America's two million incarcerated men, women, and youth live in a hidden, isolated world filled with depression, anxiety, hostility, and violence. But the nation's soaring prison population has not been forgotten by a dedicated network of visual artists, writers, poets, dancers, musicians, and actors who teach the arts in correctional settings. This anthology compiles the narratives of several accomplished arts-in-corrections teachers who share their personal experiences, philosophies, and bittersweet anecdotes, as well as practical advice, survival skills, and program evaluation guidelines. Teaching the Arts Behind Bars is an invaluable tool for artists, program administrators, and corrections professionals, and a testament to the power of creative expression in promoting communication, positive social interaction, inner healing, and self-esteem.

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams is Assistant Professor of Art Education at the University of Iowa. She lives in Iowa City. Buzz Alexander is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where he founded the Prison Creative Arts Project and is co-curator of the Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan prisoners. He lives in Ann Arbor.

Grady Hillman

The Mythology of the Corrections Community

Ibegin writing this essay just after the twentieth anniversary of my first arts-in-corrections residency, a three-year stint as poet-in-the-schools (beginning in the fall of 1980) for the prison school system of the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC). That experience opened up to me a new world, which has swept me along on its course to over seventy correctional facilities in four countries (five depending on how you want to configure Northern Ireland). During these years, I've felt compelled to chronicle my experiences and research in articles and book chapters, screenplays and training manuals, but even that record reminds me that I've forgotten much more than I remember. This work is a struggle; its support or lack thereof is constantly vulnerable to shifts in societal emotion and impulses of political convenience. I've seen wonderful programs, and some that are best described as ill conceived, appear and disappear without regard to quality. This work is fraught with unforeseen crevasses. Sometimes we are faced with traps set by those who don't want to see us succeed or those who would exploit our presence for personal motives; sometimes we set traps for ourselves. Those of us who endeavor to bring arts experiences into correctional settings must be constantly present or looking forward. Rarely are we afforded the luxury of looking back. In TDC parlance, there's always a wreck waiting around the bend.

My commitment to arts-in-corrections contributed to a divorce, to new romances, and to the discovery of a tribe of fellow fools and prophets who believe in the arts and work in prisons and alternative settings. Like any strangers entering a foreign land, we have come to understand ourselves better, learned where our edges are, discovered the differences between a Freeworlder and a Lockedup. Most remarkably, if we are attentive, our students teach us the power of the tools we use in our art.

It seems appropriate at this time, twenty years later, that I look back and attempt to outline my arts-in-corrections experience-and that is all it can be, just a silhouette of the real thing. Some of it will be wrong, but I hope it's all true.

I was working as a poet-in-the-schools in Huntsville, Texas, when I was invited to perform the same function for the Texas prison school system. What seemed to be serendipity or coincidence accompanied the inception of this new project; I think this sense reflected my early romantic associations with both poetry and prisons, and a natural youthful assumption that I was in some way unique. I've since learned that art and the criminal justice system are more ubiquitous than anyone realizes. At current rates of incarceration, nearly 2 percent of our population is behind bars at any given moment.

Twenty years ago our prisons did not incarcerate so many of us. Texas had what was then considered to be a huge system, some 25,000 inmates, the third largest system in the nation, if memory serves. Now it and California are the largest systems in the nation, maybe the world, with over 150,000 adult inmates. Much has changed since 1980. Back then Texas ran what was discovered to be an unconstitutional correctional program, one that employed inmate guards. Being an initiate, I simply assumed all prisons had "building tenders," convicts who carried keys, controlled the cell doors and corridors, and directed traffic in these mini-cities. Now, corrections officers are one of the largest workforces in the state and in other states such as California and Florida, which are more amenable to labor organizing. Correctional officers' unions are the largest labor groups, carrying enormous political clout. Back then, privatization of prisons was hardly a decent topic of conversation; the notion that we would turn over the wheels of justice to business concerns somehow was demeaning to the authority and gravity of our system of law. Now, I work in two states with privatized juvenile facilities, companies whose growth stocks can be traded on NASDAQ.

