Reflections from the Inside Out: It Keeps Us Human!

"Prison is another world." 

A Corrections Officer (CO) told me the first time I went to Gus Harrison Correctional Facility. Every week I travel inside to another world. Through the bubble and across the yard with fences all around me and men gawking because my partner and I are an oddity in this world. This world with its own language to learn--CO, the bubble, LOPs, Special Acts, sanctions, PPDs, send a kite to Ms. Bates--and  protocols to follow--wait for the door to close, through the metal detector, shoes and socks off, check your feet, mouth open, turn around, patted down. Sometimes there are comments thrown from across the yard but I shake it off and move on, head up, eyes forward. (Unless its someone I know, then a quick wave and a hello! resist the urge to run. Never run.)

After a dip into this world traveling through the yard and to the school building (yes, a school building. This one even has a gym), one more sign in and I'm here finally. Into a classroom, with windowed walls, I enter a world within a world: workshop. Here in the space we create. We act and we laugh. We play. And for a few moments through the games we play, our energy and acting, our words and stories--we are just people, just human, just us. For a moment, we could be anyone anywhere. For a moment, we are in a court room and someone is being sentenced to life in prison. We are inside a living room and siblings quarrel. A man wins the lotto. A sibling gets locked up. For a moment the yard outside is but a memory. Then I am reminded of exactly where I am, we are. We are inside prison. We cannot touch, not even a handshake. We are inside prison and through windowed walls COs stare and other inmates wonder. What are those crazy people doing in that drama class?

It's not all pretty, it's certainly not easy, but with courage we take risks, I take risks, and this vibrant new world within a world rings with ourselves just as we are. Happy as we are; scared as we are; lonely as we are; hurting as we are. And we need this space. The guys need this space. As Abdullah said in my last workshop, "On the yard we have to walk around angry all the time, but here we can really ask 'hey, how ARE you?" Because vulnerability on the inside is dangerous. It's life-threatening. But everyone needs to be vulnerable. It's only human. I don't know who or what I would become if I had to walk around angry and closed. Locked up and locked down. And I need this space too. I walk around with my own walls up, head down, focused focused focused, busy busy busy. But in workshop I find support and honesty. I forget those things in my life I just cannot handle right now and play. 

In this space we create characters and scenes that build on each other and off each other into plays. Original plays improv'ed from beginning to end. What plays we create! They are complex and if we are honest they are deep. Our play on Wednesday, the second I've ever been a part of (my first play you'll have to ask me about another time), was called 'Life's a Gamble.' We created it in 3 workshops and performed it on the fourth, our sixth meeting. That's a total of 4.5 hours (the first two workshops we worked on an idea that we scrapped on the third workshop). Well, 4.5 hours plus all the work the guys put in during the week and the thinking/planning that Emily and I did. But three weeks and we had a play! And a complicated play at that. 

'Life's a Gamble' centers on a poker game, but it's not about poker. Rather it is about the intersecting lives and relationships of the people at the table and not at the table. It is about family loyalty and friendship. It is about the unpredictability of living, mistakes, learning, and growing. In essence: a snapshot of lives. The main players are a barber, prosecutor, 2 brothers and a sister, and their friends a lotto winner and victim. Their stories at first seem unrelated but it comes out through a weekly poker game they are deeply intertwined. The brother and sister (George and Diane) have a problem. Their brother Twitch is in jail for stalking someone and they need $500,000 to bail him out. Incidentally, George’s friend Que has just won the lottery. Could this be the solution to their problem? Meanwhile, Diane's friend Penelope, who's being stalked by Twitch, suddenly claims Que is her daughter Ariel's father. Penelope burns her friend and wins over Que to collect back logged child support. In  the final scene where Twitch is sentenced we learn he wasn't stalking Penelope at all. He was trying to see his daughter: Ariel. 

Got it? Good. We had a ton of fun creating it and performing for an unfortunately limited audience. But hey, its prison. What can ya do? Roll with the punches and carry on. At the end we celebrated the men in the workshop with certificates, applause, and congratulations all around. One guy told me he's going to mail his certificate home to his kids to put on the fridge. Another told me he's going to hang it in his cube (cell). We all had ridiculous grins on our faces, proud of what we accomplished.

"Why do you do this anyway?" 

A CO recently asked me in the bubble. I stumbled to answer her, whose job is the nearly the opposite of mine. COs must maintain power as they are in a precarious position, greatly outnumbered by the men they rule over. (Yes, rule. Each prison is much like a little fiefdom) They must build walls and barriers to keep people apart and different. Whereas, I seek to connect. I seek connection in all areas of my life. In academics the connection of abstract things, of words, ideas and facts. In my life, connecting with people. I sought out PCAP (Prison Creative Arts Project through which the workshops are run and supported) in order to make connections with people. People many forget are still people too. I was scared it would be hard or impossible to connect with people inside prison. I don't know them. I don't know their lives. I don't know where they have been or what they are living through everyday. But the beauty of workshop--the beauty and light inside a very dark place--is that people are reaching back out toward me and you. Yearning to connect and stay human.

"It keeps us human!" Danny proclaimed in a discussion following our play. That's just it. It keeps us human.


I carry with me a part of the inside. A small part, yes, but a powerful part that has shaped me and continues to shape me. I carry the voices and power of the men I work with every week: GB, Stevo, Ricky, Danny, Jerry, Dee, Anthony, Romeo, Que, Abdullah, Lil Jon, and the men in my last workshop. It's the connections created on the inside, in our world within a world, that keep me looking back as I walk away. The connections that make me want to run up to the man I know across the fence. But don't run. Never run. I'm in prison. 

For further reading and viewing:

1. Here's the blog of a man who inspires me in honesty and responsibility: HURLCO 

2. I am a Voice Exhibition Promo

3. I also recommend Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin by Judith Tannenbaum