Patience and Resilience, a post by Dana El-Khatib

Dana hugging a child at a workshop for Teatro em Comunidades. Eddie Williams appears on the left.

My name is Dana El-khatib. I’m currently a rising junior at the university of Michigan, studying Economics. Though born in Ann Arbor to a Palestinian family, I lived most of my life in Jordan. For that reason, I constantly find myself comparing how different cultures approach different practices.

The Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) at the University of Michigan aims to provide arts programming among other things to incarcerated individuals in Michigan prisons, and returning citizens. This is done through drama workshops, a literary art review and an annual art exhibition. This past winter semester, I was one of six alternating facilitators for drama workshops in the Federal Correctional Institute at Milan. When people ask me why I decided to join PCAP, I think of many reasons that I could blab on and on about. I think about how I cannot make a moral judgment about the people inside because I didn’t grow up in the conditions that many of them did. I think about our dysfunctional educational system, I think about systemic racism, etc. However, if I’m being honest, one of the biggest reasons I chose to do PCAP is for my own selfish desire to grow as a person. There is a word in Arabic that has a special value in Islam;الصبر; pronounced as“alsabir.” Though I do not believe there is a direct translation in English that could embody all of its meaning, if I had to explain it, I would say it’s a combination of resilience and patience. This concept has become more and more important for all Arabs due to the economic and social conditions the region faces. Even more than that, its value has become rooted in Palestinian culture with resistance and struggle. Although everyone faces adversity in their lives in many forms, I, having lived a very fortunate life, knew that I could learn a thing or two about alsabir from the incarcerated, and that’s why I initially joined PCAP. Imagine growing up in horrible economic conditions and then being stripped of your freedom because of the life that society has pushed you towards. Yet, I have never seen more forgiving and positive people than the individuals I have worked with on the inside. When setting guidelines for the workshop in Milan, two of the men immediately said that one guideline should be: peace and love at all times. If I had been in their shoes, I think I would have so much hate and anger in me that I would want to get revenge on this world, but most of the people I have met seemed to have a wonderful soul that just wanted to better their life; that is what I see as the embodiment of الصبر.

In Brazil, I wondered how the different social and cultural scene would affect how people reacted to their living situation. When we visited a facility specifically for mothers who give birth in prison and their children, I was amazed by the strength of the women. In Arab culture, when a woman gives birth, everyone is there to help her. The grandmother or mother-in-law also usually stay with the mother for a couple of months to help manage the burden of a newly born baby. As I watched the mothers in the prison holding their crying babies, I compared the life they live with the life that I had always expected a new mother to be living. There was no outside support or comfort. No one to hold you when you don’t know what to do, no one to take care of your crying baby at night so you could rest. You only had yourself and the other women in the prison. I tried holding as many crying babies as I could so that the women could have the closest possible experience to a normal workshop, but I knew that there is only so much of your reality that you can escape for a few minutes. I saw the women care for each other’s babies; I thought about their solidarity together. This doesn’t even compare to the burden of knowing that in a matter of six months, your baby will be stripped from your hands, and often put into foster care if the mother’s family does not take them in. Yet, I saw the women smile and laugh. One said she named her son Moses after the prophet, because she feels that he is a warrior in this prison; this gave her strength. Again, I thought about how resilient and patient these women were. I admired the amount of صبر they had and only hoped that I could be nearly as strong in my life.

The favelas offered a whole new look into what this strength could mean to a community. We facilitated workshops for adults and children in what is known as a favela. A favela is a unique low income area in Brazil. Looking at the favelas and walking through them, I felt as though I had already been there. They were almost a carbon copy of the older and more established Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. The children had the biggest and brightest smiles. The elderly had the strongest spirits even after living so long in such harsh conditions. On the bus ride back, a friend of mine was very sad. When I talked to him, he said he kept thinking about all the shit these kids have been through in their lives. I simply smiled and said, they have the strength to handle it. I really do believe that the universe does not throw something on you that you cannot handle. These children are raised in circumstances that enable them to develop a level of صبر that we can’t even understand or compare to. They find ways to carry on and strength that radiates through their smiles. I wish no one in the world was put in such conditions, but the truth is many are living these conditions and worse everyday. If we want to wallow in sadness of how depressing that is, we surely all can; but that won’t do anyone any good. I admire their strength and I do not fear that they will not survive because I know they will. I refuse to think of them with pity, but I insist on admiring all those who have lived through much worse than what I have experienced because the truth is, they can teach us a lot.

Accessibility Abroad, a post by Syd Lio Riley

Oi! My name is Lio Riley. I’m a rising sophomore at the University of Michigan studying theatre arts and (potentially) American Culture. Before classes even started Fall semester, I met the lovely Ashley Lucas, who said she took a group of students to Brazil each summer to study theatre and incarceration. I looked her in the eye and said, “I’m going with you.” Almost a year of facilitating workshops in Michigan prisons and communities has passed, and here I am in the Mango Tree Hostel writing about my experiences doing the same in Brazil. With only a week left, it still doesn’t feel real.

In the time between meeting Ashley and traveling to Brazil, I learned a lot about how prisons work. I took her class The Atonement Project in the fall and Theatre and Incarceration in the winter (both of which are co-taught by the lovely Cozine Welch. Hi, Cozine!). In addition to gaining an unexpected interest and passion for carceral studies and activism, I began to study the intersections of transgender identity and disability in the American Culture department (Hi, Prof L!). I’m a transgender student at the university, and I’ve been living with a chronic pain condition in my knees for just over six years. Both of these identities, along with academic study and my newfound passion for prison activism and justice work, have lead me to ask a lot of questions on this trip concerning accessibility and representation, in theatre and theatre work abroad.

An example of tactile paving on a sidewalk

One of the first things I noticed after exiting my plane in São Paulo was the tactile paving found on every walking surface of the airport. Tactile paving is a system of ground tiles with raised bumps and ridges, used to help blind and visually impaired people navigate public spaces. In the US, they’re commonly placed at the ends of sidewalks, but I’d never seen entire networks of them inside buildings. When we left the airport, I found them lining every sidewalk and many hallways inside buildings, too. I thought this was pretty cool — the more I learn about accessibility, the more I recognize it (or the lack of it) in public spaces. It made me wonder why we didn’t use tactile paving this generously in the US. Still, as I began to navigate the landscapes of Florianopolis and Rio, I found the cities to still be largely inaccessible.

 

With pavement more frequently broken than not and a lack of curb cuts (small ramps built into the ends of sidewalks for wheelchair or stroller users) everywhere, the physical accessibility of the cities has been frustrating. For me, a broken escalator or elevator that requires a key to use can be the difference between a fun night out with friends or missing the next day’s activities (I’m writing this from the hostel while my classmates sing and dance at the hospital). This was reflected in the prisons, as well. The conditions of the prisons we’ve seen have been heartbreaking. As a non-incarcerated person navigating the prison, there were often only stairs or incredibly steep ramps. We saw very limited space for the folks incarcerated to get sunlight or fresh air and in one prison, large trash-can sized bins filled with rice left out in the open for bugs to land on and crawl in. It made me wonder what accessibility looked like for the people living inside. With how everything else looked, I wasn’t optimistic.

In addition to just the physical accessibility of space for people with physical disabilities, accessibility also is about accessibility of education and other government-provided services. We learned right away that many of our friends in Brazil take the bus for several hours each day to get to school. Some take multiple busses, and even boats. We also learned when traveling to the favelas that in some places, streets are so narrow that cars can’t fit through. Many are built into hillsides which makes them difficult to navigate, and because there are no street names or house numbers, people living in the favelas can’t receive mail, and also have a hard time finding employment without a permanent address. This perpetuates the cycle of poverty. In prisons, the religion you practice can determine your living situation, making religious freedom complicated. Evangelicals are provided with “nicer” living accommodations and more colorful surroundings due to the prevalence of Evangelicalism in Brazil, while Catholics are more crowded and don’t have access to as many things. For the trans women living in the men’s prison, this can mean choosing between denouncing their identities and losing access to their community in order to claim a religion for access to slightly better conditions, or claiming no religion to maintain the ability to live as women and attend the theatre workshop exclusive to trans women. Most incarcerated people are denied access to any programming at all, as we’ve learned after visiting several facilities here.

Many of these problems are too large for any one of us to solve in the three weeks we spend here, and I’ve been struggling with finding ways I can help improve accessibility while also honoring my own body and accessibility needs. Throughout the trip, the most surprising thing I’ve learned is how central accessibility is to PCAP. By literally bringing theatre into spaces like the prisons, hospitals, and favelas, we are making theatre and the arts accessible. One of the most striking examples of this was in a women’s facility called Unidade Materno Infantil, a facility where incarcerated mothers can keep their newborn children for about six months before either their families care for them or the babies are turned over to the state. The workshop participants included both mothers and their babies, meaning that many women (and some of us!) were occupied feeding, changing, soothing, and holding babies. Because there was such an obvious need for theatre games that accommodated this situation, we played each game sitting down, and adapted the game or our own movements to the needs of ourselves and the group. While the obvious reason for the accommodations was the babies, playing the games sitting down alleviated my pain personally and made it easier for me to facilitate and participate.

