Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice Undergoing Review–Raise Your Voice

The following is a press release from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition’s monthly newsletter.  It’s very important that those of us with loved ones in the Texas Department of Corrections respond to this call for information and tell our stories.  Please speak up!

TDCJ’s Sunset Review is Beginning – We Want Your Input!

If you care about criminal justice reform, now is the time for you to speak up and voice your concerns.

TCJC is very excited to tell you about a unique opportunity to offer input and suggestions that will help improve Texas’ criminal justice system. Presently, the Sunset Advisory Commission has begun its review of TDCJ and other criminal justice-related agencies, including the Board of Pardons and Paroles, the Windham School District, and the Correctional Managed Health Care Committee.  Based on its evaluation, the Commission will make recommendations on how each agency can be improved or whether the agency should be abolished.

You can take part in this opportunity for improvement by letting us know what should be done to improve Texas’ criminal justice agencies.  TCJC has created a comprehensive guide to the Sunset process to help individuals understand the process, how they can get involved, and what resources are available.  Please click the link below to download a PDF version of our guide to Sunset:

• Policy Guide to the Sunset Review Process

To download a 1-page flyer on how to participate in the Sunset process, please click below:

• Share Your Story – Participate in TDCJ’s Sunset Review Process!

Again, the Sunset process is in its beginning stages, and most agencies under review have already submitted Self-Evaluation Reports (SERs), which are available on the Sunset Advisory Commission’s website.  To view each agency’s SER, visit the Sunset SER webpage here!

To view individual agency SERs, please click on the links below:

• Texas Department of Criminal Justice
• Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
• Windham School District

• Note: The Correctional Managed Health Care Committee’s SER is not yet published.

An agency’s Sunset review typically only occurs every 12 years, so we must seize upon this rare opportunity to improve the criminal justice system.  Through the Sunset process, and with your help, we can achieve the necessary reforms that can make Texas’ criminal justice system a model for others.

Punishing Protestors with Violence and Jailing, a post by Jodie Lawston

Yesterday morning, at around 2:30 am, police in riot gear arrested 51 peaceful protestors at Occupy San Diego.  The arrests took place at the Civic Center Plaza and Children’s Park.  Earlier this week, Scott Olsen, a former marine, had his skull fractured by Oakland police as the police arrested protestors.  Arrests have also taken place in other cities around the country, including Nashville, Atlanta, and of course New York.

I am an avid supporter of the Occupy movement.  I attended marches in San Diego when it first began, and have joined the protests regularly since then.  I have friends in New York who are a part of Occupy Wall Street, and send updates about their experiences regularly.  I encourage my students to attend.  When we talk about this movement, the question that constantly arises is how police clad in riot gear—who have more in common with the 99%–feel about attacking, hurting, arresting, and jailing peaceful protestors who are fighting for interests that include the interests of the police.  We wonder how they feel working for the interests of the 1% when their interests are with the 99%.  Indeed, even the Oakland mayor said that she and the police have more in common with the 99% then with the 1%.

In a time when society is growing more and more punitive—imprisoning younger people, undocumented people, the poor, women, people of color, and trans people—it is clear that any resistance will be met with punishment.  This is very clear with the Occupy movements; police are used by the state to maintain the status quo.  Corporations and big banks take advantage of those of us who are part of the 99% with impunity, and our resistance to this is met with ridicule—as exemplified in the mainstream media’s accounts of the movement—dismissal, and outright violence.  Jails and prisons, already filled to capacity, and used to try to convince us that resistance is futile.

But resistance is not futile.  The Occupy movement has already unmasked the greed of the 1% and the injustice of the laws that protect it.  It is time for society to march toward justice and equality, and to listen to what “we the people” have to say, without using violence, aggression, and imprisonment to silence us.

What Can We Do? The Difficulties of Prison Activism, a post by Ashley Lucas

In a comment made on one of my recent posts, a former student of mine expressed her dismay at the conditions prisoners face.  She asked what we can do to protest or change the fact that many Texas prisoners are not being served lunch on the weekends.  I stare this question in the face every day and seldom have a satisfactory answer.

I have spoken with my father since I wrote the aforementioned blog post and now know that he still gets to eat lunch on the weekends.  He believes that most of the folks being denied weekend lunch in Texas are in the county jail system, and I suspect that he is correct.  Like those of us on the outside, prisoners hear a lot of rumors, partial truths, and outright lies about what is happening in the criminal justice system, so it’s often difficult for me to make assertions with certainty about policies and procedures that effect my family’s daily life.  One seldom knows whether what we experience is due to actual policy and what occurs because of the arbitrary will of wardens, guards, or other prison administrators.  When we ask for explanations of the rules, often we receive no satisfactory answers.

