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Abstract
Based on almost 50 years of combined experience as prison activists and prison teachers, the authors offer three case studies of prison activism and pedagogy in action. The first case study, by Hartnett, details the “artistry of agency” as enacted in poetry workshops in prison and in public poetry events, thus illustrating artistic communication. The second, by Wood, examines how friendship becomes political in the epistolary communication between free and imprisoned correspondents, thus addressing interpersonal communication. The third, by McCann, addresses web-based communication as a tool for advocacy for condemned prisoner/activists on Texas’s death row, and hence political communication. Taken as a whole, the three case studies celebrate different communication strategies as avenues of enlightenment and empowerment while offering powerful arguments for abolishing the prison–industrial complex.
Acknowledgements
All three authors are founding members of PCARE, the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education collective. Parts of this essay were presented before gatherings of the National Communication Association, the Rhetoric Society of America, the 12th Biennial Public Address Conference, the 10th Anniversary Critical Resistance Conference, and as invited talks at the University of South Florida, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. For their generous commentary, the authors thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal, the members of PCARE, Lisa B. Keranen, and Eleanor Novek.
Notes
1. Marciano Plata et al. v. Arnold Schwarzenegger et al., No. C01–1351 THE (E.D. Cal. and N.D. Cal. 2009) at 6, 7, 10, 16, 42, and 153. For context, see Solomon Moore, “Court Orders California to Cut Prison Population,” New York Times, February 9, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html (accessed October 7, 2009).
2. Plata v. Schwarzenegger et al., 183; and see Jon M. Taylor, “Post-Secondary Correctional Education: An Evaluation of Effectiveness and Efficiency,” Journal of Correctional Education 43, no. 3 (1992): 132–41.
3. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press), 40.
4. See Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); and Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education (PCARE), “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 402–20.
5. Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 89.
6. Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 3–4.
7. See Michael Hames-García, Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987).
8. See Stephen John Hartnett, “The Annihilating Public Policies of The Prison–Industrial Complex; or, Crime, Violence, and Punishment in An Age of Neo-Liberalism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 3 (2008): 491–533; and Erica Meiners, Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and The Making of Public Enemies (New York: Routledge, 2007).
9. Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition, Revised and Expanded Edition (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2001).
10. Hames-García, Fugitive Thought, xliii.
11. Eleanor Novek, “‘The Devil's Bargain’: Censorship, Identity, and the Promise of Empowerment in a Prison Newspaper,” Journalism 6, no. 1 (2005): 6.
12. PCAP, “Statement of Commitment,” quoted in Buzz Alexander, Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 233. On the relationship between prisoner protest and prison pedagogy, see Gabrielle Banks, “Learning under Lockdown,” Colorlines 6, no. 1 (2003): 12–6; Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 57–9; and The Last Graduation: The Rise and Fall of College Programs in Prison, directed by Barbara Zahm (New York: Deep Dish TV, 1997), VHS.
13. Pew Center on the States, One-in-100: Behind Bars in America (Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2008), 5, 11.
14. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Justice Expenditure and Employment Extracts, 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 2008); the data table is accessible at http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1022 (accessed September 8, 2011).
15. Erika Wood and Rachel Bloom, De Facto Disenfranchisement (New York: ACLU, 2008). The term “labor disenfranchisement” is from Paul Street, “Color Blind: Prisons and the New American Racism,” in Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, ed. Tara Herivel and Paul Wright (New York: Routledge, 2003), 32.
16. See Carol Stabile, White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Bill Yousman, “Inside Oz: Hyperviolence, Race and Class Nightmares, and the Engrossing Spectacle of Terror,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (2009): 265–84.
17. Stephen John Hartnett, ed., “Introduction: Empowerment or Incarceration? Reclaiming Hope and Justice from a Punishing Democracy,” in Challenging the Prison–Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 1–13.
18. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Perennial, 2002), xxi.
19. Jailbirds, directed by Jon Rutter (Muncie, IN: Pineapple & Jalapeno Productions, 1993), VHS.
20. See Patricia Yaeger, ed., “Editor's Column: Prisons, Activism, and the Academy—A Roundtable with Buzz Alexander, Bell Gale Chevigny, Stephen John Hartnett, Janie Paul, and Judith Tannenbaum,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 545–67.
