name called offers a special status to those with letters coming to them.  The other prisoners and the prison staff are made aware that someone in the outside world is paying attention to this person.  Even if what is being delivered that day is a magazine or other impersonal publication, the recipient of such mail has a person in the world beyond the walls who cared enough to send reading material.  So many of the 2.3 million incarcerated in this country have no one who writes to them, so those who do receive mail have a special status.  Prisoners and staff alike report that regular receipt of phone calls, visits, and mail make a person less likely to suffer abuse while incarcerated.  Everyone in the prison is aware of who has people on the outside who care about them, who would advocate for them in a crisis, and those who do not are more vulnerable.  Who would complain if they disappeared?  To whom would they report a rape or an attack?

The level of isolation and lack of agency experienced by prisoners raises the stakes of communication with the outside world.  Almost by accident, I discovered the profundity of prisoners’ desire to reach out to people in the free world, even strangers.  When I decided to write a play about prisoners’ families, I also wanted to include perspectives from those in prison but was not able to secure permission to conduct interviews in prisons.  The next best thing, I decided, would be to solicit letters from prisoners to tell me about their relationships with their families.  I placed an ad in a newsletter put out by the Coalition for Prisoners’ Rights in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Their newsletter is sent without charge to all prisoners and for a nominal fee to their families and advocates who subscribe.  It has a broad circulation throughout the U.S. and into some parts of Canada, and I placed an ad in the newsletter saying that I was the child of a prisoner and a student who was writing a play about prisoners’ families.  If these folks would be willing to answer a few questions about their relationships with their families, they could write me at my address at the university where I was studying.  The first week after the ad appeared in the newsletter I had received 100 letters; by the end of the second week that number had doubled, and by the time I graduated and moved away several years later, I had received letters from over 400 prisoners telling me about what had happened to their families.  I conjecture that part of this overwhelming response came from the need that so many of us have to talk about what prison has done to our families, but perhaps another significant part of this was the implicit promise that I would read their words, that I and anyone who might see these stories represented on stage would become witnesses to some aspect of these lives that prisons conceal.

I send a lot of mail to people in prison and encourage those of you who have a connection to a prisoner to do the same.  Strong connections with people in the free world help prisoners live better lives both during and after incarceration.  This website has a new page which provides the mailing addresses for the incarcerated contributors to Razor Wire Women who wish to make their contact information public. Je’Anna Redwood suggested this addition to the site, and we are now writing letters to all other incarcerated contributors to the book to ask if they would like their addresses listed as well.  We will only list addresses if and when each contributor requests that we do so, as a means of protecting their privacy.  However, if you read the book and want to share your reactions with a particular contributor whose address is not listed, you can send your letters to me, and I will pass them along to the writer or artist in question.

Last year my postman actually thanked me for the number of letters I send on a daily basis.  He said that if everyone sent as much mail as I do, the US Postal Service would not be in trouble, which is something friends of mine have been saying as a joke for years.  His comment made me feel incredibly gratified because someone noticed my efforts to stay connected to my father and other people about whom I care.  Prisoners are doing more than their fair share to support the Postal Service.  Let us do the same in support of prisoners.

Taxing Prisoners’ Families: Pay for Visits in Arizona, Pay for Health Care in Texas, a post by Ashley Lucas

After the passage of SB 1070 (the toughest immigration legislation in United States history), the Minute Men, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tent City, many of us thought that Arizona could sink no lower in terms of devaluing the rights of its residents, but yet another gross offense against human decency has evolved in the Grand Canyon State.  Anyone who wants to visit a prisoner in the Arizona Department of Corrections must pay a $25 fee.

Essentially the Arizona prisons have responded to the state budget cuts by taxing prisoners’ families who are already among the most vulnerable populations in the state, and the added cost for visitation will certainly deter family members from visiting.

Popular discourse surrounding the financial cost of incarceration tends to focus on what the state pays to lock someone up and court costs, but we seldom examine the monetary losses suffered by prisoners’ families.  When a person enters a prison system, s/he loses the ability to be fiscally responsible.  The incarcerated can neither pay their outstanding debts–legal or otherwise–nor provide financial support to their families.  Prisoners have only two ways of accessing funds.  Either someone in the outside world deposits money into an inmate trust account run by the prison system, or in some states prisoners can earn money for jobs performed in the prison or on work release.