When I learned that my father and the other men on his unit still receive lunch on the weekends, I immediately felt relief and then concern for those less fortunate prisoners who are now missing two meals each week.  The problem has not changed.  It just doesn’t happen to directly affect my father, yet.

My student’s question remains: what can we do?  As with all forms of activism, there are no direct answers for those of us who seek a more humane way to respond to crime and make our society safer.  The biggest stumbling block, especially for those of us who have loved ones in prison, is the fact that prisoners live hidden from view in a completely controlled space.  Humanitarian and watchdog groups can only gain access to as much of the prison as those who run it allow them to see.  Even if prisoners have a means by which to communicate truthfully with the outside world (and this is often not the case), whatever they say has the potential to incur retaliation from those who hold them captive. Our actions in the outside world can also cause retaliation against prisoners.  If activists or family members agitate too much or in the wrong way, prisoners–not those of us on the outside–will suffer the consequences.

Prisoners have so little personal property and such limited control over their daily lives that it is very easy for a malicious, or even a careless, person working in the prison to severely diminish a prisoner’s quality of life.  For instance, prisoners are subjected to periodic searches of their bodies, living spaces, and personal property.  In most prison systems prisoners must endure a full strip search before and after each visit with a person from the outside world.  For women, this frequently involves having to pull apart one’s labia and display one’s vagina for inspection.  As we can imagine, it would be very easy for a guard to make this process even more humiliating or physically painful with little effort, by conducting the strip search slowly, commenting on the physical appearance of the prisoner, or engaging in touching not necessary for the search.  These are all difficult offenses to document, and a prisoner’s complaint about inappropriate treatment during a search would likely result in the weighing of a prisoner’s testimony against a guard’s. A prisoner registering such a complaint through official channels would again expose her/himself to the possibility of retaliation.  The cycle is difficult to break.  Most prisoners who have told me such stories felt compelled to remain silent and pray that the abuse did not continue.

Another difficulty involved in prison activism has to do with how cut off prisoners remain from free world advocates.  Prisoners know much better than those of us outside what needs to be done to improve the quality of their lives, but activists often take it upon themselves to decide what prisoners need and how we should go about getting it.  Any activist work done on behalf of prisoners should involve the incarcerated to the greatest extent possible.  That said, communication barriers and questions of access remain.

Though prison activism is exceedingly difficult, it is not impossible.  Organizations like Critical Resistance and web forums like the Prison Activist Resource Center have helped many people to get involved in various particular struggles related to injustice in the prison industrial complex.  Many much smaller grassroots organizations do excellent work in one small sector, like helping bus children to prisons to visit their parents.  These people do extraordinary work that immeasurably improves the quality of life for prisoners and their families.  This work is vital, and we need it to spread and grow.

After joining in many campaigns to change unjust laws or protest specific injustices, I see the necessity of this work but feel that the majority of what I personally can do to respond to this international crisis of mass incarceration must take place in a cultural realm.  Though we need protests and specific political actions, I am fundamentally convinced that we have to have a cultural revolution if this madness is ever going to stop.  We need to be talking about the humanity of prisoners and the conditions of their lives as much and as publicly as possible.  We need to counteract the falsehoods perpetuated by politicians running on get-tough-on-crime platforms and the inflated terror that media outlets use to get us to consume their products.  We need not only good research on what’s actually happening inside prisons but people who can help translate academic studies into forms that more people will hear, read, see, and understand.  We need to engage the public and find ways to have honest dialogue that do not frighten people away.  We need more art, literature, poetry, theatre, blogs, and music that provide a realistic picture of what prisons do to all of us.  We need to step away from depictions of prisoners as either inhuman monsters to be perpetually feared or glorified gangsters admired for their ruthlessness and materialism.  We must begin to break down the entrenched righteousness that a great many people feel about how just a people we are, how we are suited to judge others without even knowing the circumstances of their charges or incarceration.