21. Prison Justice Project, Captured Words/Free Thoughts, http://prisonjusticeproject.org/capturedwords/?cat=1 (accessed August 15, 2011).
22. Alexander, Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? 2–3.
23. A similar strategy drives Robin Sohnen's Each One Reach One theater ensemble. See “Play-Writing & Community Activism as Redemption and Prevention,” in Challenging the Prison–Industrial Complex, ed. Stephen John Hartnett, 181–200.
24. Judith Tannenbaum, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 20.
25. Judith Tannenbaum, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 91.
26. Letting go of pretense thus becomes the first step toward building solidarity with the disenfranchised—see Garrett Albert Duncan, “Beyond Love: A Critical Race Ethnography of the Schooling of Adolescent Black Males,” Equity & Excellence in Education 35, no. 2 (2002): 131–43; and Phillip K. Tompkins, Who is My Neighbor? Communicating and Organizing to End Homelessness (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009).
27. On involving undergraduates in such projects, see Buzz Alexander, “‘A Piece of the Reply’: The Prison Creative Arts Project and Practicing Resistance,” in Challenging the Prison–Industrial Complex, ed. Stephen John Hartnett, 149–78; and Lori Pompa “Breaking Down the Walls: Inside-Out Learning & the Pedagogy of Transformation,” in Challenging the Prison–Industrial Complex, ed. Stephen John Hartnett, 253–72.
28. Big Ern, quoted in Tannenbaum, Disguised as a Poem, 53.
29. Anonymous, “I Look for Beauty” (unpublished manuscript used with permission, July 2010), Microsoft Word file.
30. For examples of “spying divinity” amidst hard times, see Stephen John Hartnett, Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004).
31. The themes noted here are found in Captured Words/Free Thoughts and other prison-based collections, including Tobi Jacobi, ed., Can Anyone Hear Me Scream? (Fort Collins, CO: SpeakOut! Women's Writing Workshop, 2008); Kal Waggenheim, ed., Inside/Out: Voices from the New Jersey State Prison (Livermore, CA: WingSpan, 2009); Jennifer Scaife, ed., Open Line (San Quentin, CA: Prison University Project, 2008); and Buzz Alexander and Janie Paul, ed., Doing Time, Making Space (Ann Arbor: PCAP, 2005).
32. Tannenbaum, Disguised as a Poem, 199; and see Stephen John Hartnett, “Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Commitment,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 1 (2010): 68–93.
33. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can't Wait (New York: Penguin, 1964), 64.
34. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith (1971; repr., New York: International Publishers, 2003); Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Stephen E. Bronner (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978); and George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970; repr., Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994).
35. This conversation is noted in James A. Colaiaco, “The American Dream Unfulfilled: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’” Phylon 45, no. 1 (1984): 1–18.
36. See Steven J. Jackson, “Mapping the Prison Telephone Industry,” in Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration, ed. Tara Herivel and Paul Wright (New York: The New Press, 2007), 235–49.
37. Janet Maybin, “Death Row Penfriends: Some Effects of Letter Writing on Identity and Relationships,” in Letter Writing as Social Practice, ed. David Barton and Nigel Hall (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), 151.
38. See Jennifer Asenas, Bryan J. McCann, Kathleen Feyh, and Dana L. Cloud, “Saving Kenneth Foster: Speaking with Others in the Belly of the Beast,” in Communication Activism Volume Three: Communication for Social Change, ed. Lawrence R. Frey and Kevin M. Carragee (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Forthcoming).
39. For historical context, see William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
40. See Patrick McGreevey, “Thousands of Cell Phones Confiscated in Prisons,” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/02/local/me-prisons2 (accessed November 15, 2009).
41. See Mary Bosworth, Debi Campbell, Bonita Demby, Seth M. Ferranti, and Michael Santos, “Doing Prison Research: Views from Inside,” Qualitative Inquiry 11, no. 2 (2005): 249–64.