Some state prison systems have found ways to take a cut of the money families send to their incarcerated loved ones.  In California, prison sentences often include a fee to be paid in restitution to the state, which in practical terms means that both prisoner wages and deposits made by family members to prisoner accounts are taxed with a certain percentage of the funds going to pay the restitution costs.  Every time a family member deposits money for a prisoner to use, the state of California takes 55% until the prisoner’s restitution costs have been paid.

Prison wages vary from state to state, but the Prison Policy Initiative cites the average of the maximum wages paid to prisoners by states as $4.73 a day.  In Texas and Georgia prisoners are not paid at all for their labor.

You might be wondering why folks in prison need money at all.  Prisoners can only spend funds in their trust accounts at the commissary within the prison or send their money home to their families or others on their visiting lists.  In Texas, indigent prisoners are not given toothpaste, just tooth powder which one scrubs onto the teeth with one’s fingers.  Other hygiene products, like deodorant, can only be obtained if you have the money to buy them.  Prisoners can also buy stamps and letter-writing supplies, which for families who cannot afford the expense of collect phone calls or travel for visits serve as the primary (or only) means of communication between a prisoner and her/his loved ones.

Prison commissaries also sell food products, which have proven invaluable for prisoners with dietary concerns.  For instance, starting in 1995 the Texas Department of Corrections fed prisoners a meat substitute known as Vita Pro, until the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the prisons could no longer serve it.  During the years that Vita Pro was being served, many prisoners, my father among them, could not attain adequate nutrition from the food provided in the prison chow hall and reported terrible digestive problems whenever they attempted to eat Vita Pro, which was served at almost every meal for four years.  Therefore, money to show at the prison commissary was essential to their health.  Those without funds had to make do with Vita Pro or find ways to trade for commissary food in the prison’s underground economy.  Prisoners’ families, mine included, felt an urgency to provide our incarcerated loved ones with funds to pay for food.  This cost, like so many others in the prison, gets displaced onto people who have not been convicted of crimes, who are helping to prevent recidivism by maintaining essential family ties with prisoners.

Now Texas families are being hit with a new and frightening fee: $100 a year to cover the cost of a prisoner’s health care.  Since Texas prisoners earn absolutely no wages for their prison jobs, the only means by which such fees can be paid is by family members, and this $100 a year will only buy our loved ones access to health care so bad that the Texas Civil Rights Project’s latest report on the subject calls it a “Secret Death Penalty.”

Get Tough on Crime advocates say that prisoners deserve to pay for every conceivable thing, but even if one buys into that extreme ideology, one cannot force a largely indigent population to cover the costs of its own incarceration.  Instead families take on the myriad financial burdens of incarceration. Most of these families are already among the working poor, and incarceration cost them a breadwinner in the household.  Many incarcerated people, especially women, fulfilled caregiver roles in their families prior to their incarceration, so their displacement from the home means that families must find alternative means to care for the children, elderly, and incapacitated people in their households.  We family members also cover the costs of travel for visitation, collect phone calls, and the legal debts that court battles leave in their wake.  Now we must pay for the basic rights to see those we love and to provide them with ineffective health care.

National Conference on Prison Higher Education, Registration Now Open

I just received this notice and wanted to share with those of you who might be interested and able to attend.  Jodie and I will not be there but would love to post reports from folks who do attend.  Please email us from the Contact Us portion of this website if you attend the conference and later wish to post reflections. – Ashley

National Conference on Prison Higher Education, Friday-Sunday, November 4-6, 2011
University of Washington, Seattle

Conference registration is now open at: http://bit.ly/rmmbOr

Conference registration is free but required.

**Early registration deadline for a pre-conference site visit to Monroe Correctional Complex is Friday, September 16.

Organized by Transformative Education Behind Bars, this conference aims to further coalition building among prison-based higher education programs, regionally and nationally. It seeks to continue the process of identifying and moving towards shared goals, begun at the Strategies for Action Conference sponsored by the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois in October 2010.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE (details subject to change)

Friday, November 4, 2011
4 pm-9 pm
Pre-conference Site Visit to WSR Monroe Correction Complex. Space limited; pre-registration required.