The simplest thing we can do is to question the representations of prisoners we see every day and to interrogate our assumptions about who we think those people are.  Talk to the people around you about casual remarks they make about prisoners.  Do not laugh at jokes about prisoners being sexually assaulted; notice how common these are.  Speak up when you hear falsehoods.  Read; be well informed about prisoners’ struggles and the things that happen to their families.  Serve on juries when you have the chance; do not assume that people are guilty just because they have been charged.  Do not be complacent about the injustices around you; do not shut them out of your thoughts just because your life would be easier if you did not face the suffering of others.  Take opportunities to help when they present themselves; create them when you can.  Never stop asking, “What can we do?”

Ms. Magazine Blog Reprinted a Post from RWW!

The good folks at the Ms. Magazine Blog are reprinting this blog’s review of Inside This Place, Not of It–a new book of testimonials from women in prison, compiled and edited by Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman.

Read it at Ms. here.

Read it on this blog here.

We admire the feminist writing that Ms. Magazine and its bloggers bring to the world and are proud to have a small affiliation with this excellent publication.

Let’s Do Away With Lunch! The Newest Way to Cut Budgets in Texas Prisons; a post by Ashley Lucas

So often I feel like starting posts on this blog with the words, “The latest depravity to emerge in U.S. prisons is (drum roll please). . .”  Well, this week that sentence can be finished with the fact that thirty-six prisons in Texas are now saving money by not serving lunch on Saturdays and Sundays.  They are instead serving something they call brunch, which gets served between 5 and 7 AM, and not providing another meal until dinner, which is made available starting at 4 PM.  I received this tidbit of news from the Grits for Breakfast Blog, which along with the Texas Observer and The Angolite, is among my favorite sources for criminal justice-related news.  The New York Times also covered this story.

I have long been deeply disturbed by the quality of food served in Texas prisons and have written a bit about Vita Pro (a food substitute unfit for human consumption that was served in Texas prisons for years) in an earlier post on this blog.  Unfortunately, what’s wrong about how we feed folks in prison could fill several books.  One of the ironies of serving time in most prisons in the South is that prisoners grow an extraordinary amount of food and seldom get to eat what they cultivate.  Many of the largest prisons in the South, including the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and Parchman Prison in Mississippi, stand on the sites of former plantations and have maintained their essential functions since the antebellum period.  All Texas prisons (and many in other southern states) are colloquially called farms, and the prisoners who live inside them cultivate crops and raise livestock.  The food products generated by the labor of prisoners are usually sold to other public institutions, such as schools and hospitals, with the remaindered, unmarketable yet edible products being served in the prison chow halls.  For instance, the tops of broccoli plants, that one might buy in a grocery store, are sold to school districts to serve to children, and the large, tough stems from the bottom of the plant are chopped up and served to prisoners.  In Texas this is one of the only green vegetables prisoners receive.  I think about this every time I eat broccoli.

The prison where my father resides is surrounded by fields of red earth in neatly plowed rows.  The first time my mother and I went to visit my father in prison when I was fifteen, I saw a group of horses grazing in a pen at the prison’s edge and remarked to my mother that it was a relief to see that the men got to ride horses sometimes.  I knew that having a connection with animals would be  a comfort to my father and many other incarcerated men.  My mother had to tell me that the horses were only for the guards to ride as they patrol the prisoners working in the fields in “hoe squads”–the worst and most grueling labor assignment in the prison.  The arrangement evokes slavery, indentured servitude, and sharecropping all at once.  The sweat of the laborers feeds those of us who can afford not to toil.  Even the horses are among the master’s tools; no petting allowed.

Prisoners with money in their inmate accounts can buy food from the prison commissary–the company store, if you will–but everything there is processed and prepackaged.  They cannot buy fresh foods of any kind, certainly not those grown on the prison grounds.  Junk food abounds in prison, as do diabetes and other diet-related health problems.  The food in the chow halls in Texas involves a lot of pinto beans and white sandwich bread, from what I am told, and not much flavor.  Breakfast is usually served before dawn, and many prisoners refuse to rise at 3 AM to get to the chow hall for that first meal.  This ungodly hour for a meal time seems to me to be a strategy for keeping the number of diners at that first meal of the day to a minimum (another cost-saving strategy) or yet another way to punish people further, to throw off the natural rhythms of the day, to keep prisoners unsettled and disrupted as much as possible.

Another anecdote on the subject of food in prisons.  One year at Christmas a guard gave my father a banana.  Guards are not allowed to give anything from the outside world to prisoners, ever, and this one could certainly have lost his job for this act of kindness.  I do not know what compelled the guard to give up the banana from the lunch he’d brought from home, but it was the first fruit that my father had eaten in many years.  My mother and I both wept in the visiting room when my father recounted this simple yet monumental act of kindness, and though I do not know the guard in question, I am ever grateful for his generosity.  This incident helps me to remember not to disregard the humanity of those who work in prisons.