Materno Infantil workshop facilitators standing in front of their bus after workshop

The fact that these games were so easy to adapt for mothers and their new children, but we still struggle to adapt theatre for folks with other less-obvious access needs frustrates me at times.  PCAP is built on uncertain schedules and arbitrary rules of the prison, as well as creativity and improvisation, so accessibility is often an easier goal in our small workshops. Not to say that PCAP has mastered accessibility — there is always work to do — but we can use these principles and mindsets when addressing accessibility and disability representation in theatre as a whole. This starts with how we include disabled people in our conversations. Do we use language like “deformed” to describe babies who are born disabled because of the Flint Water Crisis? Do we put an elderly actress in a wheelchair for the entirety of a show, but prompt her to get up and dance when comedic timing calls for it? Do we expect less from the elderly folks in our workshops than we do of the young ones, and express surprise when they actually can act (or twerk!) better than most of us? Changing our own attitudes of what disability looks like, what counts as “comedy,” and what kinds of people are disabled can lead to a larger attitude change that hopefully builds a more accessible world for everyone — whether that means physically, financially, religiously, based on gender or sexuality, or any other reason.

Teatro Renascer participants and facilitators in a tableau from a short scene. They are all posing with different expressions of fear.

Navigating my own access needs abroad has been a challenge, and I’ve learned many of my classmates are struggling similarly. It is incredibly frustrating at times, especially when I have to miss class, workshops, and other fun outings, but it’s made me keenly aware of where accessibility falls short in other areas, both here and in the US. Learning about the work our friends in Brazil are doing with trans women in prison makes me wish PCAP offered resources like that, and has encouraged me to pursue the study and advocacy for transgender people in prisons at home upon our return. Facilitating a theatre workshop with a baby in my arms reminded me that theatre is secondary to access and inclusion. There’s a lot of work to be done in regards to accessibility in and out of prison, as well as in theatre, but addressing the problems that exist and recognizing solutions we have found can help us continue to push for an even more inclusive environment in our workshops and our world.

Solidarity and Storytelling: The Women of Joinville, a post by Hannah Agnew

My name is Hannah Agnew, and I will soon be starting my senior year at the University of Michigan with a major in Sociology and a minor in Crime and Justice. I have been involved in PCAP since my freshman year of college and it has completely changed my life, to the point that I have decided to enter a career field in which I can work with incarcerated women. For over a year now, I have been facilitating the Sisters Within at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the longest running theatre troupe in a women’s correctional facility in the U.S. As I have been doing the work here in Brazil, I have constantly had the Sisters on my mind and in my heart––I truly wish they could be here with us.  

Throughout my week of facilitating theatre workshops in correctional facilities located in Florianópolis, Brazil, the pain and frustration of seeing what we do to incarcerated folks all over the world has really hit me. A few days ago our group was given a guided tour of a men’s correctional facility which felt like a bad joke–– we walked along the top of the wall that forms the periphery of the grounds hearing the administration relish in how “progressive” they believed their facility to be as we observed fragments of the men’s everyday lives from a literal line between freedom and captivity. While this tour was necessary in helping to establish a relationship with this facility and beginning new theatre workshops there, I felt a wave of frustration wash over me as I realized that this work really never gets any easier. But after thinking about it, I realized that seeing the injustices that happen in prisons shouldn’t ever become easier and that we must always keep fighting for those inside. While this week I have seen humanity at some of its worst in the way we confine and attempt to strip incarcerated folks of their sense of self, I have also seen at every facility I have gone to that despite the restrictive conditions they are kept in, people inside continue to maintain their identities and a sense community in the most creative and inspiring ways. I was particularly struck by the group of women I worked with at a prison in Joinville, a town located three hours outside of Florianópolis.

Due to the fact that the workshop is facilitated in a very small space, only four of us were able to join in––me, Ashley, Vicente (a theatre professor from UDESC), and one of his students. We were accompanied by the two women who regularly facilitate the workshop and a journalist who was able to take pictures of our time together. When we arrived at the facility, I was taken aback by a long line of primarily women waiting outside, all dressed in the same uniform-like outfits consisting of a white t-shirt and grey sweat pants. I soon learned that they were visitors of the women inside, required to dress this way so that guards could distinguish them from the incarcerated women, and I was painfully reminded of the fact that when someone is prison, their loved ones are held captive by the prison as well. Not only did these visitors have to go through the frustrating and often humiliating ritual of being searched by guards in order to simply see their loved ones, but the prison took a sort of ownership over them as part of their individuality was diminished by the outfits (similar to the incarcerated women).

The women’s prison is located right next door to a men’s prison, and in the middle of the two lies the programs building, which is shared by both the men and the women (but never at the same time). We later learned that the room we had our workshop in was also used by the men for literacy classes, but the women did not have access to them and were not able to learn how to read or write. As we made our way to the room we were overtaken by a toxic smell in the air, a mix of paint fumes and other unknown substances, and not long after we all began uncontrollably sneezing, coughing, and trying to exude the foreign stench from our bodies. I wanted to run outside and take in the nearby fresh air, and my heart broke for the women who are constantly surrounded by these conditions, being seemingly poisoned by the cruel and unforgiving institution.

After adjusting to the air, we finally made it to the room where we would facilitate the workshop, and I was completely taken aback. I had never been in a space like this for a workshop. It consisted of two adjoining cage-like rooms separated by large metal bars with gaps in them big enough for us to reach through and touch the women but still effective in segregating and emphasizing the difference in status between the facilitators and the incarcerated women. We were to have two workshops in this room, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and during the entirety of them we would have to adjust all of our games and exercises to working through these bars. I had a feeling similar to the day before at the men’s prison, struck by how the facilities used very physical ways to remind the folks inside where they were. But despite all of this, the women were an absolute joy to work with,and I will never forget how inspired I felt by their creativity and determination to create art with us despite the literal and symbolic barrier that separated us.

In the first workshop we began with an activity in which we got together in pairs and helped each other stretch and gave our partners massages. While I was paired with Vicente, I watched as several women worked with each other through the bars, and at some moments I even forgot that we were separated. For the rest of the workshop we primarily led group games in which all of us held hands and formed a circle that permeated through the bars. The women we worked with did not let the barrier stop them from connecting with us and each other, and the joy I felt in that room was palpable. Despite the prison telling us we were different and separate, we still found a way to create community which I think is a very common theme in all of the PCAP workshops that we do. After the first session, we facilitators left for lunch as we waited to begin the second workshop. It has always been difficult leaving prison and knowing that everybody else has to stay behind, but I particularly felt it in this moment as we all had the privilege of being able to decompress, relax, and take in the fresh air while the beautiful women we had just worked with were forced back into their monotonous and dehumanizing every-day routine at the facility.

During the second workshop, we facilitated mostly all of the same games from the morning and of course these women were just as excited, creative, and joyful as the first group. At the end of our time together, I told them all how touched I was by their ability to be so open in this space and that when I returned home I would carry this experience with me and tell the Sisters all about them. The women then proceeded to ask all about the Sisters and even expressed their wishes to exchange letters with them, despite the fact that have never met and probably never will. It was beautiful to see a sense of solidarity that transcended cultural and geographical barriers between these women and the Sisters.

Soon after, they began a political discussion about their wishes to protest the current President and climate of their country, but someone expressed their frustration in the fact that they could not do anything from behind bars. But Vicente was quick to point out that this was not true. He went on to explain how theatre can be used as a form of protest and that several folks he has worked with have been given permission to perform on the outside and create something that represents what they want others to know about them. The women seemed particularly excited about this, and I felt a new wave of passion and intensity take over the room. On this note we headed out of the prison, and it left me with a lot to think about.

With this experience I have a newfound passion for the work that PCAP does, and I have a deeper understanding of the power of theatre and the creative arts in creating solidarity and enabling folks in total institutions to preserve their humanity. Each workshop was only two hours long, but even in this short amount of time, I felt like I had gotten to know the women on a deep and personal level (despite not speaking the same language). I saw a deep sense of community and solidarity between the women, facilitators and even the Sisters, and I saw everybody in the room use theatre to permeate the wall between us. I often take theatre for granted in my everyday life, but in this context I realized just how powerful it can be in uniting folks and maintaining agency.  I also have immense respect for the women that regularly facilitate the workshop, one of whom drives three hours there and three hours back home every week. I learned so much about movement, language, and vocals from them, and I am excited to shared everything with the Sisters when I get back home. In working with these women I realized how much I still have to learn as a facilitator and how valuable it is to exchange different pedagogies in order to bring new perspectives into our workshops. Throughout the entirety of this trip, I have gained so much insight not just from the participants but from the other facilitators, scholars, and students from UDESC who are conducting work similar to ours. I don’t think it will be possible for me to ever forget this experience, and I hope to keep the women, both participants and facilitators alike, in my mind and heart even when I leave Brazil. I find myself wishing I could tell you all even more about these women and that they could be on the outside to tell you all their stories themselves, but I hope that this post gives you all a sense of the beauty, creativity, and resilience that they all possess.