University Beyond Bars students on the inside invite conference goers to observe UBB classes in action. They are preparing to present their own discussion agendas for the conference.

Saturday, November 5, 2011
9 am-5 pm
Panels and Roundtables

Sunday, November 6, 2011
9:30 am-12:00 pm
Panels and Closing Discussion

Proposed topics for discussion include:

• Steps towards National Organization / Coalition Building
• Developing Tools for Program Assessment
• Impacting Public Opinion / Strategies for Political Action
• Building Program Sustainability / Securing Funding
• Re-Imagining/Re-Enacting Prison Pedagogies
• Creating Scalable Program Models

To register for the conference, go to: http://bit.ly/rmmbOr

Prison Arts in the News Website, a post by Ashley Lucas

A recent comment on this blog led me to discover an excellent website I’d never seen before.  The Prison Arts in the News Website provides links to arts work happening in prisons all over the world.  The blogger running the site does not provide commentary on these news stories but casts an impressive net in finding instances of prison arts work in many genres and countries.  This sort of data compilation is really helpful for those of us who write scholarly articles about prison arts work and for artists who want to find models of how others are doing such work in carceral contexts.

Kudos to the administrator of the Prison Arts in the News Website!  I admire your work.

Reflections on Doin’ Time Performance by Nina Billone Prieur

Nina Billone Prieur is Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Duke University. The following is a conference paper she presented about Ashley Lucas’s play, Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass, at the ATHE Conference in Chicago in August 2011. Many thanks to Nina for sharing her writing on this blog and for her thoughtful analysis of my performance. -Ashley Lucas

I had the pleasure of watching Ashley Lucas perform Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass along with students from my Performing Social Justice course this past spring at Duke University. Lucas first developed the performance in 2004 from interviews and written correspondence with prisoners’ family members, current and former prisoners, as well as people who work in and around the prison system. In addition to theaters, universities, and academic conferences, she has performed and continues to perform Doin’ Time in prisons and other correctional settings across the United States, as well as in Canada and Ireland. For the first hour of the performance, she artfully moves through a series of monologues either drawn verbatim from interviews or adapted to create composite and fictional characters. Finally, she closes the performance with a brief moment in which she speaks as herself—an interviewer, a performer, and someone who also has a loved one in prison. Immediately after this moment, the audience applauds, the house lights come up, and Lucas facilitates a discussion that functions in many ways as the performance’s second act. Throughout the conversation we had at Duke, and as I understand often occurs in Doin’ Time’s discussions, audience members asked Lucas to speak further about her own experiences having a family member in prison, and in response, some audience members were also moved to share their own experiences with loved ones inside, at times noting that these were experiences they did not usually speak about publicly.

Our panel today focuses on how documentary theater “unsettles remains,” with those remains most easily understood as historical artifacts. While Doin’ Time certainly animates the voices and experiences of people from a particular time and place, the performance, I think, is most remarkable for how it gives voice to an urgently contemporary story by facilitating a public conversation about (and between) the millions of Americans affected by the prison system whose stories tend to be buried not only in the past, but also here and now and all around us.

In many ways, this performance has a rather humble goal. As the character Nell who opens and closes the show explains, the play is a collection of “stories about people who got kinfolks in prison.” From this perspective, the performance focuses on sharing the particular experiences of those on one side of prison walls. One character, a photographer, speaks to the play’s central theme by noting:

I keep thinking about the people left behind when somebody goes to prison, and how that absence changes the shape of a family… It’s not like when someone dies and you mourn their passing and learn that life will never bring that person back to you in the flesh. You live daily with a palpable absence, with the knowledge that the people you love are living and breathing in a cement box somewhere, that they are alive and in a place where they cannot be well.

I am especially interested in how this seemingly humble goal of sharing the stories of those with kinfolks in prison invariably performs a powerful—and for many, a powerfully unsettling—form of social activism. By speaking about prison in ways that differ from our society’s conventional prison narratives, Lucas both exposes and challenges what we might understand as the prison’s “ghosting” operations. Most critically, the performance confronts the popular conception that the prison and those most affected by the prison, exist somehow “over there,” buried away at the edges of society and of the popular consciousness. Through the stories of those with loved ones inside, through Lucas’s own story, and finally through the stories of fellow audience members, Doin’ Time shifts the subject of the prison story from them, to you, to us.

