“Writing Has Made Me Different”: Writing in a Milwaukee Prison

Before we went to the prison, we met up at a coffee shop in Milwaukee’s Washington Heights neighborhood to go over our lesson plans. Steph Kilen and I were getting ready to teach a pilot session of a cream city review-sponsored creative writing class at the Sherrer Center, a men’s work-release prison east of where we sat.

Entering a prison was new to us. Steph has a background in adult education and was finishing up a low-residency MFA in fiction. I am a poet with a day job at an arts nonprofit, writing and working here in my hometown. While I had participated in a couple of readings with other poets at a prison in Racine, halfway to Chicago, neither Steph nor I had been incarcerated or worked in a classroom setting with incarcerated writers. But even before the four-session pilot course ended, the work awakened in us something I have come to recognize in other people who’ve done this work.

We started talking about continuing the class even before the pilot had ended. We found students who were ready and eager to learn. Everyone in the room wanted to be there. “Writing for me is all about transformation and understanding of ourselves and the world,” Steph later said. “People who are incarcerated are in a particularly heightened position for writing to do its best work.” She continued to note that our students “were really hungry, quick, talented, and sharp.” In the months leading up to class, I read memoirs about various writers learning and teaching writing in prisons. All of these memoirs noted the comfortable atmosphere that arose in these writing classes, but I was still nervous about our pilot class running smoothly. I shouldn’t have been worried; the class felt natural and comfortable and our students and the Sherrer Center staff welcomed us in.

Creative writing classes in prisons have existed in the United States at least since the 1970s, but the number of offerings seems to be growing as politicians, media, higher education, and arts communities start to grapple with the magnitude of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. The United States locks up 25% of the world’s prisoners in spite of comprising only 5% of the world’s population. Over the last 40 years, the prison population has grown from 300,000 prisoners to over 2 million. This explosion is due not to population growth (the general U.S. population has not even doubled in size, while the prison population has grown six-fold) or a rise in crime, but the War on Drugs, Truth in Sentencing, and other changes in legislation that have disproportionately affected poor communities of color—the very communities that already experience a lack of access to good jobs, sufficient legal aid, mental health care, and other resources including the media and publishing opportunities that change American consciousness. As the author of The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander puts it, “No one imagined that the prison population would more than quintuple in their lifetime.” Yet somehow it has, invisibly to certain segments of society.

In recent years, the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement has encouraged popular media and politics to focus on the disproportionate number of people of color tangled in the criminal justice system. For a slew of political, social, and economic reasons, mass incarceration has hit Milwaukee especially hard. Wisconsin’s prison population has grown 1,000% since 1974 (with our general state population increasing by just 24% over the same years). In Wisconsin, the rate of incarceration among black men is higher than in any other state. Half of African-American men in Milwaukee in their early 40s have served time in state prisons. Our 53206 zip code may be the most heavily incarcerated area of its size in the world.

We are in a state of emergency. What do we need to do to prevent people from falling through cracks, to forbid society to deem anyone worthless, to recognize the profound contributions we lose when we lock...