 

How I Got to a Women’s Prison in Brazil, a post by Christian Ureña

Oi! My name is Christian Ureña. I just completed my junior year at the University of Michigan. I am majoring in Movement Science in the School of Kinesiology.  I was first introduced to PCAP over a year ago when one of my fraternity brothers, Sergio Barrera, was in Ashley Lucas’s Theatre & Incarceration class. He talked so fondly of his experience in PCAP and about the fun he would have with the men in prison when playing theatre games. I wanted to be able to make an impact as well by bringing joy to people who have not experienced positive emotions like that in quite some time. The following semester I enrolled in Ashley’s Atonement Project class. Through this class, I was able to do a workshop. I was a co-facilitator with Sergio and another one of our Fraternity Brothers, Carlos. We facilitated at the only Federal Prison in the State of Michigan in a city called Milan. Throughout the course of the semester I was able to see firsthand the benefits of programming for the men in prison. I enjoyed that experience so much that I felt that I needed to continue doing this work because one semester was not enough. From there, I went on to facilitate the community workshop at Miller Manor that included people from that living community and reentered citizens. Through these workshops, I was able to learn a lot and bring people a lot of joy in several prisons in Michigan. When Ashley told me about the trip to Brazil where I get to do these same theatre games and continue to impact people and bring them joy, I knew this was something I wanted to partake in.

Christian Ureña and his fraternity brother Sergio Barrera on the beach in Florianópolis.

Now that I am in Brazil, I know I made the right decision coming here to continue doing this work. Today, I had the privilege of going into one of the women’s prisons here in the state of Santa Catarina. Going in, I knew it was going to be much smaller than the men’s prison we were able to see earlier this week but besides that I did not know what to expect. First off, I was surprised with the lack of security that there was going into the prison. There was no metal detector or pat down or anything. I do not know if this is because we are “The US citizens,” so they just trust us, or if this is the normal protocol. That surprised me, but besides that, I had a great time.

The women are absolutely hilarious and super nice. Before our workshop started, the ladies prepared a mini performance for us. I honestly did not understand a lot of it. I know something was going on with a hitch hiker of some kind that had a lot of belongings. I also know that they played the pancake game at the end, and it was honestly the best version of the pancake game I have ever seen. I laughed so much. Later, they showed us this amazing game that I got to play in which there is a cat and a mouse. The mouse and the cat are both blindfolded. The objective of the game is for the cat to “catch” the mouse. It is a game that would never be allowed in a US prison [because it involves blindfolds and physical contact] which makes me think back to my friends at Milan because I know they would love to play this game.

Back to the ladies, after the workshop, we were allowed to celebrate with them and eat cake that they made for us. It was the most delicious thing I have had so far while being in Brazil. I am a huge fan of sweets, and it truly hit the spot. However, throughout this celebration, I couldn’t help but notice something. Their bathroom door is bigger than the door frame; therefore, the door does not close. There is also no soap in the bathroom. Also, the toilet is missing its toilet seat. These are things that I feel are basic in the maintenance of the prison that unfortunately these ladies have to live without. The warden of the prison explained to us that there are still a lot of renovations happening so I truly hope adjustments will be made to their restroom. One thing that the warden shared with us that made me happy was that she used to be a prison guard who did not understand the use of programming such as the one we provide. However, once being promoted to warden she was able to see and appreciate first hand the impact programming can have on the women. She spoke very fondly of the impacts of the theatre workshop which is something that gave me a lot of hope for the women in the prison.  

A Visit to the Women’s Prison in Florianópolis, a post by Stevie Michaels

My name is Stevie Michaels, and I am a student at the University of Michigan. I became affiliated with PCAP, the Prison Creative Arts Project, just one semester ago. After graduation, I plan to attend the Police Academy and become a police officer. I thought that PCAP would be an amazing opportunity to gain a well rounded education about the criminal justice system in the United States. And in the past six months, I’ve gained so much more that simply education. I have found passion, hope, and humanity in every person in the program as well as the inmates that have participated in the workshop that myself and two co-facilitators led in a men’s prison in Jackson, Michigan.

Michigan and UDESC students at the university, getting ready to go to the women’s prison.

Coming to Brazil was not something I intended to do when I began my journey with PCAP. I thought PCAP would be a one semester class and in April, when my workshop ended, I would just walk away. That wasn’t the case. I didn’t want to stop learning about the people and I just wanted to immerse myself in a program that could actually bring change to a system that I found to be so cold. Maybe I couldn’t make a change individually, but as a collective group I found that, at the very least, PCAP brings smiles and fun to the inmates all around Michigan. So I decided to pack my bags and get on a plane to see what PCAP does with its partnerships in Brazil.

On just day two in Florianópolis we had the opportunity to visit an all women’s prison. The prison was right next to a historic men’s prison which is over 90 years old. The women’s prison is perched up on a hill, very small, and one might not even realize it is there. Prior to becoming a prison, it was a storage shed for the men’s prison. When I say shed, I mean it. It is incredibly small, housing 71 women inside it, which is overwhelming. They are currently building an addition onto the back of it so that by June they will be able to house 220 women. At the moment there is no grass, unlike the prisons I have seen in Michigan. Usually there is grass in the “yards.” If you look around you can see the paint chipping off the cement walls, and the unkept corners of dirt buildup and places where the air conditioners into the offices would leak water and rust. Because of the lack of space, the theater space that Vicente, a professor at the university here in Florianópolis, uses is an awkward open “cage” where everyone can see you. Vicente has only done a semester worth of workshops here, as he is still trying to gain more access to run programs in the nearby prisons. This type of area where the workshops are held is different than in the US, and many of the prisons have classrooms.

We spoke with the Warden of the prison, along with three of the women on the Minister of Justice’s staff, who were in a meeting the previous day with both Vicente and my professor Ashley to discuss prison programming and its importance. The entire time a woman from the Ministry of Justice was taking photos and staging photos of us to put in a press release. This was a bizarre experience because in the US no photos are ever taken inside the walls.

Although the prison doesn’t have conventional places to run the workshops, I think that this is a vital place to run them. Because of the lack of space and programming, a workshop could really bring some hope and happiness to a place where there may not be much of it.

Having the opportunity to speak with the Warden has encouraged me to learn more about the laws and rules of the criminal justice system in Brazil, not only to advocate for programming in prisons there, but also to compare to the US and see what we can take and use and learn from each other.

Theatre in a Prison with Mothers and Babies: A post by Alex Bayer

My name is Alex Bayer, and I am entering my senior year at the University of Michigan. I am a psychology major and ultimately hope to be a therapist who works with youth. I’ve always had passion for the arts—I was a dancer for 15 years, participated in theatre throughout middle school and high school, and discovered how much I love creative writing during college. I heard about the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) during my freshman year of college and was instantly intrigued by the idea of bringing different art forms (creative writing, theatre, and fine arts) into a prison, where people are constantly denied of their humanity and self expression. Although I was intrigued, I was also slightly hesitant. I was well aware of the stigma attached to incarcerated people and didn’t know enough about the prison system to justify why I wanted to involve myself in this type of work. After taking a study abroad course in Copenhagen, Denmark, called the Psychology of Criminal Behavior and visiting various rehabilitation programs, my frustration with the prison system in the U.S. escalated. By my junior year at the university, I made the incredible decision to join PCAP.

Alex on the dock behind a restaurant where we ate in Florianópolis.

It’s safe to say that PCAP has changed my life. Compared to all other classes I have taken at U of M, I have never been surrounded by a group of such intelligent, open-minded yet skeptical, and passionate individuals. I facilitated a workshop at a youth facility in Detroit with Adelia and Kaitlin, who are now two of my closest friends. We went to Lincoln every Sunday at 5 PM and led a group of 10 boys in various theatre games. It didn’t take long for us to fall in love with these boys, and going into that facility soon became the highlight of my week. We continued our workshop into the summer, and only stopped because we were all going to Brazil, where we would have the opportunity to visit prisons and hospitals and exchange our knowledge and excitement for the work we do with Brazilian students who engage in similar work.

We are now in our third and final week of our experience in Brazil. Today I went into a prison with two students from UniRio (a university in Rio) and four students from the PCAP program. We went into a facility with mothers and babies, made for incarcerated women who are pregnant during their sentencing and can keep their babies for the first six months of their lives. After six months, these women are forced to find someone else to take care of their baby or hand that baby over to the government.