It is precisely this “presenting” of the prison—this insistence on the system’s presence here and now and among us, even in that presumed safe “space apart” of the darkened theater—that many of my students found to be the most emotionally and intellectually unsettling aspect of the performance. It is of course important that we situate Duke’s generally sheltered, primarily white, highly privileged student population here, as my students’ responses are certainly not indicative of those across Lucas’s incredibly diverse audiences as a whole. That said, I would suggest that this shift in perspective that my students experienced from “over there” to “right here” can lead to a productive disorientation for many audience members, a disorientation that requires a rethinking of the relationship between “criminal justice” and “social justice” in American society.

After the post-show discussion, one of my students came up to me and tentatively shared that she had found the play to be incredibly moving, but she confessed, “I think I still disagree.” When I asked her what she disagreed with, she explained: “It’s just that I still think there are people in prison who are guilty.” In the weeks following the performance, as my students and I discussed the work both in and out of class, many shared similar sentiments: “I’m sorry that people are sad that their family members are in prison,” another noted, “But what about crime victims? Isn’t that the real story?” Others responded with the familiar sentiment: “People act like the prison is so bad, but what are we supposed to do, let rapists and murderers run free?” I was struck here but how and why a play about the experiences of people with family members in prison would elicit such responses. What was it about these stories that became for many of my students an argument about the “innocence” vs. the “guilt” of the incarcerated? Why was the legitimacy of these stories judged in opposition, and even seen as a threat, to the stories of crime victims? Doin’ Time does not explicitly put forth a particular political argument about these topics, yet many of my students could not get past the idea that the performance required them to choose between being either “for” or “against” prisons, and in turn, being either “for” or “against” prisoners, their families, and their communities. These binary constructions tended to rest on a general conception that incarcerated people, as well as their families and communities, could only be cast as either “innocent” or “guilty,” and by extension either “good” or “bad,” either one of “us” or one of “them.” The reason for this, I suspect, has a great deal to do with the prison’s “ghosting” operations and with the forces of dehumanization upon which the system relies.

As Ruthie Gilmore argues, “Dehumanization is…a necessary factor in the acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself) should spend part or all of their lives in cages” (Golden Gulag, 243). In order to promote a system which (as the Supreme Court recently ruled in the case of California prisons) fails to protect the most basic human rights, a certain distancing process is necessary. The racialized and classed construction of “criminality” relies upon particular discursive conventions that allow for only certain stories to be told: stories about violent and/or repentant criminals, wronged and suffering victims, and determined truth-seeking police, prosecutors, and public officials. The stories of those who love someone inside simply do not fit within such a paradigm.

One the greatest disruptions for my students came with their difficulty reconciling their felt need to maintain clear boundaries between “good guys” and “bad guys,” “self” and “other” with the fact that they, quite simply, liked Ashley. They identified with her—an identification that was no doubt coded by perceptions of racial and class identity. Her body, her voice, and her story—as well as the bodies, voices, and stories that she channeled through the performance—simply did not fit within the narrative constructions upon which they had come to rely. Accepting Ashley and Ashley’s story as part of a larger, shared public narrative necessarily called into question their understanding of the prison’s public story more generally.

By bringing together the voices of spouses, children, and siblings of prisoners, by revealing both the diversity among those voices as well as the points of commonality between them, and by positioning them center stage, Doin’ Time effectively intervenes in what artist and scholar Sharon Daniel describes as the “public secrecy” of the prison. Despite a decreasing crime rate over the past thirty years, we in the United States have come to incarcerate not only more people, but also a greater percentage of our population than any other nation in the world. The images of and discussions about “crime” and “criminality” that circulate widely within the public sphere—in the form of political debates, news stories, movies, TV, and music—overwhelmingly serve to cover up, to dehumanize, to bury, not only criminalized individuals, but also their families and larger communities. Doin’ Time helps to counter the violence legitimized by these paradoxically verbose silences by facilitating a different kind of public conversation that pushes beyond the stifled and stifling narrative conventions upon which the prison relies.