Today–Sunday–I am plagued by not knowing (yet in my heart already knowing) whether my father is being offered lunch today.  Is his prison one of those no longer serving lunch on the weekends?  Almost certainly it is, but I cannot ask him on a day when the mail does not go out.  If he calls me, we can talk about it, but I have no way to initiate that conversation myself today.  Even when I can reach him, I cannot fix this.  Instead I dream of the lunches we will make together when he comes home, though I dare not speculate about the date when this might occur.

Rest in Peace, Piri Thomas; a post by Ashley Lucas

On October 17, 2011, one of the great prison writers died.  Piri Thomas, best known for his memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967), provided readers all over the world with a glimpse of how factors like racism and poverty encourage incarceration, and he articulated a version of Nuyorican identity years before the founding of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe popularized the concept.

In Seven Long Times (1974)–an additional, lesser known volume of memoir–Thomas recounts the years that he spent in prison, and his efforts to bring about social justice continued for many decades after this publication.  One blogger is now crediting Thomas with having the vision to prophecy the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Thomas believed in the human dignity of all people, as is evidenced by his poem “If in the Moment of Passing,” quoted here from his website:

If in the moment of passing an eternity,
I could have the interfaced essence,
The power of looking back at me,
I would say it truly as I would for the world–
Let me be free.

I know that the blood that pounds and pulses its way
through my veins,
Does not alter the course toward the star that not only I,
But all can aim for.
It is a beauty that we all can reach.
It is a beauty that we all can teach.

Given unto each one, what do we truly own, except that
which we truly are,
And what we can choose, be it a rainbow, a star,
Or the agony of a past of present scars.
I am not a poet who makes things unreal,
I am a poet who makes one feel the strength that is
in our people.
Human beings upon the face of this beautiful earth,
Who must know their dignity, their honor, no matter their race,
No matter their creed–from the moment of their birth.
Born of earth and universe. Punto.

Que en paz descanse, maestro.  You shall not be forgotten. Punto.

Recent and Upcoming RWW Events in Fall 2011, a post by Ashley Lucas

Jodie and I just had a wonderful experience doing our first book signing event at our alma mater, UC San Diego, this Monday, and we are so grateful to UCSD’s Departments of Ethnic Studies, Sociology, and Theatre & Dance for training us as graduate students and for welcoming us back with open arms to celebrate the publication of Razor Wire Women.  A crowd of more than thirty of our former professors and colleagues along with current students and community members attended the event, and we were honored to share the limelight with Julietta Hua, who also received her Ph.D. from UCSD’s Ethnic Studies Department and who talked about her new book, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights.  Special thanks to Yen Espiritu (Chair of Ethnic Studies) and to Lexi Killoren from UCSD’s Alumni Affairs for organizing this event.  We are also grateful to the folks at the UCSD Bookstore who came to sell RWW and Trafficking Women’s Human Rights at our talk.  Both books sold out at this event!

Jodie and I are looking forward to November 2011, when we will participate in many events to help promote RWW in Georgia and North Carolina.  Be sure to catch us at the following events:

• Wednesday, November 2 from 5 to 6:15 PM–I will speak about RWW on a panel with Jules Odendahl-James and Nina Billone Prieur before a performance of the play Self Defense at UNC Greensboro’s Brown Building Theatre
• Friday, November 11 from 4 to 5 PM–Jodie and I will be signing copies of RWW at the SUNY Press booth in the book exhibition hall at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference at the Sheraton Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia
• Saturday, November 12 at 8 PM–I will perform my one-woman play, Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass, at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in the Grand Ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia; Jodie will join me onstage for the post-performance discussion and for a book signing thereafter.  Check out the amazing poster (Ashley Lucas ShowNWSA 2011) that graphic designer Adam Ulloa made for this event!
• Tuesday, November 15 at 2 PM–Jodie and I will speak about RWW and sign copies of the book at UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan Theatre in the Center for Dramatic Art.  This event is sponsored by the Department of Dramatic Art.  Adam Ulloa designed another fantastic poster to help advertise our two book events in North Carolina: RWW book events in NC Nov 2011.
• Thursday, November 17 at 7 PM–Jodie and I will speak about RWW and sign copies of the book at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina

We thank everyone who has read the book and/or this blog for your enthusiastic and ongoing support.  We firmly believe that  dialogue, critical thinking, and cultural change are necessary in order to address the myriad injustices that surround the prison industrial complex, and we hope that this book and blog can help bring many new voices to this global conversation.

