Simone Davis and Inside-Out in Canada, a post by Ashley Lucas

One of RWW’s contributors Simone Weil Davis brought the Inside-Out program to Canada, and the Canadian press has recently picked up the story.  I visited the women’s prison in Canada which hosts that country’s first Inside-Out classes and met both inside and outside students who are participating in the program.  All gave the program rave reviews.  Congratulations to Simone and the rest of the folks working with Inside-Out in Canada, and thank you for the important work that you do!

No Room at the Holiday Inn: Our Christmas Visit, a post by Ashley Lucas

Some good news arrived on the morning of my departure from North Carolina for my holiday trip.  Governor Bev Purdue vetoed the repeal of the Racial Justice Act.  This means that prisoners on death row in North Carolina will still be able to file appeals of their sentences on the grounds that the death penalty is applied in a racist fashion.  To read an earlier post on this blog about the Racial Justice Act, click here.  Thank you, Governor Purdue, for upholding this landmark law which makes a significant step toward addressing the legacies of racism and lynching in our Southern state.

Carrying this Christmas present in my heart, I flew to Texas to visit my parents for the holidays.  I spent a full day to flying from North Carolina to my mother’s hometown.  The next day my mom and I went into her office and worked until 2 PM before we drove the eight hours to the small west Texas town where my father’s prison sits surrounded by cotton fields and endless sky.  We arrived after 10 PM and pulled up to the local Holiday Inn.  Since the parking lot was only a third full, we assumed that they had plenty of available rooms.  As luck would have it, a pipe had burst in the hotel, flooding several rooms.  Since another section of the hotel was being renovated, less than half of the rooms in the hotel were habitable, and all of those were booked.  We got back in the car and drove down the road to another hotel called the Baymont Inn.  We got a room, but when we put our key card in the door, we realized that the room was dead bolted from the inside.  The teenager at the desk had given us the key to an already occupied room.  We probably startled a sleeping person, perhaps another prisoner’s family member or a weary workman who had spent all day laboring in the nearby oil fields.  We went back down to the front desk, got  the key to a different room, and finally managed to settle in for the night, exhausted and grateful for sleep.

I couldn’t help thinking throughout our travels and frustrations of how many families would be journeying down country roads to the places where we hide our prisons from public view.  Some of them will find shelter through a charity organization, like the Good Samaritan Hospitality House in Colorado City, Texas, which provides free lodging for families visiting loved ones in nearby prisons.  Other families will spend a night or two in their cars on the side of the road because they have no other place to stay on their way to and from the prison.  A great many of the adults in these families will, like my mother, have worked a full week and begun their sojourns with no rest.  The children may have started off toward the prison directly from school, as we used to do when I was younger.  Their journeys home will have to be just as hurried so that they can avoid the expense and difficulty of finding lodging for an extra night.

We arrived at the prison on Saturday morning and were told there would be a forty-five minute wait to get into the visiting room because all of the visiting tables were already occupied.  We had the good fortune of arriving at an opportune moment when two of the only three chairs in the gate house at the prison’s entrance were available.  The families ahead of us on the waiting list to get into the visiting room were sitting in their cars in the cold until they saw other families leaving the prison, vacating the much-desired tables where each family could for a moment celebrate the holidays.  Because this particular prison recently instituted a rule that no long visits–or special visits, as they are called–would be allowed on holiday weekends, the weekend prior to Christmas is now experiencing the overcrowding that used to occur on the holiday itself.  We all adjusted our travel schedules to make sure we would be allowed to visit for eight hours rather than the scant two permitted on short visits.  The families who had waited in their cars had to be searched twice on their way into the prison–once upon arrival when they came into the gate house to get on the waiting list to enter the prison and again when they returned from their cars to the gatehouse so that they could begin their visits.  All of us had been searched by a guard at the entrance to the parking lot when we drove into the prison, so some visitors had actually endured three searches by the time they saw their loved ones in the visiting room.  Prisoners, of course, face searches far more invasive; they are strip searched as they enter and leave the visiting room.