Before arriving to Rio, I had never visited a women’s prison, only the juvenile facility I worked in during the winter. Going into the women’s facility was much different than what I had experienced in the past. I never went inside this facility; we played theatre games with the women right outside of their rooms on a deck. As we walked up to this deck, we passed a church built for the women in the prison. We then approached a group of women on the deck, and they were all holding their babies or gently rocking them in their strollers. At first, I was so distracted by the cuteness of the babies. The women welcomed us and seemed happy for us to play with their kids; many of them even handed us their babies to hold for a little bit. We began the workshop with a name game, but at this point, a lot of women left. Many of them were preoccupied with other tasks, such as breastfeeding or changing diapers. After the name game, we played a couple of games that involved dancing/singing/hugging, and we got much more comfortable with one another. During these games, we had a rotating group of about 3-4 women, depending on who could participate in each moment.

Following the games, one of the women suggested having a group discussion instead of playing more games—a suggestion I would have never heard when I worked in a facility with teenage boys. The woman began by asking Asma, one of our group members, about the hijab she was wearing. The woman was curious as to why Asma wanted to cover up her hair, and explained that Brazilian women are often very comfortable with displaying their bodies in more revealing clothing. Although Asma was put on the spot a little bit, she handled the pressure really well, and the woman was thankful for her willingness to answer the questions. The woman admitted that she has never really talked to anyone from the United States and does not see many people wearing a hijab, so she wanted to educate herself. These questions sparked openness among the whole group, and a lot more women came to the deck to join the discussion and ask more questions to all of us.

Our PCAP group in class with Prof. Vicente Concilio’s theatre students in Florianópolis.

The discussion was just like it would be with any group of women I met in Brazil—our group shared experiences with these women, and they did the same in return. It felt natural, and I quickly forgot I was in a prison. At the end of the discussion, we hugged and kissed the women goodbye. It wasn’t until exiting the prison that I was reminded of where I was. Right in front of the prison, a police car was parked with a giant rifle sticking out of the window. My heart immediately sank. I knew that it was used for intimidation and that I wasn’t in any personal danger, but it reminded me of the intimidation tactics that are constantly used against the women I just talked to for the past two hours. I was reminded of the fact that these women aren’t free; the fact that these women will have to say goodbye to their babies soon; the fact that one mistake a person makes could lead to being incarcerated and put in inhumane conditions.

Thinking about these facts cause a lot of frustration, but I then remind myself of the people I am surrounded by and become hopeful again. Such strong, resilient people who also recognize the problems with the prison system surround me. Of all aspects of this trip, the people are why I am most grateful—not just the PCAP group, but everyone I have met on this journey. I am beyond grateful for the various professors and students from Brazil who not only include us in their work but also welcome us with wide arms and make us feel at home. The Brazilian students who speak English continuously translate for us during conferences and classes. All of the students we met have taken a huge interest in us, asking us questions about our lives, showing us around, and teaching us about their culture. Although I knew I would have an amazing experience with the entire PCAP group and our fearless, nurturing leader Ashley, I had no idea how much I would connect with the Brazilian students here. I am looking forward to the rest of my week in Brazil and will always carry the love I have received from all of the people here.

The City Behind Bars: A post by Renisha Bishop

Why are the darker skinned people and indigenous people treated the worst in every country? Why are the rumors, stereotypes, misconceptions so standard across the board for these people? They are poor. They are dangerous. They are uneducated. They are criminals. WHY? Is it that the people in control are afraid of their potential? Their strength? Afraid that they would actually be smarter, more creative, intuitive, in fact more powerful? So powerful that they would actually be on the top and not the bottom.

It really saddens me to think about the mistreatment, discrimination, abuse that people face globally. For some reason, I only believed that racism existed in the United States but I was so wrong. My friends here in Brazil quickly dispelled this myth for me. I thought I wouldn’t have much in common with them, but we share much more in common than I ever imagined.

Prior to coming to Rio de Janeiro, I was told that it was very dangerous, that I shouldn’t walk around by myself. I really feared for my life. I was paranoid for the first couple of days. I thought there would be people just waiting to rob me for the little I had. Once I got adjusted and saw more of the city, it seemed just like any other major city in the US. Rio really reminds me of Los Angeles for some reason.

I’ve been to two different prisons here in Rio; both are facilities for women, but one had a wing for women with infants. During our workshop with the mothers, I was able to hold a two-month-old for almost the entire workshop. It was a different experience, being inside of a jail with babies. Babies are a source of innocence and pure joy, but the reality of their futures is dark and unfathomable. The women are able to keep their babies for up to two years legally, but since the facility is over-crowded, they are only able to keep them until they turn six months. Then the babies go with their mother’s family or are given to foster homes. Most of the women don’t have any family to raise their children until they’re out of prison, so the babies are given to the foster homes. It’s a hard process for women to give their babies away. I felt the pain of uncertainty while being inside of the prison with them. It was such a stark contrast. The happiness and innocence of the babies but the heaviness of the women. I was glad that we were there to take their minds off of their realities for a brief moment with theater games. But it’s always sad leaving workshops knowing that once we leave it’s back to reality for them.

The other women’s prison I went to was very different than the first. As soon as we got there, it was a small room near the gate with a small opening where the sun could barely peak through. These two women came to the small hole to speak to us. I was very disturbed that two women were in that small room, and we were told to not speak to them. Once we got into the prison, the other incarcerated women warmly welcomed us affectionately with hugs and kisses. We all sat through my professor’s performance about families who had loved ones incarcerated. We were all deeply moved by the various monologues in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. I left the prisons and returned to a chic neighborhood that had bars around the houses and apartments. It’s a crazy dichotomy. Everyone is behind bars for various reasons. Who are the real criminals here?

Renisha Bishop is a recent graduate of The University of Michigan. 

UDESC Prison Arts and Education International Conference: A post by Christa Shelmon

Olá! My name is Christa Shelmon, and I just graduated from Michigan with a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology (woot!). This past semester was my first semester being involved with PCAP, and I wish I hadn’t waited until the last semester of my senior year to join.

I facilitated a theater workshop every Saturday morning from 8:30-10:30 am with Brittani Chew at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility (WHV) in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Waking up that early on a Saturday was not ideal. However, we had an awesome time every week. Our experience was unique in the sense that we concluded our semester with only woman in our workshop—a PCAP first!

I was really interested in coming on this trip, especially after finding out that theater and arts programming was actually a thing in prisons, and the fact that we could do such a thing in a totally different country struck gold for me. I have been learning so much already during this first week in Florianópolis, particularly at the first annual Seminário International de Arte e Educaçao Prisional, hosted by the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (UDESC). This two-day conference featured guest speakers from all across Brazil who spoke about the challenging, yet rewarding work they do in prisons, as well as a concluding presentation by our very own Ashley who explained what PCAP is and what us students do in our weekly workshops. The conference was not catered to us—it was entirely in Portuguese. So, you can imagine how difficult it was for us to follow along. But, with the help of our Brazilian friends, Ashley, and Silvina (the graduate assistant for this trip), we were able to receive translations along the way in order to be present and attentive throughout the conference.

Michigan students pose with the panelists.

The second day of the conference particular was meaningful to me, for it highlighted many challenges and triumphs that I experienced with the workshop I was a part of this past semester. Day two of the conference consisted of various presentations on the work that was being done in prisons across Brazil. Most, if not all, of the presenters worked in women’s prisons, as I did, so I was that much more curious to listen to the type of workshops and classes they facilitate or teach. Carinie, one of the presenters, had a very interesting presentation that stood out to Brittani and me. Her first experience almost paralleled our workshop at WHV, and we immediately began making connections and comparisons. Initially, Carinie was a student who just wanted to make art and do theater, and did not think too deeply into the prison institution itself. She reflected on how she did not realize the effects of the prison institution until after two years of facilitating workshops. I found this to be relevant for me as well, and it is very hard to know how things are going to go each time you visit the prison. Some days are better than others—it’s so situational. This has been frustrating for many of us at PCAP.

Later, Carinie talked about how at times she found it hard to connect with the women, especially as a twenty-one year old college student who didn’t have as much life experience as some of the women she worked with. She also discussed how many women were experiencing depression, which obviously hindered them from participating in the workshop at their best ability, or how the prison staff failed to communicate to the women about her absence, leaving her in a tangled web of angry women and careless workers.