Connie Convicta Comics, Episode 14, by Ana Lucia Gelabert

Comics from this same series appear in the book RWW as well as elsewhere on this website.  Ana Lucia Gelabert continues to draw her comics from inside a Texas prison.

Connie Convicta Comics, Episode 12, by Ana Lucia Gelabert

Domestic Violence Awareness Month: The Other Side of the Wire, a post by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Kit-Bacon Gressitt is a student at California State University, San Marcos.  She is currently taking Jodie Lawston’s class, Comparative Perspectives on Gender and Justice. Jodie has invited students in this course to write entries for the RWW blog.

You’d think a survivor of an abusive relationship would lend one of the most empathic of ears to women incarcerated for charges related to domestic violence. Women who committed crimes because their abusers forced them to. Women who, without the resources to buy a get-out-of-jail-free card, were caught up when the men who terrorized them broke the law. Women who ultimately erupted in one excruciating moment of self-preservation, one violent demand for freedom, and killed their abusers. Yes, you’d think someone who came close, but managed to avoid that final step, would be exquisitely understanding.

But I’m not. Or, to cut myself some slack, I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all understanding. I once condemned women who failed to protect their children from abusive partners. I had conveniently forgotten how grateful I was that I’d had no offspring with my abuser, how uncertain I was of what I might have done had I borne a baby into a violent family, how terrified I was that I might have taught a child how to submit, how to disappear into the background, how to cry silently, how to duck.

I, however, had gotten away, rescued by a woman who didn’t even know me — “I know what’s going on,” she said. “Come home with me.” Despite her generous gift of freedom, though, I grew stingy with those who had none, who were paralyzed by the fear of the next assault, who could do no more than cower among smaller victims. Instead of generosity, I offered criticism — perhaps to distance myself from the woman I once was, to deny I had ever been a victim “like that,” to refuse to acknowledge we are one.

Then in 1988, I looked into the disfigured face of Hedda Nussbaum, read the evidence of her 12 years of horrifying abuse and degradation, listened to the testimony of her sitting on the bathroom floor with the dying child her partner had beaten, and I realized what an unconscionable act it was to blame her. To blame a brutalized victim for failing to behave like a good girl, like a good mother — as though no fist had ever silenced her, no fear had ever paralyzed her, no foot had ever kicked her, no words had ever cut her, no weapon had ever shattered her.

Then in 2011, I watched a new documentary called Sin By Silence, the story of the creation of Convicted Women Against Abuse — an organization formed inside the California Institute for Women to help educate the system about domestic violence (click here to find screenings). And I read a new book, Razor Wire Women, edited by Jodie Michelle Lawston and Ashley E. Lucas, a collection of stories, essays, poetry and art by abused, incarcerated women and those concerned for them. And then I knew at once that even though I was free, I was only one kind stranger away from the other side of the wire. There or in my grave.

And in that knowledge grows empathy.

A Prison Is a Prison, Even in Canada: Doin’ Time on Tour; a post by Ashley Lucas

During the week that ended September and began October 2011, I had the privilege of taking my play to Canada for the first time.  One of Razor Wire Women‘s contributors Simone Davis took on the arduous task of scheduling three performances at two universities and a prison in the nation where she teaches and makes her home.  Simone does some incredible work.  In addition to teaching at the University of Toronto, she has brought the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program to Canada for the first time, setting up a course which a professor named Shoshana Pollack now teaches for students from Wilfrid Laurier University and incarcerated women at Grand Valley Women’s Institution.  By all reports, the new Inside-Out class is going very well, and at least one outside and a few inside students in the course attended my performance at the prison.  During my time in Canada, Simone told me about an extraordinary annual event called Prisoners’ Justice Day which is commemorated all over Canada with fasts, speeches, and protests.  Simone gave me a beautiful tee shirt designed for Prisoners’ Justice Day, and I will wear it with pride.  Thank you, Simone!

My first performance in Canada took place in the lovely Gill Theatre at the University of Toronto, where an incredible group of faculty and graduate students hosted me and ran the tech for the show.  Though the audience appeared to have about ninety people in it, they were so quiet that I could not read their reactions to the play until the house lights came on at the end of the show.  (Canadian audiences outside of prisons are in my experience a much quieter bunch than folks in the U.S. or Ireland.)  We had a very engaging and productive conversation at the end of the performance.  Several days later I encountered an equally supportive audience at Trent University in the small town of Peterborough, where I was hosted by a wonderful scholar named Gillian Balfour whose co-edited collection Criminalizing Women has a good deal in common with Razor Wire Women.