Despite the challenges we face on the way in and out of visits, our time together as a family is the best and most cherished present we receive each Christmas.  The insensitive comments made by guards, the stiffness in our joints from so many hours of sitting on airplanes and in cars, the fears that some new terror might have worn away yet another aspect of our loved one’s physical or mental health since we last saw one another–all fades away in the warmth and joy created by the simple act of gathering our family around a table for  a few precious hours.  May every family find the peace and love amongst them this holiday season.  My family’s Christmas came a week early this year.

On Trial During the Holidays: Laurence Lovette, Eve Carson, and Lost Stories, a post by Ashley Lucas

As someone who teaches at UNC Chapel Hill, I, like the rest of our campus community, was stunned, grief-stricken, and profoundly disturbed by the murder of our student body president Eve Carson who was abducted and shot on March 5, 2008.  I did not know Carson personally, but many of my students and colleagues adored her and have recounted many, many stories about what a remarkable, loving, intelligent person she was.  I wish that the media coverage about Carson told more about these aspects of her life.

In the Fall of 2009, I began teaching a freshman seminar on the subject of Documentary Theatre.  In this class, my students collectively choose a topic to investigate and create a play based on research and interviews they conduct throughout the semester.  In the first two weeks of class, we spent a lot of time mulling over a variety of possible topics which might serve as the subject of our play.  The students narrowed their interests down to two topics fairly quickly: Eve Carson’s murder and health care (which was a big news story at the time because of the Obama Administration’s controversial plans for health care reform).

My students in this course were all freshmen, so none of them had been UNC students during Carson’s tenure as student body president nor at the time of her murder.  However, since most of them were from North Carolina, they had seen a great deal of news about the crime, and the shadow of loss cast across the campus had significantly colored their first days as college students.  Some had misgivings about whether our class might cause greater pain to those who knew and loved Carson by conducting research about her life and death and portraying traumatic events on stage.  We spent much time discussing the ethical questions surrounding the idea of creating such a play and how we might go about it.

One of my students approached me after class one day and said that she had gone to high school with one of the young men accused of Carson’s murder, and she did not feel comfortable working on a play about this subject matter.  She had not been close to the accused but had known him well enough to think he was a regular kid, like so many other boys in high school.  She was bewildered and frightened by Carson’s death and the implication of someone she knew in such a brutal crime.  We discussed the possibility of this student completing an alternate assignment for the course if our class chose to put on a play about the Carson murder.

The class was divided fairly evenly on whether to do a play about the murder or one about health care.  The tide shifted in favor of a play about health care when a particularly impassioned student told a moving story about her family’s struggles with health insurance while her mother was being treated for cancer. We produced a thoughtful and compelling series of monologues about health care that semester, and though we no longer discussed Eve Carson or the circumstances of her death, our earlier discussions stayed with me, as did my student’s concern for and confusion surrounding her high school classmate who was accused of having killed someone.

The investigations in the Carson case quickly led to two prime suspects.  Demario Atwater pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder and is now serving two consecutive life sentences in a federal prison in California.  The other suspect, Laurence Alvin Lovette, now stands trial in Orange County Criminal Superior Court.  Because Atwater took a plea deal, Lovette’s trial offers the general public a great deal of information about the night of Carson’s death which was never before released in such detail.  My local newspaper, The Durham Herald-Sun–and likely all other major news outlets in our area–is providing a blow-by-blow accounting of each day’s courtroom testimony.  In most cases I try not to read this kind of news coverage because those who covered my father’s trial said such misleading things about our case and our family when we endured what Lovette and his loved ones now face.  However, I have been unable to stop myself from following the news of Lovette’s trial because I am so struck by what the testimony recounted in the news reveals about his life at the time of the crime.