Finally, Carinie mentioned how the women opted out of a final performance at the end of the semester, and instead vied for sharing out their experiences with others instead of putting on a show. Listening to Carinie’s story allowed us to reflect on things we could have done differently in workshop. Brittani and I were so inspired, that we went to speak with her one-on-one during the break, just to get some feedback and let her know how similar our situations were. Carinie could understand English, but could not speak it very well, and therefore Silvina helped translate during our conversation. She was very insightful and appreciative of us going up to her and sharing out our feelings. After talking with her for a few minutes, she revealed that she, too, finished her semester with one woman in her workshop. This was heartwarming, and made that moment even more special. She left us with some really good advice of focusing on the work and not the grade—it is important to always consider the needs of our workshop group. She also reminded us that persistence is key, and although we may not be able to see the impact we had on the group, do not let that deter you. “Just one, that’s all it takes to make a difference!”

After the other five presentations, the presenters formed a panel for a question and answer discussion. The final question asked what inspired or motivated each individual to continue doing the work that they do, despite the trials and challenges they face daily. The entire panel gave beautiful answers, closing out the forum portion of the conference. It was an amazing opportunity to hear from individuals who are striving to be the change they want to see in the world, and served as motivation to never give up, despite how tough it may be to crack the system.

Question and answer time after the panel.

Theatre Programming in a Women’s Prison in Durban, South Africa

I’m in Rio de Janeiro with my University of Michigan students but trying to catch up on blogging about my South Africa trip before I launch into our adventures in Brazil. More to come soon.

Durban is a lovely beach town. Since I couldn’t take pictures of the prison, this will have to do for an illustration.

Durban, South Africa is a beautiful seaside town–not exactly the place where you’d expect to find an enormous complex of prisons known as the Westville Correctional Facility. Andy and I were introduced to both Durban and Westville by Miranda Young-Jahangeer, a professor of drama and performance studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Miranda has been doing theatre work inside Westville for the past fourteen years. She’s worked with men and youth at the prison at different times, but she prefers to work with incarcerated women and has focused on them throughout most of her time at Westville.

Miranda drove us about twenty minutes outside of Durban to the prison.  Separate men’s and women’s prisons as well as youth facilities can be found inside the fences of the Westville complex, as can several rows of apartments for prison staff members and their families. One staff person told us that she chose to live inside the gates of the prison because the facility provides bus service for her child to attend the local school. She had lived somewhere outside the prison walls but had chosen to move into the staff housing in the prison complex for reasons of convenience, despite the fact that she does not like her job.

The guard at the main gate to the prison knew Miranda, and she signed a register before we drove through the entrance to the facility. The prison complex is vast, and we did not even come close to seeing all of it. Miranda parked near the women’s prison, and when we entered the building, we each signed a sheet at the front desk. We did not show identification, answer any questions, or get patted down. A guard gave visitors’  badges to me and Miranda (but not Andy because apparently men don’t need them at the women’s prison), unlocked a metal gate, and let us into the prison. Everyone there seemed to know Miranda, and undoubtedly her long relationship with this particular prison made entering it far easier than it would be for other people. In Michigan prisons, even when we know the staff well, my students and I still face some pretty significant security measures–advance security clearance, identification, metal detectors, pat downs, lots of questions about our plans for the day. It felt very odd to be able to gain access to a prison so easily in a country so vigilant about security. Miranda reminded me that the folks who run prisons in South Africa can be every bit as capricious and changeable as their U.S. counterparts. Prison authorities at Westville have have moved or cancelled performances and activities at the last minute, and Miranda has seen other groups try unsuccessfully to gain access to this facility which she and her students enter with relative ease. Prisons are nothing if not full of contradictions.

A prison staff member named Veli has worked with Miranda for many years, helping to set up the theatre workshops inside the facility. Veli’s brother had held the same position at this prison, and when he passed away, she took his place. When I asked Veli if it had taken time to build a solid working relationship with Miranda, she said that she took up right where her brother left off. He had had a positive relationship with Miranda and her work in the prison, and Veli saw no reason to feel differently. Veli and Miranda led us up a flight of stairs and into a small activities room with several desks with sewing machines on them. The theatre workshop is on hiatus for a few weeks but will start up again in late August or early September. Unfortunately our travel schedule wouldn’t permit us to make the trip during a time when we could see the workshop in action. Instead we had a conversation with Miranda, Veli, and one of the incarcerated women (whom I’ll call P.) who has been doing theatre in the prison for nearly all of the fourteen years Miranda has been facilitating workshops there.

When P. came into the room, she greeted each of us with big hugs, and I was startled at how comfortable she felt in doing that, particularly with Andy–a man she’d never met. In the U.S. physical contact is strictly monitored, particularly between visitors and prisoners and between people of opposite genders. Often women in prison do not feel especially safe around men, and in the U.S. it would be even more unlikely for a prisoner and visitor to have physical contact with a prison staff person in the room. We didn’t see any male staff members working at the women’s prison, and Miranda tells me that very few male staff work there. That might explain the apparent lack of restrictions on physical touch. However, Miranda also reports that the number of incarcerated women in South Africa who report having been sexually or physically abused is above the global average, which hovers around 80%. This refers to abuse incurred prior to incarceration. I would assume that the predominantly single gender environment in female prisons in South Africa greatly reduces the amount of sexual abuse that women endure during incarceration. After reading an early draft of this blog post, Miranda also noted that P.’s hugging is a cultural signifier of her role as an older woman in the prison, a mother figure. A younger woman would not have hugged us so effortlessly, but P. did so as a way of showing that she trusts us and that we are welcome in her space.

The three of them–Miranda, Veli, and P.–asked about our work and why we were interested in theatre in prisons, and then they told us about some of the workshops and performances they have done together. Miranda teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in which students come into the prison to do theatre work. Her students will sometimes develop a performance of their own for the prisoners as a way of starting a conversation about a relevant social issue. At other times, the students work with the prisoners to devise an original performance–sometimes in response to the performance the students brought into the prison.

P. loves to sing, and music is an integral part of each performance. Most South African prisons have a choir inside them, and once a year the national Correctional Services will pay to bring the incarcerated choirs from across the country to the same prison to have a choral competition. This astounded me. The only time that I’ve ever heard of prisoners going from one institution to another to perform in the U.S. was for a huge play called The Life of Jesus Christ at Angola prison in Louisiana. For that production, which in recent years has been revived once or twice a year, women from a prison a few towns away are brought to Angola to rehearse and perform in this enormous passion play. That only requires coordination between two prisons.  I can’t imagine what a logistical feat it must be to move incarcerated choirs (presumably men and women) from all corners of South Africa to a single location for a competition. A 2007 documentary film called The Choir follows one group of prisoners to the National Prison Choir Competition.  I haven’t seen the film (if anyone knows how to acquire a copy, I’d be grateful for the information), but I’d love to see both the film and the actual competition itself some day.

Apparently most of the theatre work that these folks have done together in Westville has dealt with social issues of one kind or another, including HIV/AIDS, gender discrimination, and the poor treatment of prisoners. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, this is not a thing we can do in most of the U.S. because prison administrators feel that any critique of the system could lead to unrest or violence amongst the prison population. This does not seem to be the case in South Africa–or at least not in the work of theatre folks and prisoners I met. I was trying to explain to Miranda, Veli, and P. that we can’t even mention prison guards in our plays, and Veli said that if they couldn’t make fun of the guards, they wouldn’t have ever a play.  Mocking the guards has been a major point of comic relief in their productions, and for the most part the guards don’t seem to mind.

In one notable production the women in the prison were responding to the terrible conditions at the prison clinic. The AIDS epidemic was claiming many lives, and often the bodies of prisoners remained in beds at the clinic for days before being removed for burial. This meant that other women confined to the clinic would have to lay for days on end next to the dead bodies of their friends. The play that the women devised about this situation included a character of a particularly unkind nurse in the clinic, and Miranda didn’t realize until the performance of the play that the nurse in question was not only a real person but was being represented in such a way that she was totally recognizable to the entire prison audience. The nurse was in the audience of the performance along with 250 incarcerated women, and at some point during the play, the nurse got up and fled the courtyard where the play was taking place. As the nurse ran away, the women in the audience all raised their arms above their head and shouted “la la la la la,” mocking her in unison. In a bizarre twist of fate, that same nurse ended up becoming a prisoner at Westville sometime later, and she joined the theatre group and became a much-beloved member of the troupe.

A performance like this would have shut down a prison theatre program in the U.S., but seemingly the only enduring consequence of this at Westville is that the audiences for the group’s plays are now much smaller. Big gatherings of the entire prison population for the sake of a performance are no longer possible, but the theatre group endures.

