What Prisoners Create When They Create Art

By Jean Trounstine

For 32 years, James Riva, 55, has been incarcerated at Old Colony Correctional in Bridgewater, Mass., serving a life sentence for murder. Riva says he collects 300 to 400 four-leaf clovers every summer and dries them. “They bring no good luck or bad” but they give him some “peace,” he writes at betweenthebars.org, the blog founded by two MIT whiz kids.  Artwork by James Riva. Photo courtesy betweenthebars.org

In one of Riva’s 12 or so posts, he wrote a short story about a disturbing relationship between a mother and son that includes the details of a brutal crime. But while his haunting words paint an image, the artwork that accompanies the story shows the mystery, power, and transcendence of art. Perhaps influenced by Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, it hasn’t received a comment yet, but when it does, Riva can interact with the outside world—online.

Creating art and sharing it with the world is a way for prisoners to assert themselves back into humanity. As Supreme Court Justice’s Thurgood Marshall wrote about prisoner rights: “When the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality … nor is his quest for self-realization concluded.”

In a paper titled, “Mediative Collaborative Positioning: The Case of Prisoner Blogs,” researchers Mirjana Dedaic and Katherine Dale write that blogs “open a new space” for prisoners while giving them the chance to challenge their confinement by “stepping beyond the bars” into cyberspace. There, they can be educators, critics, analysts, storytellers, and in the case of art, they’re seen for their talent instead of for their crimes.

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(This article first appeared on BostonMag.com and is excerpted here by permission.)

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Jean Trounstine

Jean Trounstine is an author/editor of five published books, a professor at Middlesex Community College, and a prison activist. She worked at Framingham Women’s Prison for 10 years, where she directed eight plays and published Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison about that work. She takes apart the criminal justice system brick by brick at jeantrounstine.com where she blogs bi-weekly at “Justice with Jean.”

Prison Parenting Program Boosts Visitation

Dianne-Frazee Walker

The most significant benefit of the Inside Out Parenting Program offered in Oregon prisons is increased visitation which results in a lower recidivism rate. Research has proven that inmates who receive abundant visitation are less likely to reoffend when they return to the community.   Photo courtesy tracyschiffmann.com

Parenting Inside Out (PIO) is a parenting program offered in Oregon prisons for over ten years. The program was initiated by the Oregon Social Learning Center and the Oregon Department of Corrections. The reason why PIO works is the program encourages individuals to visit incarcerated family members often. The positive outcome is family relationships are nourished, which provides motivation for incarcerated parents to reconnect with their children.

The Oregon Social Learning Center conducted a randomized controlled study to test the outcomes of (PIO) participants. Empirical results of the study provided the impact PIO has on incarcerated parents. The study presents evidence that both male and female inmate parents who took PIO classes improved their parenting skills and relationships with their children.

359 incarcerated parents participated in the experiment. Both mothers and fathers were randomly divided into two groups. Half of the parents participated in parenting classes and the other half did not.

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What Massachusetts Prisoners Blog About

By Jean Trounstine

Prisoners are probably one of the last groups anyone would expect to have access to their own blog. Some might argue that they should never get such a privilege. But keeping in mind that more than 95 percent of prisoners will one day return to society, we might consider how we want them to return—remorseful, sure, but also educated and aware of what’s going on in the world they re-enter. That’s how to help them become productive citizens.

A few progressive programs around the country are stepping up to give prisoners tools to tell their stories online, add their perspective to the conversation, receive feedback from readers, and get up to speed with 2012 technology. Some San Quentin prisoners in California express their ideas through hundreds of questions posted on Quora like “What advice would you give to your 10-year-old self?” and “What does it feel like to kill someone?” In Maine, prisoners mail letters to family and friends which then get posted with comments on The Political Prisoner Blog.  Photo courtesy cartoonstock.com

In Massachusetts, MIT has grabbed the lead in this area, thanks to its Center for Civic Media. Founded by PhD students Charlie DeTar and Benjamin Mako Hill, Between the Bars bills itself as “a weblog platform for people in prison through which 1 percent of Americans who are in prison can tell their stories.”

The site has more than 5,000 actual documents from prisoners, some incarcerated in Massachusetts, many from all over the country. Most of the documents are uncategorized, but about 500 fall into several areas: cartoons, letters, essays, and poems. Comments from readers are snail-mailed back to the prisoners, who get a chance to respond. Not exactly the instantaneous world we know, but a boon for offsetting the isolation that prisoners often feel. 

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(This article first appeared on BostonMag.com and is excerpted here by permission.)

___________________

Jean Trounstine

Jean Trounstine is an activist, teacher and author/editor of five published books, including the highly praised Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison. She worked at Framingham Women’s Prison for ten years where she directed eight plays, and in 1991, she co-founded the women’s branch of Changing Lives Through Literature, an internationally-known reading intervention for probationers.  She has written numerous articles about her work, most recently for Boston Magazine: “For the Massachusetts Parole Board, It’s Time for a Change,” November, 2012. She takes apart the criminal justice system brick by brick by blogging for Boston Daily, the Rag Blog and at “Justice With Jean,” www.jeantrounstine.com.