Lovette is now twenty-one years old, which means he was only seventeen or eighteen at the time of the murder.  An African American raised in poverty in what sounds like a pretty tough neighborhood in Durham, Lovette lived surrounded by guns and drugs.  He is accused of a terrible crime, and his personality, his hopes for his life, indeed his very humanity have been left out of the news coverage and perhaps the trial itself.  He is very young, and if he is convicted, he will likely never have the chance to discover a better way to live.  If a jury finds him guilty, Lovette will likely never be able to explain to others, perhaps even to himself, that he is more than the worst thing he ever did.  If he is guilty, I do not believe that he should go unpunished or that it is safe for him to live among us in the present moment.  I also am not ready to mark him (or Demario Atwater) as irredeemable, to decide that someone just entering his twenties can never evolve or become a better person.  I am unconvinced that keeping him in prison for life either makes us safer or benefits our society in the long run.

Eve Carson’s humanity has been lost in the news reports, too, and her family also fares poorly in the public descriptions of their current grief.  The trial and the news are about the terrifying and gruesome events of the last night of Carson’s life, overshadowing the complexity and richness of who she was and what her loved ones endure as they continue to live.  A friend of mine who came to a recent reading of Razor Wire Women remarked that he worries that both prisoners’ and victims’ stories are not told frequently enough or well enough.  I concur.  We know  a great deal about how to tell stories about crime, but we know very little about how to understand or talk about what makes crime possible–the living and ever-shifting contexts of people’s lives, the complicated process of decision making, the vulnerabilities of victims and perpetrators.

During this holiday season, my thoughts are with the Carson, Atwater, and Lovette families and those who love them.  In a time of year when we are urged to reflect on peace, good will, and the dawning of a new year of possibilities, the weight of loss, fear, and sadness stand in sharp relief to holiday celebrations.  Perhaps in the days and years ahead of us, we can work together to prevent tragedies like murder and the devastation that follows incarceration.

Troop 1500 to Have a Sequel: Film About Girl Scouts with Imprisoned Mothers, by Ashley Lucas

In 2006 PBS’s Independent Lens documentary series featured a film called Troop 1500, which chronicled the lives of a group of Girl Scouts whose mothers lived inside a Texas prison.

This profoundly moving glimpse at what both mothers and daughters endure as a result of incarceration will now have a sequel, providing viewers with a sense of the long term effects of separation and prisons on two generations of women.  Click here to read an article by filmmaker Ellen Spiro about the upcoming sequel, which should not be missed.

Check your local TV listings for rebroadcasts of Troop 1500 on PBS.

A Meditation on Compassion and Incarceration, a post by Ashley Lucas

My friend Margarita Mooney, who writes brilliantly about the sociology of religion, recently pointed me toward a post by Bradley Wright on a blog called Black, White and Gray and a response to this post by a woman named Holly.  Wright tells “A Story of Turning the Other Cheek” about a man who offers his coat to the thief who has just stolen his wallet.  The would-be mugger is so surprised that he joins his near-victim at a local restaurant where they dine together.  Crime averted, and potential violence and incarceration halted in their tracks.  It’s a revolutionary response to an assault.  The man being accosted at knife-point sees beyond the attack itself and realizes that the man who has come to rob him is something more than this ugly and dangerous action.  The man who threatens another is so struck by the revelation of his own humanity in his victim’s eyes that he ceases to be a threat in this moment and instead sits down peacefully to dinner.  This may seem like an easy solution, but in fact it’s not at all easy to look beyond what threatens and frightens us to search for the humanity in an aggressor.

In her comment on Wright’s blog post, a woman named Holly describes the day that her fourteen year-old son was attacked by a group of boys.  He was beaten and needed stitches, and a year of legal battles finally sent a young man to prison.  Holly was not only upset about the harm done to her son but also concerned about the fate of the youth who would likely become more hardened by life in prison rather than finding a way to live a different kind of life and cease hurting others.  Holly’s sentiment is one not often expressed publicly.  We are trained not to feel compassion for people who have committed acts of violence, urged not to search for ways to prevent such acts by understanding what motivates them but rather to label some people irredeemable and never again welcome them into society.