In between the two university performances, I visited Grand Valley Women’s Institution and performed for a group of about thirty incarcerated women.  The staff at Grand Valley explained to us that the prison has both minimum and medium security housing units but that the differences between the two were not enough to be much of an incentive for women to want to move down to medium security.  The whole prison operates on a higher security level, and with stricter rules, than most minimum security facilities in Canada.  True minimum security facilities in Canada do not have fences around them, but Grand Valley does.  Even at that, I was surprised to learn that the women there had some privileges that incarcerated people in the U.S. almost never have, like communal kitchens where they can cook meals for themselves.  (I also heard about such kitchens at the women’s prison in Dublin when I was there in 2005.)  Grand Valley also has some form of segregation cells for holding prisoners in isolation, though I did not see them or hear about how many such cells exist or why women are placed there.

My access to Grand Valley was facilitated by Simone Davis and Grand Valley’s educational counselor Peter Stuart, who not only took care of all arrangements made in preparation of my arrival but also ran the sound cues during the play.  Peter approaches his job with good humor, intelligence, and a genuine concern for the well-being and education of the women incarcerated at Grand Valley.  He represents the very best sort of work that can be accomplished by prison employees; he works to help prepare women to have successful lives after they leave prison.

As with all audiences I’ve encountered inside prisons, the women at Grand Valley watched my performance so intently and with such obvious emotion that I felt wrapped up in the energy that they offered me.  Several women left the performance early, most of them during the Healer monologue–the one published in RWW about a little girl whose father is in prison.  They were not in any way disruptive as they left, but it seemed clear that those who were going felt it would be too painful to stay–or at least that it what it looked and felt like to me.  The same thing happened with at least one of the women in the prison in Limerick, Ireland, when I performed there.  That monologue in particular appears to be the one that elicits the most forceful emotions from women whom I presume are incarcerated mothers.

In the discussion after the performance, the women told me about what visiting with their families is like at Grand Valley.  Drug sniffing dogs inspect each visitor and often terrify the children coming to see their mothers and grandmothers.  One of the women was very upset about a new schedule for a form of special visitation where families can stay the better part of a day at the prison.  Though I did not quite grasp all the details of how such visits are scheduled, I learned that such visits must be scheduled in advance and that the new form of scheduling makes it harder for families on the outside to choose the dates that would be workable for them, resulting in fewer of these special visits.  Several of the women in the audience wept as the cuts in visiting were discussed, and then a surprising thing happened.  One of the women who had spoken quite a bit during the discussion stood up and hugged me.  She thanked me for my performance, then sat me down in the front row of the audience and said, “Now I have something I want to give to you.”  She then performed a country song she had written about being an incarcerated mother.  The song had several verses and a chorus complete with hand gestures that suggested holding a baby, dancing with a man, and dying.  Never before has someone in an audience offered me a performance after my play, and I was delighted and remain deeply grateful.

People in all three of the audiences I met in Canada were deeply troubled by the new omnibus crime bill which looks certain to pass through Parliament soon.  The bill introduces mandatory sentencing and longer prison terms than Canadians have faced in the past.  The prison I visited was already expanding in anticipation of the many new prisoners expected in the next five years.  Peter Stuart at Grand Valley has begun investigating longer term educational programming to benefit the women who will serve longer sentences.  Why is it that other countries emulate the very worst of U.S. policies on crime and incarceration?

My memories of the women I met at Grand Valley will remain with me always, and my sincerest thanks go to Simone, Gillian, Peter, and the folks at the University of Toronto for making my first Canadian tour such a success.  If any of the folks I met in Canada are reading this and would like to share reactions to the performances on the blog, we would be happy to post them.

The Parchman Hour (A New Play by Mike Wiley), a post by Ashley Lucas

I am the production dramaturg for The Parchman Hour by Mike Wiley.  The play is being produced at the PlayMakers Repertory Company at UNC Chapel Hill from October 26 to November 13, 2011.  The text of this post contains the dramaturgical notes I wrote for the program of the play.  It’s a well crafted and politically significant play, so if you live anywhere within driving distance of Chapel Hill, go to see the show!

Throughout the American South, Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be.