I was invited into the Texas prison system by Bob Pierce, a man who worked as Assistant Director of Personnel for the Windham School System of the Texas Department of Corrections. Bob had a Ph.D. in Folklore from the University of Nebraska and was a member of the Huntsville Arts Council, the organization that contracted me to provide a creative writing residency in the public schools. Bob was into prison culture big time; he'd done graduate work on Ledbelly and later taught graduate courses at Sam Houston State University on prison literature. Windham was a nongeographic school district created by the Texas legislature to provide GED and competency-based high school diploma programs as well as coordinate the vocational and college programs. There were about twenty-five prisons then, and every one of them had a school Bob's rationale was that if Windham was a school system, receiving state money based on ADA (average daily attendance) just like any other school system, why couldn't it apply for and receive artist-in-education grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA). After some head scratching and advocating by Marilyn Schieferdecker, who ran TCA's Arts in Education (AIE) program, it was determined that it could. We were pretty sure that this was the first ever state-funded arts-in-education prison residency.

I conducted two ten-month creative writing residencies for Windham before joining staff for about six months and going off grant. During that time I provided workshops for eighteen prisons through the schools, correlating my creative writing exercises to core elements of the language arts curriculum. That wasn't hard. What was challenging was trying to create expressive writing exercises for men and women who were functionally illiterate, operating at or well below a fifth grade level. Out of my three years at Windham came the beginnings of the curriculum I use to this day, an experience-based curriculum emphasizing descriptions of immediate sensory perception, memory, and dreams-universal imagistic experiences that are not age specific but that definitely relate to the genres of poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting. I also taught professional writing workshops at three prisons-my five hours a week of community time under the AIE grant. Most of these men (and these professional workshop students were all male) managed to get published during the three years we worked together. Almost all of them had high school diplomas and some had college degrees. My selection of participants was based on demonstrated talent, and my three years with the TDC and Windham produced one anthology, Writers Block , and a film, Lions, Parakeets and Other Prisoners . I also managed to bring in about a dozen guest artists.

While the residency had some unique characteristics, it came in at the end of a wave of prison arts programming that had been going on for four or five years. Then, prisons still had as part of their missions a rehabilitative agenda. Now, rehabilitation is no longer even given lip service. The Texas Department of Corrections went so far as to change its name to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, revealing in semantic terms a more punitive philosophy. The Federal Bureau of Prisons had a well-developed national prison arts program, and some states, such as Oklahoma and California, had been providing artist residencies to all the prisons in their systems for some time. The Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP) coordinated a prison arts project that provided boxes of small press literature free to prison creative writing projects, and they had a magazine that regularly published inmate writing and artwork. Many publications around the country actively solicited the work of inmates inspired by the efforts of Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm Braley, Michael Hogan, Ricardo Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and many others.

One of the first lessons I learned is that there are many working artists in prison-men and women who have already determined that the creation of personal or cultural expressions helps them to do their time and may actually be something they can do when they get out. Even the system in Texas supported this activity to some extent. Almost every facility had a "piddlin' shop," a space where inmates could do arts and crafts. Supplies weren't provided but could be purchased through education and recreation funds, the same money, typically provided by families, that enabled inmates to buy cigarettes or cans of tuna at the commissary. Every year, the TDC organized an inmate art festival, which was held in conjunction with the prison rodeo, and inmates could sell their work and receive compensation. Guards and staff purchased much of the work. The TDC also had a recording studio and maintained three inmate bands that regularly performed at prison functions.

To the best of my knowledge, that is all gone now. Many fine programs still exist to support fine arts programs for adult inmate populations, but they are definitely on the wane compared to the extent of programming and organized support that existed in 1980. The reasons are many and complex. Fundamentally, I believe we began to incarcerate more people than the system could handle, and all treatment programs-education, job training, drug treatment-suffered with the massive buildup of what has been rightly termed "the prison industrial complex." Those institutions without beds began to ship inmates across state lines where there was space. County jails began receiving state inmates for a price. Suddenly, prisons were all about bed space, and correctional institutions, which had never been overly concerned about recidivism rates, began to look upon bed space as a financial resource and locating prisoners as a commodity market.