When I heard Sister Helen Prejean speak last week, she told a story which she also wrote in her acclaimed book Dead Man Walking about the father of a murder victim expressing his grief over the idea of the death penalty.  His child had been killed by a man whom Sister Helen would later accompany to his execution, and this father–a Catholic–objected to the death penalty but felt pressured by family and friends to call for the death of the man who killed his child.  People told this father that he owed it to his child to demand the killer’s death; they said that anything less would be a sign that this father did not truly love his child.  This brand of retribution  ran counter to the father’s religious beliefs and also did not seem logical to him.  How could another death in any way alleviate the loss of his child?  How could executing someone else’s son be just or righteous?  Nevertheless, the people surrounding this grieving father tried to make him feel like he was wrong to have compassion and concern for the person who killed his child and the mother of the condemned man.

Our popular culture and criminal justice system are so wedded to the notion of punishment that we often lose sight of what will actually make all of us safer and less violent.  Youth who enter the criminal justice system rarely escape it permanently.  Most folks who spend any time in juvenile detention will cycle through jails and prisons for the majority of their adult lives.  This is not because these individuals are inherently criminal or because their first offenses were particularly grave; rather, our system of punishing people in this country tends to mark them with a lasting social stigma.  Prisons, for youth and adults, teach more lessons about how to commit crime than about how to build better lives, avoid breaking laws, and exhibit concern for the well-being of others.  If we really want prisons to protect us, then they should train incarcerated people how to be useful, productive citizens and community members.

When I express this sentiment, skeptics are quick to return to the idea of punishment, saying that we need to be focused on making sure that people suffer for the fact that they have broken laws.  As the child of a prisoner and someone who has come to care about many other incarcerated individuals, I can tell you from close observation of incarcerated people that being separated from your loved ones, unable to contribute your time or financial assistance to your family’s well-being, stripped of the ability to make even simple decisions for yourself, and forced to live among people who might harm you takes its toll on a person.  We do not lack for punishment in prisons, but often we do lack compassion and foresight about how our ill treatment of prisoners ultimately makes all of us less safe.  If people come home from prison–and the vast majority of the 2.3 million people we incarcerate will one day return to live among us–without hope, a job, a place to live, or family connections, then they will likely turn to crime as a means to survive and as a way to vent the anger they feel at having been held against their will under dangerous and unsavory conditions.  Is it logical for us to expect anything different?

What if prisons were places where people learned how to be better versions of themselves?  What if the folks who ran prisons taught those who live in prisons what safety can mean in its fullest sense?  That would require that we demand an end to rape and other forms of violence inside prisons.  We would need to accord guards and prisoners alike with respect and human dignity and to encourage an environment in which the logic of violence could be unraveled.  We would have to stop locking up thousands of people for nonviolent offenses and seek appropriate alternatives to incarceration which focus on accountability to victims and the respect that each of should have for those who live and work in our communities.

Thank you, Holly, for being thoughtful enough to care about what happens to the young man who harmed your son and for being brave enough to speak this unpopular thought aloud.  We have a great deal to learn from you.

Loyal Citie Network Media and Razor Wire Women, by Jodie Lawston

On December 6, I was interviewed by Adam Hayes from Loyal Citie Network Media about my research and advocacy work around women’s incarceration.  Loyal Citie is interested in doing some work that highlights women’s incarceration.  My interview will appear on a DVD with an interview by John Carlos, and Razor Wire Women will be featured on the site.  We are looking forward to some collaborative work to bring increased awareness about, and social change around, mass incarceration in the United States.  Thanks, Adam!!

