Abolition From Within: Enabling the Citizen Convict

G. English "Where Heaven and Hel Batle for the Souls of Man", 2009

Prison abolitionists such as Angela Y. Davis wisely focus upon changing public policy, legal practice, and police enforcement in ways that would choke off the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) by denying it the largely poor, urban bodies of color upon which it feeds (Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 107). "Prison," Davis remarks, "needs to be abolished as the dominant mode of addressing social problems that are better solved by other institutions and other means" (Rodriguez 215). In this essay, I want to suggest that, while such work outside the prison goes forward, abolition teachers can help the prison population begin their own reincorporation into civil society. We can help to resurrect 2.3 million Americans from "civil death" by encouraging acts of civic community building inside the nation's fourth largest city, and by this action work to abolish the prison by dismantling the difference (and differance) between inmate and citizen. By addressing the social inequities and police practices that feed prisons and encouraging civic organization inside Prison City, the prison that exists today can be winnowed away all the more quickly. It might also, simultaneously, undergo radical metamorphosis into a civil institution that serves as an engine of progressive civic engagement. Abolition work outside, and fundamental transformation inside, pursued simultaneously, might in fact yield one of those "other institutions" that Davis envisions. Here I will ground these ideas in my experience of prison teaching, then review the complimentary effects of teaching prison writing to traditional undergraduates while also bringing these undergraduates inside the prison to interact with inmates. I will then discuss the implications for prison community building drawn from a national prison-essay project.

Prison Pedagogy

On November 13, 2006, I began teaching a creative writing workshop inside Attica Correctional Facility (ACF). In this setting, I have witnessed inmates taking control of their lives not only as members of the workshop, but also, through writing, as critical citizens of the PIC. Since beginning, the workshop has convened from 6:30 to 8:45 p.m. every other Thursday evening. The college where I teach has supplied funding for the texts distributed to all men: a standard creative writing textbook, a thick story collection, an essay collection, hard-back dictionaries, as well as writing pads and pens—items that the men would otherwise have to buy from their prison-job wages of twenty-five cents per hour. At each meeting, we discuss an assigned story or essay, discuss a particular technical point (for example, narrative persona or point of view), workshop drafts of stories and essays, and listen to men read from first drafts. The nuts and bolts are standard for a creative writing workshop. It is the effect of its setting that sets this and every other prison classroom apart.

On the evening of the first class in 2006, I asked each man to describe what writing experience he had had and what parts of his writing he wanted to improve. The question evoked a common desire to introduce form and structure into their writing: "I would like to work on staying in line with my writing. Keeping the theme of the story. Creating a space where I can replace whatever seems out of context"; "structure and form (understanding the marriage of the two)," "techniques for making my work more structured"; "a systematic way of piecing all my ideas together"; and "to maintain a consistent point of view." From the start, all the men were thankful for the technical vocabulary offered by me and by the textbook, and for my insistence that they follow through to the completion of essays and stories, despite doubts, interruptions, or even loss of motivation on a topic. Their writing, while losing none of its vibrancy, quickly began to assume greater coherency of form and structure. Reponses to the works assigned from the essay and story collections also became more focused and incisive.

The men in the current class come from a wide range of backgrounds. Of the...