That's not what ended my presence at Windham. I made the mistake of joining the staff. After two years of working under grants, Windham encouraged me to join the faculty. It was a disaster from the beginning. The students I could serve changed-no more professional workshops, only GED students. Oversight on book publications became an arduous chain-of-command process that lasted months. My freedom to respond to teacher requests and perceived student needs was slowed incredibly. I was even asked to help the prison superintendent write speeches. (I refused.) I was so low on the totem pole that the ground came to eye level. I had originally thought that institutionalizing the arts program was the best outcome I could hope for, but I learned that collaboration between correctional institutions and arts organizations (such as the Texas Commission on the Arts) is a much better route to go.

Contracts protect all parties and clearly define roles and responsibilities. They serve the artists and the prisons. Rather than absorb arts programs into institutional hierarchies, correctional institutions should be encouraged to absorb the cost but continue to operate with arts organizations and artists on a contract basis. In recent years, I have seen the wonderful California Arts-in-Corrections program struggle with this issue to its detriment. Battles with the William James Association, the arts provider for the northern half of the state, and UCLA ArtsReach, the southern provider, instigated by the California Department of Corrections to gain greater control have driven away both providers and left the program in disarray. California developed a system of hiring some artists as facilitators, making them civil servants and requiring them to coordinate activities at their prisons. But prisons are remote, and facilitators cannot take care of the hiring, the invoicing, and the training of resident artists. This difficulty was created by the program's demonstrated success-it was proven to reduce recidivism and incidents of inmate misbehavior, and it has actually saved its host institutions significant amounts of money. When success happens, association with or control over a program becomes attractive, and power struggles can ensue.

Adult penal institutions are traditionally organized around a military-style hierarchy with highly defined chains of command. Like the military, control of information to the outside is of great concern. Departments of corrections operate in highly charged political environments. Without clear missions, public perceptions of what prisons do or are supposed to do range from assumptions that corrections should rehabilitate to assumptions that they should punish. Arts programs, by their nature, get the words and images out. Most curricula are organized around producing culminating events-performances, exhibitions, and publications. As programs become more successful and the successes and talents of the inmate participants become more evident, the penal hierarchy recognizes that these are not frivolous activities and adjusts to frame them in the context of public and political perception. A highly favorable newspaper article can result in the artist being asked to gain approval before granting any further interviews with the media. Sometimes the oversight is reasonable, and sometimes it is oppressive.

As I was preparing Writers Block , the administration wanted to review the contents prior to their publication, which delayed progress. Then they imposed a new system of release forms, which required that I secure permission from each contributor even though all contributions were submitted with a form that granted publication rights. Many of the contributors had been released, and I had to try to track them down on the outside. This extra paperwork was a result of the administration's perceived need to protect itself from inmate lawsuits. All in all, it was a miserable though eye-opening experience. (I've discussed this with many other artists in this work who have felt like they were punished for doing well.) Even though I was no longer under contract to TCA, the publication was funded through a grant from them, which enabled me to get the book published. I was able to convince the state arts commission to apply pressure to the state department of corrections to make it happen. This experience points out the need for contracts with clear delineation of roles and responsibilities.

My parachute from the Texas arts-in-corrections program was a media development grant from the Texas Committee for the Humanities to write a screenplay about the prison years of O. Henry. That research brought me to the Ohio State Penitentiary, where William Sidney Porter transformed himself into a popular writer while doing a three-year, three-month stint for embezzlement around 1900. Back then it was a federal prison. I also became familiar with the accounts of Charles Dickens, who visited the United States twice in the mid-1800s to provide a social critique of our new institutions called penitentiaries. He was not impressed.

Continues...

Excerpted from Teaching the Arts behind Bars by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams Copyright © 2003 by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.