Women in Prison, The Cost of Fighting Back Talk, by Jodie Lawston

On Tuesday December 6, I led a discussion on women in prison that particularly focused on women who kill their abusers in self defense.  This discussion was organized by Raihana Siddiq of the Women’s Center at CSU San Marcos (Thank you, Raihana!!).   There are an estimated 2,000 – 4,000 women in prison for killing their abusers in self defense, with about 600 of those women incarcerated in California (see Kathleen Ferraro’s Neither Angels Nor Demons and Elizabeth Leonard’s Convicted Survivors for more on this).  California is one of the first states to have enacted laws around intimate partner violence in murder cases: In 1991, California began to permit expert testimony about intimate partner violence in murder cases, and in 2001, parole boards were directed to take into account histories of intimate partner violence during hearings (Silja Talvi has an excellent overview of this from 2002, here).  The group Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA), originally created by Brenda Clubine, was instrumental in increasing awareness about women who kill their abusers.  The film Sin By Silence, directed by Olivia Klaus, is an excellent and highly recommended resource for understanding how women who have experienced violence and abuse are then treated by the criminal justice system.  It importantly features the women of CWAA so viewers begin to get an understanding of their situations and their incredible resiliency.

During the discussion, people asked what they can do to help.  I’ll reiterate here that educating ourselves in the first step, and then engaging in prisoner support work, or becoming involved with organizations that are already doing this work–at whatever level you are able–helps to make a difference (check out the organizations we have listed on this site, as a start).

Razor Wire Women Recognized at UNC, a post by Ashley Lucas

This week Razor Wire Women is being recognized as a significant new scholarly book at two separate events on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill.

Last night the Institute for African American Research (IAAR) held a reception to honor members of our campus’ African American Studies research community.  Reginald Hildebrand, interim director of the IAAR, organized this event both to honor Eunice Sahle who has just been named the new chair of UNC’s Department of African and African American Studies and to recognize the UNC faculty members who have published books this year which make significant contributions to the field of African American Studies.  Razor Wire Women was on the list of publications, and Hildebrand praised the book and its authors’ commitment to social justice.

On Wednesday, December 7 from 4 to 6 PM, UNC’s Institute for Arts and Humanities (IAH) will hold its annual holiday reception to celebrate books published in 2011 by IAH fellows.  I have the absolute joy of being a fellow of the Institute this semester and am honored to be among the IAH authors who will be present to sign books tomorrow afternoon.  The reception is open to all UNC affiliates.

North Carolinians Organize to End the Death Penalty, a post by Ashley Lucas

An organization called People of Faith Against the Death Penalty has launched a campaign to repeal the death penalty in the state of North Carolina, and they brought renowned anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean to North Carolina to speak at several events this week.  This effort comes on the heels of the Republican-controlled NC State legislature’s repeal of the Racial Justice Act, which provides prisoners the opportunity to appeal their death sentences on the basis of racial discrimination.  Successful appeals on the grounds of the Racial Justice Act do not result in death row prisoners being released from prison or in the overturning of their convictions; rather, the Racial Justice Act enables death sentences to be converted into life sentences.

The Racial Justice Act (see full text here), championed by State Senator Floyd McKissick of Durham, responds to the fact that death sentences are much more likely to be handed down in cases which involve a black defendant and a white victim than any other possible combination of races for defendants and victims.  For an excellent report on the statistical data and a review of several studies which prove the racial bias of sentencing in capital punishment, see this article on the Death Penalty Information Center Website.  This body of evidence on racial inequality in capital cases first drew national attention in 1986 when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case called McClesky v. Kemp.   In this case, lawyers arguing on behalf of a black man convicted of murdering a white police officer in Georgia cited the Baldus study as evidence of racial discrimination in capital sentencing.  The court assumed the validity of Baldus et al.’s study yet ruled that this data was “insufficient to demonstrate unconstitutional discrimination in the Fourteenth Amendment context or to show irrationality, arbitrariness, and capriciousness under Eighth Amendment analysis.”  McClesky was executed in 1991, and despite many follow up studies which confirm and expand the findings of the Baldus study, our nation continues exhibit blatant racial bias in executing its citizens.

Though the North Carolina legislature has voted to repeal the Racial Justice Act, this battle is not yet lost.  Governor Beverly Purdue still has the power to veto this repeal and uphold this ground breaking legislation.  To urge the governor to veto the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, click here.

