About Outreach: Prison Transformation through Creative Writing Design

The YWrite project investigates the role of creative writing in prisons through a state-of-the-art prison education program designed specifically for incarcerated women and children in the Northern Territory. The workshops teach incarcerated students how to express themselves through creative writing in various forms of prison prose, graffiti art, and storytelling. Graffiti constitutes a special genre of writing that has been deployed by prisoners to reflect on their circumstance, to protest their penal incarceration, or even to transform their understanding. Because "graffiti" remains unconstrained by traditional writing conventions (of spelling, grammar, and punctuation), such writing provides a space for resistant writers or those of lower literacy levels to write intuitively. A writer of graffiti can articulate messages with a sense of urgency, uninhibited by conventional expectations of normative writing. The aims of the project are to foster motivation and self-efficacy through creativity, which in turn can lead to improved self-image and reduced emotional stress, an increase in literacy, and more postrelease opportunities. A major outcome of the program will allow detainees to share their "stories" through the publication or exhibition of their work, which will in turn contribute insights for society's understanding of effective prison arts programs and the effects of writing to transform.

Why is this project important to the Northern Territory? In 2016, the Four Corners program "Australia's Shame" revealed the ongoing abuse of Indigenous youth in Darwin's Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and sparked many reasons why a penal system that does not rehabilitate at-risk Indigenous people should be completely transformed, if not abolished. Footage from the program showed children as young as twelve years old being punished with the use of restraint chairs, covered in spit-hoods, and locked up in isolation cells for indefinite periods of time. Such cruel and archaic forms of punishment have not far progressed since the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries in Europe, when criminals were punished with infliction and discomfort to their bodies through humiliation—or, to a worse extent, maimed, flogged, or sen-tenced to death. In Australia, Ronald Ryan was the last man to be executed at Pentridge Prison, and it was only in 1967. Yet even after the thirtieth anniversary of the Royal Commission into the Aboriginal deaths in custody, there remains a lack of willingness to transform prisons into places of support and rehabilitation for those who are incarcerated (who are mostly victims of domestic violence, the poorest of the poor, and those suffering from mental illness). The absence of a model of care to transform prisons in Australia points to a gap in national consciousness regarding the humanity of those who are incarcerated.

So why a creative arts program? Since the abuse of Indigenous children in Darwin's Done Dale Detention Centre was exposed, several fiction books on the theme of Indigenous incarceration in Australia have been published, including Kim Scott's Taboo, Paul Collis's Dancing Home, and some of the stories in Tony Birch's Common People. Such texts include the bitter fear of an alleged offender being chased by police authorities and the appalling circumstances of incarceration once caught. Yet these stories also show how the grit and determination of a few characters can transform prisons into places of colonial freedom when language and culture are strong, when there are opportunities to write, to share stories, and to empower oneself in preparation for release on the outside.

To write is one of the most empowering acts of rebellion one can take—whether in the form of a novel or as graffiti written on a concrete wall. To write is to protest by creating the new formation of words in a different order to realize something new. Graffiti has a broad yet unique readership: it is not always read by choice, but nonetheless it has a fluid and encompassing range of readers—it is for everybody. The writing of graffiti is not an autonomous or mono act but can speak to many people in various ways. In prisons, for example, graffiti may communicate with inmates, prison staff, or perhaps even tourists...