-David M. Oshinsky, author of “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

Since its establishment in 1901, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, has had a reputation for being one of the bloodiest and most dangerous prisons in the United States.  A former plantation owned by a family named Parchman, the prison’s legacy of farm labor and a mostly black prisoner population remain in place to this day.  Historically, most prisoners at Parchman have worked in the fields, tending the cotton by hand for ten hours a day, six days a week.   Though prisoners now grow vegetables rather than cotton, they still work the same fields that their enslaved ancestors once plowed.  In 2010, the incarcerated workers at Parchman spent 732,326 hours in agricultural labor (Mississippi Department of Corrections Website). Some things don’t change much over time, especially in prison, especially in the South.

Parchman’s notoriety as a place of terror long predates the arrival of the Freedom Riders in 1961.  After the end of the Civil War, much of the South—and Mississippi in particular—persisted without much infrastructure of any kind.  Devastated by the economic and human cost of the war, Mississippians of all racial backgrounds now faced not only the confusion of Reconstruction but also the new legal status of the 400,000 blacks in the state.  White legislators quickly drafted the first Jim Crow laws, and Parchman—the only maximum security men’s facility in Mississippi to this day—became the destination for a great many black men (and some women) who were put to work both on the farm and outside of it as part of the convict lease system.  Most of the major cities in the South were rebuilt during Reconstruction on the backs of prisoners working on chain gangs (a practice which continues today in Arizona).  Both in terms of their monetary worth and their health and safety, blacks had been more valuable as slaves than they were as prisoners.  A slave, like any other piece of livestock, needed to be kept in good working condition if a slave owner wanted to maximize his or her productivity.  A prisoner, however, ceased to be an asset and could be worked to death without any fiscal loss to the state.  The practice of laboring prisoners literally to death was so common that, “Not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of ten years or more” (Oshinsky, p. 46).

Even those not placed on the chain gangs risked death each day at Parchman.  The field laborers at Parchman are still patrolled by guards on horseback carrying rifles.  Guards punished prisoners with such severe beatings that many died from the lashes of a leather whip known as Black Annie.  Prison administrators and guards also employed the biggest and toughest prisoners to strong arm their peers into submission, even offering guns to some of them to shoot anyone who tried to escape while working in the fields.  The severity of the conditions at Parchman prompted a lawsuit in 1972 in which the Honorable William C. Keady declared the prison “an affront ‘to modern standards of decency.’”   He ruled for an immediate end to many disciplinary practices at Parchman, including,

beating, shooting, administering milk of magnesia, or stripping inmates of their clothes, turning fans on inmates while they are naked and wet, depriving inmates of mattresses, hygienic materials and/or adequate food, handcuffing or otherwise binding inmates to fences, bars, or other fixtures, using a cattle prod to keep inmates standing or moving, or forcing inmates to stand, sit or lie on crates, stumps or otherwise maintain awkward positions for prolonged periods. (Gates v. Collier)

Death and pain—and the fear of those things—remain part of the atmosphere of most prisons, but the vast seclusion of the 18,000 acres of this former plantation, regional efforts to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War, and the inherent racism of the U.S. criminal justice system enabled a culture of perpetual violence to rule Parchman even more strongly than many other prisons in this country.

Mike Wiley’s new play, The Parchman Hour, gives audiences a glimpse of this prison in 1961 when a group of black and white civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders served thirty-nine days on the infamous farm after being arrested in Jackson, Mississippi.  On May 4, 1961, the first Freedom Ride set out from Washington, DC, carrying thirteen men and women on Trailways and Greyhound buses.  These travelers meant to assert the basic right for whites and blacks to sit with one another on a bus, anywhere in the United States.  Their peaceable action met with intense hostility from segregationists.   By the time the Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi, they had already faced many beatings and murderous mobs.  Under such circumstances, one might be tempted to assume that they were likely to be safer in prison than on these ill-fated buses, but the protestors knew Parchman’s reputation well and had every reason to fear for their lives when they were brought to the legendary farm.  Their ride for freedom ended in incarceration.

The bus rides themselves provided sufficient evidence of the Freedom Riders’ bravery and the depth of their belief in the Civil Rights Movement.  However, the Riders further proved their resiliency and their devotion to human rights by maintaining their strength, humor, and commitment to one another during the weeks they spent inside Parchman.  Few people have the will to sing about freedom while they are held captive, to engage in hunger strikes when they have already lost much of their physical strength, to hold fast to their ideals when almost no one can see them do it.  They faced Parchman and still believed in the dignity of all people.  The Parchman Hour does much to capture the sheer force of will of the Freedom Riders, and it raises up their songs and stubborn optimism in the face of terrible violence and irrevocable injustice.  They, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, and Cesar Chavez, imagined the freedom and equality they did not have and sought to create it with little more than their bodies and voices.