Last night Sister Helen Prejean addressed an audience of at least a hundred people at Trinity United Methodist Church in downtown Durham.  The event was introduced by an advocate from Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation (MVFR)–a group which brings together the families of both murder victims and executed prisoners to oppose the death penalty.  A woman named Jocelyn spoke about the day that her son was shot to death in Durham and the enduring trauma to her family, including her three granddaughters who are growing up without a father.  Jocelyn still feels hatred for the unknown perpetrator who killed her son, but she would not want that person, if found and convicted, to be executed.  She does not want another mother to lose a child and feels that all violence, including state-sanctioned executions, only leads to more violence.  The next speaker to take the podium was Rose, the sister of a man named Ernest who was executed in Raleigh.  She described her family’s suffering during the nine years that Ernest spent on death row and the time they spent together on the day of his execution.  Since Ernest’s death, Rose, her family, Ernest’s attorneys, and a community of supporters vowed to work to end all executions in North Carolina, and to this end she, Jocelyn, and others like them have continued to tell their stories to all who will listen, even though it obviously pains them greatly to retell the most devastating moments of their lives.

Sister Helen thanked and honored Jocelyn and Rose as she described her personal calling to end the death penalty.  Retelling a story she recounts in her book Dead Man Walking–which has also been adapted into an Academy Award-winning film and an excellent play–Sister Helen spoke of how what began as simple correspondence between her and a Louisiana death row prisoner led to a life’s vocation of anti-death penalty work.  She has now accompanied six men to their deaths, acting as a spiritual adviser to the condemned and witnessing their executions.  She reminds us of the dignity of human life and urges us not to perpetually judge any person for the very worst thing that he or she ever did.  She asks Christians to remember that Jesus always invoked the sanctity of life and never called for anyone’s death, and as she describes in her second book The Death of Innocents, she urged Pope John Paul, II, to firm up the Catholic Church’s stance against the death penalty.  Through her tireless advocacy, she calls on each of us to stop killing people, through caring for our neighbors and working to end the violence in our communities and the violence being done by the government in our names.

A local religious leader said a prayer after Sister Helen finished speaking.  In the periods of silence in between each portion of the prayer, I could hear quiet sobbing from those sitting in the pews all around me.  I was struck by the sheer numbers of people in my own community whose lives are shaped by murder, prisons, and the death penalty.  I thought of Jocelyn and Rose and their willingness to support the same cause, though public rhetoric often casts victims’ families and prisoners’ families as being irrevocably at odds with one another.  Each of us who believes that killing is wrong must stand together now with Jocelyn, Rose, and Sister Helen to demand an end to the death penalty in North Carolina and in the rest of the United States.  To lend your support to this vital cause, please contact your state and federal legislators, speak to your family and friends about why you oppose the death penalty, and get involved with activist organizations who are already doing excellent work on this front:

• Contact Governor Bev Purdue to urge her to veto the repeal of the Racial Justice Act.
• Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation: Founded in 1976, Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR) is a national organization of family members of victims of both homicide and executions who oppose the death penalty in all cases. MVFR includes people of many different perspectives. Because violent crime cuts across a broad spectrum of society, our members are geographically, racially and economically diverse. (descriptions of MVFR and the other organizations that follow in this list are taken from their own websites and promotional materials)
• Capital Restorative Justice Project: The mission of the Capital Restorative Justice Project is to promote healing and nonviolent responses within North Carolina communities torn apart by capital murder and executions.
• Durham Congregations in Action (DCIA): DCIA seeks to engage and empower people of faith to create a community of justice and peace through common prayers and acts of compassion; and with prophetic courage we act as advocates for the dignity and well-being of all persons, recognizing that behind every human face is the face of God.
• People of Faith Against the Death Penalty (PFADP): People of Faith Against the Death Penalty is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, interfaith organization whose mission is to educate and mobilize faith communities to act to abolish the death penalty in the United States. Founded in 1994 in North Carolina, PFADP focuses its programs on organizing among faith communities in the South.
• National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP): The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) is the nation’s oldest organization dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty. We are comprised of an extensive network representing more than 100 state and national Affiliate organizations and thousands of advocates and volunteers. Our members include families of murder victims, persons from all points on the political and religious spectrums, past and present law enforcement officials and prominent civil and racial justice organizations working to end the death penalty forever.
• Truth in Justice: Truth in Justice is an educational nonprofit organized to educate the public regarding the vulnerabilities in the U.S. criminal justice system that make the criminal conviction of wholly innocent persons possible.
• The Innocence Project: The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 to assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing.  To date, 280 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 17 who served time on death row.  These people served an average of 13 years in prison before exoneration and release.
• Death Penalty Focus (DPF): Founded in 1988, Death Penalty Focus is one of the largest nonprofit advocacy organizations in the nation dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment through public education; grassroots and political organizing; original research; media outreach; local, state, and nationwide coalition building; and the education of religious, legislative, and civic leaders about the death penalty and its alternatives.
• Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions: Since its founding following the 1998 National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty, the Center has been instrumental in the exonerations of 23 innocent men and women in Illinois. Before the founding of the Center, members of its staff were instrumental in 14 additional exonerations — including that of Gary Dotson, who in 1989 became the first person in the world to be exonerated by DNA.  The Center was the first university-based innocence project to accept non-DNA cases as well as DNA cases. Of the 37 exonerations in which the Center or members of its staff have been involved, just over half —21— were non-DNA cases.

Though, as the above list demonstrates, many people in the U.S. are committed to ending the death penalty, executions continue.  Please get involved and help end this long standing practice of state sanctioned violence.

Critical Pedagogy in Prisons? A Brief Reflective Essay, By Jodie Lawston and Gabriel Jones

Education programs in which professors, teachers, and even students enter prisons to teach adult education classes are shoddy, at best, with some institutions having educational programs and others not having them.  With almost 2.5 million people incarcerated across the nation, the educational opportunities to which prisoners have access can significantly shape their social and economic mobility upon release, as well as affect their rates of recidivism.  As critical educator Earl Shorris (1997: 6) told his own class of poor and disenfranchised students:

You’ve been cheated. Rich people learn the humanities; you didn’t. The humanities are a foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking, for learning to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force is turned again you. I think the humanities are one of the ways to become political…. If you want real power, legitimate power, the kind that comes from the people and belongs to the people, you must understand politics.  The humanities will help.

Education, then, offers the means not only for economic mobility but for critical consciousness about power and its effects, as well as about how power can be bent to the will of the people.  Critical pedagogy has been defined by Ira Shor (1992: 129) as

Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.

Critical pedagogy offers a reflective praxis for understanding power and resisting its effects (Kincheloe 2008).  In Freire’s (2000) terminology, it encourages the development of “conscientization,” “consciousness raising,” which focuses on understanding and resisting social and political oppression.  Within the specific context of prison education, such an approach analyzes and critiques the nature of the American criminal justice system, conceptualizations of criminality, and the reasons for the cycles and patterns of poverty, crime, and incarceration that characterize much of prisoners’ lives.

Educational programs for women prisoners are particularly important at present.  While men are still more likely than women to experience incarceration, for the past three decades the female prison population has increased at a significantly higher rate than that of men.  In a report for the Sentencing Project, Mauer, Potler and Wolf (1999) show that between 1980 and 1997, the women’s prison population increased by 573 percent, while the men’s prison population increased by 294 percent.  More than 200,000 women are now confined in prisons and jails across the country (see Talvi 2007, xv).  As stated before on this site and in Razor Wire Women, incarcerated women are disproportionately of color and poor.  Moreover, nearly forty-five percent of women in local jails and state prisons and twenty-five percent of women in federal prisons have not graduated high school, with between sixty and seventy percent never having attended any college (see Greenfeld and Snell 1999).

