Learning With Incarcerated Scholars

In this remarkable documentary, filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often unseen links and connections that prisons – and our system of mass incarceration – have on communities and industries all around us. Widely acclaimed, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an essential documentary, a portrait of our criminal justice system in which we never see a penitentiary.

This book explores prison arts in Australia, USA, UK, and Chile, and creates a new framework for understanding its practices. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests music, theatre, poetry, and dance can contribute to prisoner wellbeing, management, rehabilitation, and reintegration. Performing Arts in Prison represents a range of distinct perspectives on the subject, from an inspector of prisons to the voice of the prisoner. The book includes a spectrum of arts approaches and models of practice alongside theory, critical commentary, and accounts of personal experience to present a full analysis of the value and effects of creative arts in prison.

Prisons are an invisible, but dominant, part of American society: the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. In Michigan, the number of prisoners rose from 3,000 in 1970 to more than 50,000 by 2008, a shift that Buzz Alexander witnessed firsthand when he came to teach at the University of Michigan. Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? describes the University of Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a pioneering program founded in 1990 that provides university courses, a nonprofit organization, and a national network for incarcerated youth and adults in Michigan juvenile facilities and prisons. By giving incarcerated individuals an opportunity to participate in the arts, PCAP enables them to withstand and often overcome the conditions and culture of prison, the policies of an incarcerating state, and the consequences of mass incarceration.

Nicole Fleetwood enters American prisons to explore the creativity flourishing there. Though isolated and degraded, incarcerated artists produce bold works that testify to the economic and racial injustice of American punishment. These pieces, many published here for the first time, offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century.

In Arts in Corrections, the author--a poet, translator and teacher--takes readers on a chronological journey through an annotated selection of 24 of his own publications from 1981 to 2014 which recount his experiences teaching, consulting and documenting US arts programs in prisons, jails and juvenile facilities. Anyone interested in corrections and arts-in-corrections will be drawn in by the poetic sensibility Hillman brings to his writing. Readers will gain a historical and personal perspective not only into correctional arts programming in the US over the last 40 years, but also the institutional transformations in policy, culture, populations, economics, and the criminological mission expansion into other institutional settings like K-12 education. Original essays, articles, monographs and poems are interspersed with recent annotations to deliver not only a top-down view of the correctional system but also the author's personal journey of "discouragement and hope" from work conducted in approximately 200 adult and juvenile facilities in 30 states and six countries. This comprehensive book is essential reading for a broad cross-section of international readers interested in and involved in the arts-in-corrections field. With two million individuals behind bars in the US at any given time, the profile of arts programs in prisons and jails is rising and interest in criminal-justice matters more generally is increasing. This includes not only arts-in-corrections professionals, policy makers, students, researchers, advocates and academics, but professionals in multiple other fields as well as the general public.

From role-plays with street gangs in the USA to Beckett in Brixton; from opera productions with sex offenders to psychodrama with psychopaths, the book will discuss, analyse and reflect on theoretical notions and practical applications of theatre for and with the incarcerated. Theatre in Prison is a collection of thirteen international essays exploring the rich diversity of innovative drama works in prisons. The book includes an introduction that will present a contextualisation of the prison theatre field. Thereafter, leading practitioners and academics will explore key aspects of practice &endash; problemitising, theorising and describing specific approaches to working with offenders. The book also includes extracts from prison plays, poetry and prisoners writings that offer illustrations and insights into the experience of prison life.

Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different. College in Prison chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities. Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI's development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms pinpointing the contested meanings that emerge in moments of highly-charged reading, writing, and public speaking. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions--the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary--College in Prison makes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.

Far more than a building of brick and mortar, the prison relies upon gruesome stories circulated as commercial media to legitimize its institutional reproduction. Perhaps no medium has done more in recent years to both produce and intervene in such stories than television. This unapologetically interdisciplinary work presents a series of investigations into some of the most influential and innovative treatments of American mass incarceration to hit our screens in recent decades. Looking beyond celebratory accolades, Lee A. Flamand argues that we cannot understand the eagerness of influential programs such as OZ, The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, 13th, and Queen Sugar to integrate the sensibilities of prison ethnography, urban sociology, identity politics activism, and even Black feminist theory into their narrative structures without understanding how such critical postures relate to the cultural aspirations and commercial goals of a quickly evolving TV industry and the most deeply ingrained continuities of American storytelling practices.

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women's Community Correctional Center, the only women's prison in the state of Hawai'i. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses particularly on women's participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project served as a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai'i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.

The U.S. incarceration machine imprisons more people than in any other country. Music-Making in U.S. Prisons looks at the role music-making can play in achieving goals of accountability and healing that challenge the widespread assumption that prisons and punishment keep societies safe. The book's synthesis of historical research, contemporary practices, and pedagogies of music-making inside prisons reveals that, prior to the 1970s tough-on-crime era, choirs, instrumental ensembles, and radio shows bridged lives inside and outside prisons. Mass incarceration had a significant negative impact on music programs. Despite this setback, current programs testify to the potency of music education to support personal and social growth for people experiencing incarceration and deepen social awareness of the humanity found behind prison walls. Cohen and Duncan argue that music-making creates opportunities to humanize the complexity of crime, sustain meaningful relationships between incarcerated individuals and their families, and build social awareness of the prison industrial complex. The authors combine scholarship and personal experience to guide music educators, music aficionados, and social activists to create restorative social practices through music-making.