In thinking about the theatre work at Westville, I’m struck by how much national context and culture matter in terms of what is and is not permissible inside prisons. The legacy of Apartheid in South Africa has left people throughout the country with a publicly acknowledged sense that prisons often enforce the unjust whims of the government. In the U.S. we tend to defend our own sense of righteousness and see prisons as one part of the long arm of justice, believing that the people inside them brought all the negative aspects of their confinement upon themselves. During our trip, someone in South Africa told me that everyone in the country knows someone in prison or someone who was incarcerated at some point. South Africa has the highest incarceration rate in the continent, but the U.S. has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yet most of the folks I meet in my own country genuinely believe that they have never known someone who served time. This can’t possibly be true of the majority of us, but the cultural silence and stigmas surrounding incarceration prevent us from having meaningful conversations about it. South Africans continue to struggle with myriad social problems, including mass incarceration, but their ability to speak openly about this particular type of injustice is one of the things that made it possible for a former prisoner to become president and lead the country into a new era of democracy. This ability to acknowledge the problem of mass incarceration fueled by racism has certainly not led to greater justice or a significant reduction in the prison population, but I can’t help feeling like the ability to name and discuss this issue has to be a step in the right direction. How can we move towards a higher form of justice unless we can honestly describe both the world in which we now live and–to paraphrase Ghandi–the change we would like to see in our lives.

In Rio with Teatro na Prisaõ, or Romeo and Juliet Live to See Another Day

Knowing that we wouldn’t be able to take anything but our passports into the prison with us today, we weren’t able to take our cameras to get pictures of our latest adventures.  This photo was taken a few days ago when Liz Raynes was

standing in front of the Shakespeare mural which adorns the side of UniRio’s theatre building.  This image is apropos for this post because our morning was spent watching the Bard’s work get reinterpreted by incarcerated women.

We rose early today in order to eat breakfast and get to UniRio’s campus by 7:45 AM to meet Professor Natália Fiche and her students.  Fiche and the Teatro na Prisaõ program have been doing theatre work in prisons for the last fifteen years.  Every Tuesday the program goes into two prisons on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro–one women’s facility and one men’s.  We visited the women’s prison this week and will go to the men’s next week.

When we arrived at the prison, we got off the bus while those who were headed to the men’s prison continued on to another location.  Fiche and five of her students led us to a large metal gate where a guard slid open a small panel just large enough for him to look through.  Then he opened up a door in the gate and admitted us two at a time, searching the large bags of costumes that the UniRio students carried with them as he admitted them.  Andy, Flores, and I were near the back of the group, and as those in front of us were being admitted through the door, the guard decided that Andy and Hector would not be allowed to enter because they were wearing shorts–albeit long ones.  Someone dug through the costumes and found two pairs of stretch pants that they could wear.  Both pairs of pants were bright pink, but the guys were very good sports about wearing them for our visit to the prison.  The guards confiscated the offending shorts and held them at the front gate until the end of our visit.

Professor Fiche told us that they had never given her a problem about people wearing shorts before.  Apparently, prisons all over the world have this in common; the dress code seems to shift often and arbitrarily so that visitors cannot possibly keep up with the rules.  We face this all the time in the United States.  In fact, during the last year when my family members have visited my father in a Texas prison, the dress code for female visitors has become much more highly regulated than ever before.  Now when the guards decide that a woman’s clothes are too tight or low cut, have too much writing on them, or are deemed unfit for any other reason, they force women to wear blue hospital gowns over their clothes.  Visitors to prisons, particularly wives and girlfriends visiting their loved ones, tend to want to look their best and have often been very careful in dressing themselves for the precious few hours they can spend with the people they love.  My mother and I have witnessed at least two women forced to wear the hospital gowns burst into tears when the men they loved arrived in the visiting room; the women’s shame and grief becomes palpable to all visiting families around them.  If Andy or Hector were ashamed of their makeshift outfits today, they did not show it.  They laughed good-naturedly about the incident and moved right along with their day.  In this case, the shaming force that prisons often inflict upon their inhabitants and visitors did not spoil our trip.

Once we got inside the prison gate, a guard took our passports, asked us to sign the visitor’s log book, and had us walk through a metal detector.  We then followed another guard across a courtyard and into a cement building.  The room in which Teatro na Prisaõ meets is concrete on all surfaces, like the rest of the building, and has a small raised stage at one end.  The dozen or so incarcerated women in the group welcomed the UniRio students, Professor Fiche, and even us visitors with smiles and hugs.  Those of us who have done work in U.S. prisons were surprised to see that even with a guard in the room, male volunteers and female prisoners were allowed to hug without repercussions.  All of the guards we saw beyond the front gate were women, and at least one of them stayed in the back of the room the whole time we were there to watch what was going on.  We gathered from the UniRio students that this is not usually the case; during their regular workshops, the guards don’t bother to watch.  Because we were there visiting from abroad, the workshop was not only watched by a guard but also visited by the warden.  Professor Fiche had previously received approval over email to video record  today’s workshop, and she had set up a tripod with a camera on it at the start of the workshop.  The warden came into the workshop shortly after we got started to tell Fiche that she was denied permission to film after all.

Teatro na Prisaõ uses both improvisatory games based on theatre of the oppressed and traditional theatrical scripts as starting points for its work.  In the past they have not held performances for audiences but have done theatre exercises strictly for themselves within the space of the workshop.  Now Professor Fiche is working to try to gain permission from the prison authorities to allow the women to perform twice: once for their families and once for the other women in the prison.  Whether or not they will be able to do this, they are currently in rehearsals for an original devised performance based on Romeo and Juliet.

The UniRio students and incarcerated women set up chairs to make an audience for us visitors, and they put a small partition upstage right.  This served as an area for costume changes and also became Juliet’s balcony when she would poke her head over the top of the partition to talk to Romeo.  The women had a great time with the costumes that the UniRio folks had brought, and I have to say that the costumes themselves were very diverse and rather impressive–well worth the women’s enthusiasm.  They even had makeshift swords made out of paper machê for the fight scenes.

While the women were trying on costumes and the debate over filming the workshop was happening, we had some time to talk to the workshop participants before they began their rehearsal.  One woman told me about her five children, two of whom have died.  Of the remaining three, two live with her mother.  In my limited Portuguese, I didn’t understand what she was telling me about the whereabouts of the third child, but it seemed important to this woman that we know that she had a life and family beyond the walls of the prison.

This workshop is using the story of Romeo and Juliet but not Shakespeare’s text–even in Portuguese translation.  The UniRio folks have given the women a basic outline of the plot, and the women improvise scenes using Shakespeare’s characters and plot–or at least as much of the plot as they liked.

This particular adaptation of Romeo and Juliet begins on the streets of Verona where the Montagues and Capulets are sizing each other up for a fight.  This opening scene was very funny because one actor in particular (I believe she was a Capulet) was doing such a good job of goading her opponents with gestures and facial expressions.  As in Shakespeare’s original, Prince Escalus (the lead government official in Verona) appears and stops the fight with a speech about keeping the peace.  The rival families dispersed with another round of intimidating looks and hand motions.

Then the whole cast attends the masquerade ball at the Capulet residence.  Everyone appeared in sequined mardi gras masks and danced to baile funk music as though they were at a modern day nightclub.  The cast was obviously having a great time and seemed surprised and excited by this choice of music.  The UniRio students had brought a small boom box and played a number of selections of background music at different points in the play.  Apparently in prior rehearsals, they’d been playing more classical dance music, and the women in the workshop found it boring and wouldn’t do much dancing.  With baile funk as their inspiration, the dance party became a whole lot of fun for the cast and audience alike.

Romeo and Juliet fall in love at the dance, and when Romeo leaves the party, he is so overjoyed that his happiness is positively contagious.  He runs to his friends to sing Juliet’s praises and then collapses in a lovelorn heap downstage center to contemplate the many virtues of his love.  Juliet’s head pops up over the partition in the back of the stage, and she begins a soliloquy about Romeo’s virtues.  He quickly leaps to his feet and runs to stand beneath her balcony.  They have an enthusiastic exchange and run off shortly thereafter to be wed by the friar.  The two women playing Romeo and Juliet were allowed to share what appeared to be a pretty decent kiss, albeit with Juliet’s wedding veil between them–a level of physical contact that I would not expect to be allowed in prison theatre in the U.S.

At this point in the story, we encounter a most excellent bit of comedy along with a casting change.  In order to give more women the opportunity to have significant roles, a new actor takes over for Juliet just after the marriage scene.  An UniRio student named Paolo had been telling me about the double casting before we arrived at the prison.  He referred to the first actor as “the long haired Juliet” and the second as “the short haired Juliet.”  The long haired Juliet played the character as demure and a bit shy, while the short haired Juliet was far more outgoing and demonstrative in her love of Romeo.  The first time we see the short haired Juliet, she is helping Romeo to sneak into her bedroom so that they can consummate their wedding night.  She darts out from behind the upstage right partition, grabs Romeo by the arm, and drags him into her bedroom.  A number of actors were hidden behind the partition, and they enacted Romeo and Juliet’s love making by throwing articles of clothing into the air along with whoops and shouts.  We, the audience, loved it.