BU’s Prison Education Program Thrives Despite Pell Grant Ban

By Emily Payne

Boston University students know their acronyms, and from their college names to where to grab some lunch, it seems as if everything is shortened to a cryptic, insider code. Here’s one that is less known: PEP. Type that into the BU search bar and you’ll find pages on the Pep Band, Professional Education Programs, and Pre-Engineering Programs. But “bu.edu/PEP” will take you to a place where students are less likely to visit: the BU Prison Education Program. Turns out that Boston University is one of the leaders of prison education in Massachusetts, a sector of higher education that has been struggling to stay afloat.

Back in 1994, Congress passed a major crime law amendment which banned prisoners from receiving Pell Grants, a major source of federal aid. The misconception of the time was that giving prisoners Pell Grants reduced the amount of aid available to non-criminals. In reality, according to The Real Cost of Prisons Project, only 25,000 of 4.7 million available Pell Grants had been distributed to prisoners in that year, which comes out to about 0.5% of the funds. Nonetheless, because of the controversy surrounding the cause and the many misconceptions of its use, the aid diminished.

But why should we care if criminals get an education, you say? After all, we all stayed out of prison (for the most part) so that we could go to a university, receive our degrees, obtain successful jobs, etc. Well, according to a report of the Institute of Higher Education in 2005, higher education for prisoners “remains a crucial strategy in efforts to reduce recidivism and slow the growth of the nation’s incarcerated population.” Basically, a higher education provides an outlet for prisoners and gives them options upon release. They leave prison in a better position to hold a job and become an upstanding citizen, rather than revert back to the lifestyle that led them to prison to begin with.

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Innovative Prison Program Teaches Man and Dog

By Dianne Frazee-Walker

At Wakulla Correctional Institute in Crawfordville, North Florida, inmates and man’s best friend both get a second chance. Inmates locked up for various serious offenses are transformed by training canines that they have something in common with. Both inmates and dogs had behavior problems that removed them from society. The dogs were facing euthanization for not conforming to the rules. The inmates were facing time behind bars for breaking the law. Both inmates and dogs had a future that looked bleak.  

Susan Yelton and Cathy Sherman, members of Citizens for Humane Animal Treatment, Crawfordville, NF, are responsible for initiating an innovative dog training program at Wakulla Correctional Institute in Crawfordville, Florida. Their idea originated from a program in Texas, Paws for Prison. 

When Yelton and Sherman decided to ascertain whether a dog training program would work in North Florida, their first challenge was convincing Russell Hosford, warden for Wakulla Correctional Institution that it was a good idea to bring misbehaved mutts from the humane society to live with inmates for two months. Hosford’s initial reaction was, "You have to be kidding me; do you mean dogs will be living in the prison barracks with the inmates?''

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Finding Meaning as an Inmate Instructor

By Andrew Chen

As an inmate tutor at a federal prison, I get one of three responses when I answer another inmate's inquiry as to where I work.  In order of increasing frequency these are: first, a shrug and a nod -- a somewhat reluctant acknowledgement that being a tutor is probably a commendable thing to be doing; second, a "Why would you want to do that?  I would not have the patience to attempt to teach a bunch of half-wits who don't want to learn anyway"; or, third, by far the most common response, "For real?  I really need some help with my math and essay writing." 

So why did I choose to become an inmate tutor, and was it a good decision?   The answer is one that requires some context.  It took me three years to move through the U.S. judicial system from arrest to arrival at my designated federal prison facility; three years of being confined to a succession of wholly indoor, steel and concrete cell blocks with perhaps a hundred other anxious federal inmates and a couple of televisions for company; three years during which there was no opportunity to do any meaningful work, or to participate in any educational or vocational courses.

It's fair to say that I'm not a typical inmate.  I'm a workaholic with two doctorate degrees, and an almost compulsive drive to always be doing something meaningful.  Watching TV and playing cards all day really didn't cut the mustard for me.  Thankfully, I was able to find enough suitable books through the prison book carts and from friends outside, to study literature and history, two subjects I had never really had the time for since leaving school.  Still, it felt like a rather self-absorbed pursuit, and I yearned to do something that would allow me to make more meaningful contributions to my newfound community, the federal prison community.

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Prison Education: A Convergence of Principles

By Kyle Barnhill

Certainly the prison education issue should be framed in the context of a battle for public opinion. Obviously politicians who influence and ultimately control prison-education policy are elected by the people: John Q. Public. So it makes sense that public sentiment regarding this issue must shift before meaningful change and progress may be made. And ironically, this can only occur one way: public education. Not public education in the sense of tax-funded education, but that of educating the public outside the classroom. Public persuasion. In essence, altering at least a small portion of their worldview. This isn't an easy task. But it is possible. 

And the premise of those who advocate educating inmates can be summed up in one metaphorical principle: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Research, studies, and hard numbers corroborate this claim when considering recidivism. There's no denying it. Education reduces recidivism and is vastly less expensive than incarceration.

Only the public doesn't know it.

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