Listen to RWW Contributor Leslie Levitas on the Radio This Friday (9/9/11) by Ashley Lucas

Leslie Levitas, a Bay Area resident and contributor to RWW, sends her greetings to the readers of this blog and invites all of you to listen in to the radio program “Earthwise” this Friday, September 9, 2011 at 5 PM Pacific Time on  KPFZ 88.1 FM Lake County Community Radio.  You can stream the broadcast live from that website and hear Leslie read an excerpt from her story “Desiree” which appear in RWW.

Leslie will also do a reading from RWW and book signing event at Watershed Books in Lakeport, California, in early December.  Watch the Appearances tab of this website for more information to come.

Thank you, Leslie, for your wonderful work!  Several of Leslie’s beautiful photographs appear in RWW.  To see more of them, check out this YouTube video called “Capp Street Talkin’” which uses Leslie’s photography to tell a story.

Book Review by Ashley Lucas: Inside This Place, Not of It, Eds. Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman

Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prison provides a chilling glimpse of the human rights abuses suffered by women in U.S. prisons.  The book is essentially a set of edited interview transcripts with each chapter providing a first person account of a different currently or formerly incarcerated woman, and what these narrators reveal about their lives will cause all readers to shudder at the myriad physical, sexual, and psychological these women have endured.

The book’s editors, Robin Levi (Human Rights director of Justice Now) and Ayelet Waldman (best-selling author and essayist), used their combined expertise in advocacy and prose styling to knit together intellectually compelling and emotive testimonies from the more than seventy interviews they conducted with women who have endured imprisonment.  The book makes for a captivating read, but far more than that, it illuminates several major forms of injustice which characterize these women’s lives.

The level of healthcare provided to U.S. prisoners is not merely inadequate; it often constitutes torture.  One woman in this book was given a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent–an incident which hearkens back to our nation’s troubled history of sterilizing African American and Puerto Rican women.  Other humiliating and sometimes potentially life-threatening instances of medical neglect and harm inflicted by guards and medical professionals pepper the life stories of the women in this book.  Women prisoners have been forced to give birth while shackled to hospital beds and given unnecessary C-sections, only to have their children taken from them within days of their births.  One incident in the book describes a hugely pregnant woman who is forced to bend over while naked and display her anus and vagina to guards during a strip search; because of her enormous belly, she struggled for several minutes to stand up again after this humiliation, and rather than offering to help her regain her balance, the guards mocked her.  Despite her many attempts to seek medical help in prison, another woman’s diabetes went untreated for so long that she nearly died.  It is a horrible thing for the uninsured and under-insured outside prisons to struggle (and often fail) to receive adequate health care.  Compounding this with incarceration adds a new level of terror.  The incarcerated face their medical problems in a place where they are cut off from family and friends, who often do not receive word of their loved ones’ illnesses or injuries until the prisoners are well enough to contact them or have died.  Prisoners cannot seek a second opinion about their medical care and do not always have access to their medical records.  They cannot advocate for themselves, and concerned parties in the free world must have uncommon knowledge and resources to be able to even attempt to advocate for incarcerated patients.

The fact that around 57% of incarcerated women endured sexual and/or physical abuse prior to their incarceration has been long observed by scholars but seldom seems to be absorbed by the general public or those who work in the criminal justice system.  The personal accounts in this book provide a solid emotional and intellectual grounding for lay readers and criminal justice experts alike to understand the contexts of the crimes women commit and the social forces which propel the poor life choices that land them in prison.

The likelihood that incarcerated people will be raped seems to be taken as an accepted fact by the general public in the U.S., as evidenced by the abundance of prison rape jokes which appear to crop up in even the most innocuous of places.  Why the notion of any person being raped would be funny to anyone is entirely beyond my comprehension, but I can only supposed that this dire reality for many prisoners seems humorous to people only when the folks making and responding to these jokes fail to see prisoners as human beings.  Inside This Place, Not of It brings home the vulnerability of people held captive by those who have the power to abuse them, often over the course of many years.

This book is the latest edition in McSweeney’s Press’s nonprofit Voice of Witness series, which uses oral histories to address social injustice and human rights crises.  This kind of publishing work is vital to record the lives of people who seldom have public platforms from which to tell their stories, and I commend Dave Eggers and the McSweeney’s staff for the brave and progressive work they do.

Inside This Place, Not of It will be released in October 2011.  Many thanks to whomever sent me an early galley of the manuscript!