Romeo emerges from the wedding night all aglow with his love for Juliet and stumbles into the street fight that kills both Tybalt (Juliet’s cousin) and Mercutio (Romeo’s dear friend).  Then Juliet distraught by this news takes a sleeping potion to fake her death.  Romeo finds her, believes her to be dead, and then proceeds to get falling down drunk.  (The women unanimously disliked Shakespeare’s ending to the tragedy and decided to change it.)  Romeo passes out, and Juliet is first worried that Romeo is dead, then very irritated at Romeo for having gotten drunk.  She shakes him awake and forces him to his feet where he stumbles around still drunk and trying to explain himself, yet overjoyed by Juliet’s unexpected recovery.  The families reconcile.  Another baile funk dance party ensues.  Curtain call.

After the applause died down, the women and UniRio facilitators cleared away our chairs and formed a circle.  Not only did they include all of us in their circle, they deliberately spaced themselves between us so that each visitor held hands on both sides with an incarcerated woman.  The music began again, and one of the UniRio students jumped into the circle and started dancing.  We all cheered.  He pulled one of the incarcerated women into the middle of the circle and then exited to rejoin the group so that the woman in the middle could have the spotlight.  We danced this way for quite a while, each person in the middle bringing a new person into the center of the circle before exiting to rejoin the group.  Then we held hands again, and Prof. Fiche talked to the members of the group about how important their weekly attendance at the workshop is.  A short discussion ensued, and then we broke the circle.  Out of what felt like nowhere, a table appeared with food and drinks that the UniRio students had brought with them to the prison, and we were all encouraged to eat and drink as we mingled and talked about the performance.  When the food and drink were gone, we all hugged and thanked one another before we left–the women heading off into a different area of the prison as we made our way back to the front gate to reclaim Hector and Andy’s confiscated shorts.

We gathered at a little store across the street from the prison, shared more refreshments, and petted a very friendly stray cat while we waited for the UniRio bus to return from the men’s prison to collect us.  On the hour-long bus ride back, the UniRio students and Prof. Fiche shared snacks with us and much conversation about the theatre work that each of us do, both inside and outside prisons.  Someone produced a tambourine from a backpack and played it expertly as all the UniRio students sang loudly in Portuguese.  We arrived back at the university full of good spirits.  We had planned to meet up with this group again on campus two days from now for their weekly Thursday class in which they plan their activities for the coming week’s workshop at the prison, but as part of the nationwide demonstrations and protests in which many Brazilians are currently engaged, all teachers and students at public schools, including those at UniRio, will be on strike this Thursday.  Fortunately we’ll be here another week and can attend a Thursday class after our trip to the men’s prison next Tuesday.

For now, we’re left to ponder this Romeo and Juliet who chose to live rather than die.  When Jodie and I traveled to Cuba shortly after the release of our book in 2011, we saw the Ballet Nacional de Cuba perform a version of Swan Lake in which the swan Odette not only survives but marries Sigfried and has a big dance in which the chorus of swans become ladies in waiting.  After seeing both this take on Romeo and Juliet inside a Brazilian prison and the Cuban Swan Lake, I cannot keep from wondering if unexpected happy endings are signs of resistance.  When one cannot secure one’s own freedom from incarceration or an oppressive government, then perhaps imagining worlds in which Romeo, Juliet, and Odette can overcome their previously inevitable tragedies gives performers and audiences alike a sense of hope.  We cannot always escape the devastating situations in which we find ourselves, but, like another great character from classical drama–Segismundo in Calderon de la Barca’s La vida es sueño–at least we can dream, especially when we’re in the theatre.

Radio story about Illinois performance of Doin’ Time

Readers,
I sincerely apologize for not yet finding a moment to write about the incredible experiences I had performing Doin’ Time last month at Illinois State University and at Lincoln Correctional Center, but I promise to provide an update soon.  In the mean time, here is a link to a radio interview I did with the local NPR station in Bloomington just prior to my performances there.
Please note that at the end of the radio interview I stated the wrong name of the activist organization I was describing.  The organization I’m actually describing at this moment in the interview is Our Children’s Place, which is an amazing group of folks in North Carolina who provide support for the children of prisoners.  The organization I named instead is another great activist organization called All of Us or None, which serves prisoners and reentrants nationwide.  Both groups are doing vital and difficult work, and I am proud to support their efforts.

More soon. . .

Performing at Illinois State Univ. and Lincoln Correctional for Women Sept. 19 and 21

About a year ago, a woman named Sherrin Fitzer contacted me out of the blue, asking if she could get a copy of the script of my play Doin’ Time to share with a group of women in an Illinois prison.  Sherrin works at Lincoln Correctional Center for Women and leads a theatre troupe comprised of incarcerated women; they call their ensemble Acting Out.  Sherrin and I exchanged many emails and conjured up a plan to collaborate.  Janet Wilson, director of the School of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University in Bloomington, has collaborated with Sherrin and the women of Acting Out for many years, and Janet extended an invitation to me to perform Doin’ Time on her campus.  With support from many corners of the university, including the School of Theatre and Dance, Latino Studies, Crossroad’s Project, Honor’s Program, School of Social Work and the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences, Janet and Sherrin arranged a week-long residency for me:

• On Tuesday, September 18, 2012, from 10 AM to noon, I will lead “Writing Social Justice: A Writing Workshop for the Community” in Stevenson Hall, room 133.
• On Tuesday, September 18, 2012, from 5 to 6 PM in Centennial West 207, I will speak about UNC’s Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (MURAP) and diversity issues in higher education.
• On Wednesday, September 19, 2012, at 7:30 PM, I will perform Doin’ Time in Westhoff Theatre.  Click here for more information about the performance.

My time at Illinois State will be very exciting, but what will happen at Lincoln Correctional later that week is the most amazing opportunity I’ve had in eight years of touring with this play.  The women in the Acting Out troupe have read my script and written their own monologues about visitation and families.  Sherrin has been emailing me drafts of their monologues, and in this manner the women and I have been able to respond to one another’s work.  They have written some very powerful pieces, which they’ve been rehearsing with Sherrin.  Doin’ Time‘s director, the incomparable Joseph Megel, will travel to Illinois with me, and we’ll spend all day on Thursday, September 20th in rehearsals inside the prison with the women of Acting Out.  We’ll weave their eleven monologues into my play, and we’ll all perform together on the afternoon of Friday, September 21st for an audience of 150 to 200 incarcerated women.  Two more incarcerated women will run the tech cues for the show.
I have performed in a handful of prisons now in the U.S., Ireland, and Canada, and I’ve seen prisoners perform plays of their own in Michigan, North Carolina, and Louisiana.  I’ve also conducted and participated in improvisational theatre workshops in quite a few prisons, but this will be the first time that I’ve actually performed in a play with incarcerated theatre makers and the first time that anyone ever wrote or performed new material in response to my play Doin’ Time.  I have never performed Doin’ Time with other actors, and though I haven’t yet met any of the women of Acting Out, I am already deeply moved by their words and their willingness to enter into this adventure with me.
If you are going to be near Bloomington this week, please come to the show!  I’ll be posting more about my time in Illinois after my trip there.

 

Judith Clark: A Study in Long Sentences, Rehabilitation, and Prisoners’ Children; a post by Ashley Lucas

The cover story of the January 15, 2012, New York Times Magazine describes the life of former Weather Underground member Judith Clark, who has been incarcerated by the New York Department of Corrections since 1983.  Clark is serving a seventy-five year sentence, and according to writer Tom Robbins’ account in the Times as well as many prison officials who know Clark personally, she has changed dramatically during the decades of her incarceration.  In fact, in every statement I have ever read from someone who actually knows or has spent time with Clark in recent years, she is not only a model prisoner but a peacekeeper and a caretaker within Bedford Hills (the prison where she has lived for most of her incarceration).  She has a long record of teaching other prisoners and of volunteering in service programs at Bedford Hills–including the infant care program, the HIV/AIDS program, and the program which trains service dogs which are eventually given to disabled people outside the prison–which drastically improve the quality of other people’s lives.  Judith Clark has managed far more effectively than most people, in or out of prisons, to give back to those around her and to be a positive and sustaining force in the lives of others.

The passing of time changes people, often drastically, and the youth we lock up today will not be the same people in twenty or thirty years.  This is a critique that anti-death penalty activists often make; the person being executed is more often than not a very different human being than the one who committed the crime or sat before a judge at sentencing.  Is it just to continue to punish someone who is not only repentant but who has a great deal to contribute to the world outside prisons?  Is this the most useful way to spend New York taxpayers’ money or a deterrent to crime?  Decidedly not.