42. See Elizabeth Greenburg, Eric Dunleavy, and Mark Kutner, Literacy Behind Bars: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey (Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics, 2007).
43. An internet search for prison pen pals yields an array of sites: some, such as LifeLines, are nonprofits; others, such as PrisonPenPals.com, produce a profit.
44. On the political uses of such letters, see Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
45. Ioan Davies, Writers in Prison (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 232.
46. Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 7.
47. Bosworth et al., “Doing Prison Research,” 27.
48. At yearend 2007, it was reported that there were 3,220 prisoners under sentence of death in America. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Capital Punishment Statistics,” January 23, 2009, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cp.htm (accessed October 13, 2009).
49. For overviews of the death penalty, see Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and Stephen John Hartnett, Executing Democracy, Volume One: Capital Punishment & The Making of America, 1683–1807 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010).
50. The figures offered here begin in 1982 because that year marked the first execution in Texas following the 1976 US Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which lifted the national moratorium on executions mandated by the 1974 decision in Furman v. Georgia. Both decisions are available in The Death Penalty in America, Current Controversies, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 189–95 and 196–205.
51. See Ralph Blumenthal, “Texas Inmates Protest Conditions with Hunger Strikes,” New York Times, November 8, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/us/08prison.html (accessed October 16, 2009); and Human Rights Watch, “Mental Illness, Human Rights, and US Prisons,” September 22, 2009, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/09/22/mental-illness-human-rights-and-us-prisons (accessed November 20, 2009).
52. Quoted in Fanny Carrier, “Staying Alive on Death Row, a Daily Battle against Despair,” Agence France Presse, November 6, 2007, via LexisNexis (accessed August 1, 2011).
53. Texas Governor Rick Perry commuted Foster's death sentence in 2007. See Asenas et al., “Speaking with Others.”
54. See Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims’ Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Bryan J. McCann, “Therapeutic and Material <Victim>hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty Controversy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 382–401; and Jennifer K. Wood, “Justice as Therapy: The Victim Rights Clarification Act,” Communication Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2003): 296–311.
55. DRIVE “Introduction,” http://drivemovement.org/ (accessed November 19, 2009).
56. Kenneth Foster Jr., “My Epiphany,” DRIVE, http://drivemovement.org/#/my-epiphany/4519624624 (accessed November 19, 2009).
57. Gabriel Gonzalez, “To the Lynch Mob,” DRIVE, http://drivemovement.org/#/to-the-lynch-mob/4519640196 (accessed November 19, 2009). For context, see Jackson, Soledad Brother; Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Westport, CN: Lawrence Hill, 1987); and James, Imprisoned Intellectuals.
58. Reginald Blanton, “A Man,” DRIVE, http://drivemovement.org/#/a-man/4519640497 (accessed October 15, 2009). On the history of “I am a man” in the civil rights movement, see Laurie B. Green, “Race, Gender, and Labor in 1960s Memphis: ‘I Am a Man’ and the Meaning of Freedom,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 3 (2004): 465–89.
59. Gonzalez, “To the Lynch Mob.”
60. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 293–304.
61. Kenneth Foster Jr., “DRIVE and Where it Stands in Light of a Non-Violent or Passive Movement,” DRIVE, http://drivemovement.org/#/drive-and-where/4519623787 (accessed October 20, 2009).
62. Since 1973, 138 individuals have been released from death row after their convictions were overturned. Death Penalty Information Center, Facts about the Death Penalty (Washington, DC: Author, updated September 7, 2011), 2, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf (accessed September 8, 2011).
63. Herbert H. Haines, Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954–1970 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).
64. DRIVE, “Rob's Use of Force Videos,” http://drivemovement.org/#/u-o-force-vids-1/4521140566 (accessed July 27, 2011). For more on the “cell extraction” techniques used to assault prisoners, see Hartnett, Incarceration Nation, 73–86, and Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (New York: Vintage, 2000), 131–36.
65. Hames-García, Fugitive Thought, 251.
66. Foster, “DRIVE and Where it Stands.”