Despite the need for educational opportunities that would improve women’s ability to transition back into society upon release from prison, women’s prisons have fewer educational and vocational facilities in comparison to men’s prisons (see Pollock 2002).  When courses are available for women, they continue to be in areas that are underpaid and traditionally relegated to women, such as beautician classes (see Talvi 2007, and Pollock 2002).  While GED classes are sometimes available, books and materials cost money, so even when such opportunities are available women cannot afford to enroll.  Moreover, GED courses, although necessary, do not necessarily teach critical thinking.  Often, the only way to ensure that education courses are offered in women’s prisons–especially those with critical thinking angles–is for outside volunteers to go inside to work with the women.  Simone Weil Davis’ and Eleanor Novek’s chapters in Razor Wire Women discuss their work inside women’s prisons–in the Inside/Outside Prison Exchange Program and through facilitating a journalism class, respectively–and and the importance of such work.

Educational programs within prisons thus often need to fill significant gaps in students’ schooling, providing particular challenges to teachers who also want to offer a critical approach that examines the forces of power, domination, and control that have largely structured prisoners’ lives.  The work of Paulo Freire offers a significant resolution to this challenge by focusing on a pedagogy of reciprocity, one that resists the traditional teacher-student dichotomy and instead provides an educational environment in which everyone is both teacher and learner; by empowering students as teachers with their own base of knowledge and experience, and by giving them the responsibility of communicating this knowledge effectively to others within a participatory learning environment, programs can create classrooms that give students both the tools for literacy and the reasons and desire to use them.

With this in mind, Jodie Lawston created and facilitated a writing workshop with three university students, “Empowerment Through Writing,” for incarcerated women in California, which houses the largest number of female inmates in the country.  The workshops were created in response to women’s requests to have writing workshops in the prison and to an arbitrary parole board mandate to some women that they would not be paroled until they could write a “book report.”  The idea was that the facilitators and the incarcerated women would all be learners and teachers, and was therefore grounded in Freire’s notion of the pedagogy of reciprocity.  Prisoners were seen to have their own base of knowledge that we from the outside could learn from; they were not empty vessels into which we poured our knowledge (a la the banking concept of education).

The focus of the workshop, prompted by incarcerated women’s concerns, was to improve writing and communication skills as well as to expand critical thinking and political consciousness.  This approach created another even larger challenge, however, as the bureaucracy of prisons and the hostility some staff had toward outsiders and toward educational programs for women made the workshops extremely challenging.  Given that one of the basic tenets of critical pedagogy is that social and economic conditions cannot change until oppressed subjects have the tools to understand and resist the forces of their own oppression, this resistance presented a significant obstacle to the overall effectiveness of the program.

However, what we found was that although the institution of prison itself posed significant challenges to implementing a Freirian model of adult education in prisons, the women in the program thrived when we met.  Women wrote eloquently about their past and current life experiences, their hopes and dreams, and in addition, applied the critical consciousness that they already had developed from living in a prison environment to their writing.  Although the women in the workshop reported that they learned from the facilitators, the facilitators perhaps learned much more from the imprisoned women about the interworkings of the carceral system and its effects on individual women.  Indeed, it was the critical consciousness of the women, and our structural analysis of prisons, that we believe ultimately led to the shut down of the workshop; the more vocal and critical women became, the more the institution sought to silence them.  Of course, that silence is always short lived, as women clearly know how to resist and find their voices to critically analyze the institution around them.

References

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.

Greenfeld, Lawrence and Tracy Snell.  1999.  Women Offenders.  Bureau of Justice Statistics.  Retrieved on November 11, 2011, from http://virlib.ncjrs.org/statistics.asp#w.

Kincheloe, Joe. 2008. Critical Pedagogy. 2^nd ed. New York: Peter Lang.

Mauer, Marc, Cathy Potler, and Richard Wolf.  1999.  “Gender and Justice: Women, Drugs and Sentencing Policy.”  Washington, DC: The Sentencing

Pollock, Joycelyn. 2002. Women, Prison, and Crime. Wadsworth: Thomas Learning

Shor, Ira. 1992. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shorris, Earl. September1997. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor.” Harper’s, pp. 50-60.

 Talvi, Silja.  2007.  Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System.  California: Seal Press.