The bigger question here is one about the purpose that prisons serve and whether or not they adequately fulfill their function in our society.  As criminologist Stephen Richards declared, “A successful corrections system doesn’t grow.  If they were correcting anybody, they’d shrink.”  Yet incarceration rates continue to soar.  We are warehousing 2.3 million people in the U.S. and making no feasible plans to reintegrate this huge population safely back into our homes and neighborhoods, though the vast majority of them will be released from prison someday.  We supposedly believe that prisoners pay a debt to society by serving time and by thoughtfully contemplating their wrongdoings, which was the expressed purpose of the Quaker penitentiaries–our nation’s first prisons.  No amount of time served can undo past crimes, so the best use of our penal system would be to help shape those who committed prior offenses into law-abiding citizens who understand their past transgressions and commit themselves to living peacefully and productively in the future.  Judith Clark exemplifies the sort of transformation that can occur when a prisoner understands in meaningful ways how the actions that landed her behind bars had a negative impact on the lives of others.  We are no safer because she continues to live behind bars today.

Judith Clark is one of a great many U.S. prisoners who have served multiple decades behind bars.  We are locking up so many elderly prisoners that nursing home and hospice care programs, like the one in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, are becoming necessary.  Angola actually has a prisoner-run organization for a group they call “longtermers”–men who have served twenty-five or more years.  Since Louisiana has some of the harshest sentencing laws in the U.S. and a natural life without parole sentence, the longtermer population has grown to over 500 men.  The Human Rights Club–another prisoner organization at Angola–helps indigent prisoners, the elderly, and longtermers.  As you can imagine, these club members stay very busy trying to tend to the needs of such a large population with so many urgent needs.  The Human Rights Club aims to bring dignity and a measure of comfort and recognition to men who have survived for so long in such an inhospitable environment.  Every other year the Human Rights Club sponsors a celebration called Longtermers Day where the men enduring these interminable sentences can gather together.  Many of them, even old friends and family members living in the same prison, have no opportunity to see one another during the rest of the year because of the ways in which the prison segregates groups of men based on where they are housed.  Volunteers from the free world and prisoners’ family members are invited to spend the day inside the prison, mingling with the longtermers and enjoying the food and performances that brighten the occasion.  I was twenty-five years old the first time that my mother and I attended Longtermers Day.  Several members of the Angolite prison news magazine staff had invited us, and we found ourselves in a chow hall densely filled with men who had been in prison longer than I had been alive.  Few family members attended the event, and many men told us how the years in prison had eroded their relationships with their families entirely.  We saw quite a few very frail, elderly men, several of them in wheelchairs.  One man explained to my mother that he had a life sentence for stealing a toaster–the result of a harsh mandatory sentencing law for repeat offenders.  Many of these longtermers were too ill or weak to have harmed anyone even if they wanted to.  Many were children when they entered prison and had never had the opportunity to live as responsible adults.  Others had stories more like Judith Clark’s; they had entered prison angry and over the long years had come to understand their crimes and their lives very differently.  I see no utility in such prolonged detention.  If any of these longtermers remain unfit to return to free society, it is because we have not adequately helped them to prepare.  Locking up so many people for multiple decades makes no sense financially, morally, or practically, and in doing so we irreparably damage many lives  beyond the thousands of people serving these long sentences.  In a different way, their families serve this time with them.

Judith Clark has a daughter.  Harriet Clark was so young at the time that her mother went to prison that she likely cannot remember a time when her mother was free.  As Nell Bernstein has argued in her book All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated, prisons punish children who have not been convicted of any offense alongside their imprisoned parents.  Much legal and popular rhetoric condemns the incarcerated as having lost their rights to spend time with their loved ones because of the behavior that sent them to prison.  The law fails, as Bernstein so rightly asserts, to examine the rights of prisoners’ children and to even engage the question of whether or not having access to their parents should be protected.  Prisons focus solely on punishing those deemed unfit to live among us, and we rarely examine the impact that mass incarceration has on those who are not convicted of any crime, those who do not live in prisons but whose family lives, economic and emotional stability, and self-preservation are tied to prisons, courts, and police.  Harriet Clark and I have both fared far better–in terms of economic stability, access to education, and the avoidance of our own incarceration–than the average prisoner’s child, undoubtedly because we were each left in the capable hands of other responsible adults who were able to provide and care for us.  I do not know Harriet Clark and cannot speak for her, but if the Times article accurately represents her, she loves her mother dearly and remains very connected to her.  Though she is now an adult, I believe that she deserves–indeed she is owed by the state which sentenced Judith Clark with the outrageous and impractical sentence of seventy-five years–time with her mother in the free world.

A number of progressive organizations throughout the U.S. are working to implement programs to help maintain the bonds between incarcerated parents and their children.  The most ambitious of these initiatives enable mothers and young children to live together in a facility which provides parenting classes, substance abuse treatment, and early childhood education all under the same roof.  The Texas Observer‘s January 2012 cover story profiles the Baby and Mother Bonding Initiative (also known as BAMBI).  Opening this facility in April 2010 is perhaps the only sensible thing that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has done in decades.  Thus far, not a single graduate of the BAMBI program has been sent back to prison since her release–a significant victory considering that the last Bureau of Justice National Recidivism Study (published in 1994 and rather out of date now) showed that around 67% of those release from prison ended up behind bars again within three years.  BAMBI and other programs like it are very likely to help prevent the future incarceration of prisoners’ children as well.

It’s time for Judith Clark and many, many others who have served decades in prison to be allowed to live a better life, to actively give back to the world outside prisons, to spend time with the children and families who have waited these many years for the simple pleasure of a conversation held without guard supervision.  If we believe that our corrections system is in any way functional, we must grant longtermers the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities to live better than they did before their time in prison.

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!

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.

RWW Reading Today in Durham and Forthcoming Book from Rhodessa Jones, a post by Ashley Lucas

On Tuesday of this week, Jodie and I read excerpts of Razor Wire Women for an enthusiastic crowd of professors, students, and activists at the Kenan Theatre at UNC Chapel Hill.  Thank you to David Navalinsky and the rest of the staff in the Department of Dramatic Art for setting up the theatre for our reading and to the folks from UNC’s Bull’s Head Bookstore for selling copies of our book at the event!

We will do another such event at the Regulator Bookshop on Ninth St. in Durham, NC, tonight at 7 PM.  Come join us if you’re in the area!

I received an email announcement this week from Cultural Odyssey–the performing arts umbrella organization which includes the work of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women.  For those of you who do not know about the Medea Project and have not seen them perform, I highly recommend that you get to San Francisco to see the work they do as soon as you can.  Scholar Rena Fraden wrote an excellent book, Imagining Medea, published by UNC Press in 2001, about the theatre work being done by director, playwright, and performer Rhodessa Jones with the women at the San Francisco County Jail.  Now Rhodessa herself has a new book forthcoming in 2012 (though I can’t yet find any information about what press will be releasing the book).  Here’s an excerpt from the press release Cultural Odyssey sent out over email:

RHODESSA JONES’ upcoming book release

Nudging The Memory:

Creating Performance with The Medea

Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women – A Theater Handbook

“Nudging the Memory” is Rhodessa Jones’ first book! It is a response to the frequent inquiries from students, teachers, social workers, drama and family therapists, representatives of law enforcement, and of course artists/activists throughout the world regarding the work she has conducted with The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women locally, nationally, and internationally. “Nudging the Memory” will be a theater handbook of performance exercises, writing explorations, and performance material that is used in the creation of autobiographical theatre for female offenders, as a means of re-entry and restorative justice, all as a part of a woman’s journey “home”. This document will aid others in giving voice to the voiceless, and empowering the powerless, hopefully ennobling all of us.

For further information about Jones’ new book, click here.

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.

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.

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!

Drama Therapy in Prison Contexts by Ashley Lucas

When Jodie forwarded me the link to a news story about the use of drama therapy in a women’s prison in Lebanon, I was reminded yet again of the power of the arts in difficult times and places.  Theatre has been used for thousands of years to document, describe, and reflect the most violent, arduous, and incomprehensible of human actions and emotions.  In the past few decades, many trained therapists have learned to use theatre as an effective tool to help patients tap into their traumatic life experiences and productively think about, discuss, and reenact events which shape their current emotional states and behaviors.

The Geese Theatre Company is perhaps the best known group which uses drama therapy in correctional settings, and they have worked with youth and adults in prisons as well as prison staff members in countries around the globe.  Though I have not seen their work personally, a certified drama therapist friend of mine who has studied their techniques uses them to great success with the court-involved youth with whom she works in North Carolina.

It should be noted that all theatre happening in and around prisons is not necessarily drama therapy.  Though many people casually attribute therapeutic qualities to all artistic activity, especially when its conducted by or with disadvantaged populations, real arts therapy requires a licensed therapist who is trained to guide people through the emotional and psychological issues raised by particular artistic exercises.

My admiration extends to those practicing drama therapists who take on the many challenges faced by the incarcerated and those who work with them.  May this work bring about greater healing and peace in our troubled world.