Though the Freedom Riders had a significant hand in the many great triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, neither they nor the many others who fought for freedom in the 1960s managed to eradicate racism, inequality, or the brutality of incarceration.  In 2008 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report about the “horrific conditions” at Parchman Farm.  HIV-positive prisoners began writing to the ACLU in 1998, explaining that:

they were living in squalor, categorically segregated from the rest of the prison population, and barred from all prison educational and vocational programs and jobs. They told us that they were dying like flies because prison doctors refused to give them the “cocktail” (the triple-drug combination therapy that since 1997 had begun to change HIV from an inevitably fatal disease to a treatable chronic illness). (Winter and Hanlon, “Parchman Farm Blues,” ACLU Website)

The ACLU investigation found that of the one hundred twenty men being held in segregation, eighty percent were black and most were convicted of nonviolent offenses.  Their report describes these men as being “warehoused in a virtual leper colony and left to die.”  ACLU lawyers spent nearly ten years in litigation before they felt that officials at Parchman were finally taking steps to change these conditions in 2007.  Life on the Farm doesn’t change much.

The courage of the Freedom Riders—and indeed Mike Wiley’s play—ought to push us out of our seats and into our own forms of protest.  We cannot merely marvel at what those in the Civil Rights Movement did for us; we must root out the injustices which surround us today, both those that are readily apparent and those which are deliberately hidden from us.  The United States incarcerates 2.3 million people today (one in every one hundred of its citizens) (US Bureau of Justice Website).  Our schools are now more segregated than they were in 1954 when the Brown decision was handed down (www.projectcensored.org).  In 2010, 17.2 million households in the U.S. did not have enough food to feed their families—a higher rate of hunger than we have seen in this country’s history (www.worldhunger.org).  If we admire the Freedom Riders, then we must seek to become them in new ways and in unexpected places.  We cannot be content to ignore the persistent legacies of racial inequality, but we must be creative—like the Freedom Riders—and imagine the bus before we can get on it.

A Message of Solidarity; a post by Jodie Lawston

In July 2011, over 6,000 prisoners in the state of California went on hunger strike for four weeks to protest unjust prison conditions in Administrative Segregation and Secure Housing Units across the state.  On September 28, 2011 6,000 prisoners resumed a hunger strike to protest these inhumane conditions.  Critical Resistance (http://www.criticalresistance.org/) sent out a press release explaining prisoners’ families have confirmed that prisoners in the Calipatria State Prison general population and Ad-Seg units, in addition to prisoners at CCI Tehachapi, CSP Centinela and West Valley Detention Center, are refusing food until their demands are met.  The press release explains:

“The prisoners are refusing food to protest what have been characterized by human rights groups as torturous conditions in California’s Securing Housing Units (SHUs) at Pelican Bay, CCI Tehachapi, CSP Corcoran and Valley State Prison for Women. Prisoners continue to rally around 5 demands, originating at Pelican Bay, which include an end to the practice of long term solitary confinement as well as the policies of gang validation and debriefing. A prisoner at CCI Tehachapi recently described the conditions and reasons for striking: “The only clothing we are given in here are socks, boxers and a t-shirt. To be honest they’re filthy. Now just imagine being locked in that bathroom for 24 hrs, 7 days a week, year after year after year for no legitimate reason. We have only been allowed to have fresh air for four hours in the past eight months.”

Administrative segregation are some of the most inhumane conditions a prisoner can be subject to, as they are forced to stay in a cell without human contact for 23, and sometimes 24, hours per day.  In some cases they do not even see correctional officers as everything is automatic; for example, food is given through a slot in the cell door, and the person providing the food (which is awful itself and has little to no nutritional value) is not seen.  This kind of environment provides no intellectual or positive emotional stimulation at all.

You can read more about the hunger strike here: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/.  There are an array of community and organizational supporters, including actors such as Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo, activists such as Nawal El Saadawi—who was involved in the 2011 Egyptian protests—and Cindy Sheehan, and scholars such as Saskia Sasson and Cornell West.  We here at Razor Wire Women stand in solidarity with the hunger strikers and the communities that support them, and demand that their voices be heard, and action be taken on their demands.