inside-out.

I spent the last week at a national training institute for a prison education exchange program called Inside-Out. It is difficult to sum up my time with that group and what I learned, but there was a moment that was illustrative of where our hearts were after learning a great deal about how to facilitate courses in a prison setting.


Saturday we made our second trip to the prison. We went on Wednesday. It was an intense day-- there is nothing like waiting for two hours because the prison is on lockdown. Nothing like realizing that you are beyond the walls-- walls that our government built to keep these people in, to keep people like me out. Nothing like seeing the desperate hunger for knowledge and the many ways that knowledge liberates. Nothing like coming to know changed hearts that want change in the world. We met lifers and men who had three or six years left on their sentences. Men who give their 40 cents to 2 dollar an hour wages to scholarship programs for the children of other incarcerated men. Men who will be forever be defined by the worst thing they ever did. Men who came into the prison as children and will probably die there.


So when we had made our way along the winding country roads to the prison, our hearts were heavy. We had learned a lot in our training and we were coming to the prison to learn yet more from the men who were training us inside. When our car turned the corner, the first thing I noticed was the fog. The prison silhouette loomed large. And then I looked a little closer- and I saw people dancing.


In one of the cars, some women had fallen asleep on the drive out. The other women in the car turned up the music really loud to wake them up. The doors flew open and they began to dance. With each car in the caravan rolling in, people spilled out and joined this parking lot soiree. I did too.

our cheesy, unlikely anthem

The rules that govern prison parking lots are restrictive- you are told where to park, no pictures or videos, you come in as few cars as possible. You can't have maps laying out when you go in. As we danced, I could see a guard stepping out of the tower to watch, backlit by sun and fog. A truck with a correctional officer in it circled the parking lot. It dawned on me that this was very, very subversive. It was the most radical thing I had ever been a part of.


But in spite of the surveillance, and maybe because of it, we danced for the whole song. We danced because we know we are free. We danced because we needed strength to go into that milieu to do our best work. We danced because the kind of people that want to teach in prison are the kind of people who dance in parking lots. We danced because we believe we can make walls come down.

We were grateful that we didn't get in trouble for our dance party. Our program is fragile and we know that. The guards were genuinely amused and we haven't heard of any blowback.


We went into the prison that day knowing that we had just experienced something that had defined us as a group, something that we would return to as we spread out to fill our different missions across the United States and Canada. What we do is sobering and hard work, and I came away with a greater appreciation that my heart and my spirit will always need to be in the right place for me to do the work effectively. We had a beautiful day in the prison as we communed with intelligent people who believe in the power of our program. It was hard to say goodbye because it is hard knowing that human beings are kept in cells. It is hard knowing, really knowing, that you are free and others are not.


We did not dance when we left.

the imprisonment of a race.

Last Friday I trekked out to Princeton for the Center for African American Studies' conference "The Imprisonment of a Race." The conference was the brainchild of an undergraduate student in molecular biology. Originally from Inglewood, California, he was troubled by the fact that more young black men go to prison than to college. He wanted to raise awareness about the issue, so he went to CAAS. He expected maybe a professor and some kids in chairs in a classroom. What he got, however, was to help plan a conference that brought together some of the finest scholars writing about race and incarceration today. It was the kind of event that made me feel grateful to live where I do; it's a gift to have access to the resources of the Ivies.


It was a major event for me. It wasn't just that it was a networking event, or that there was some really interesting research I hadn't heard about yet-- though both of those things were big draws. It was the power of sitting in a room with several hundred people having a consciousness-raising experience.  The research was provocative-- I learned about, for instance, how children are policed and conditioned to punative punisment in schools and neighborhoods, how census counting of inmates in prisons rather than their neighborhoods of origin means less money for already poor communities (reproducing the circumstances of poverty that spawn most crime), and how it costs the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania twice as much to incarcerate a prisoner than to pay the tuition of a student at Penn State. I heard the voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner on death row-- that he joined our conference by phone, with the periodic interuptions of a recording us telling us that the phone could be being recorded, added a potent sense of urgency to the day's proceedings. I heard research I am familiar with-- how prison riots and internal resistance show that "the carceral state is, in fact, fragile," and how during the Progressive era whites were treated for poverty, blacks were neglected because of their assumed criminal pathology, and these events laid the foundations for mass incarceration. I heard all of the familiar statistics about incarceration in America- how of 2 million people incarcerated today, half are African-American, how 5 million people in this country are disenfranchised because they committed felonies. Everyone agrees that there are evil people who should be locked up, but that locking up for non-violent crimes and racist policing have occurred on such a grand scale of inequality that it they have become less effective, and indeed, manifestations of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of American governance and a need for a continued human rights struggle.


I heard over and over again:
Prisons destroy the spirit.
Prisons do not correct behaviors.
Prisons undermine family life. 
Prisons produce fractured citizenship that encourages recidivism. 
Prisons are the only policy Democrats and Republicans seem to be able to agree on. 
Prisons-- in all their dehumanizing, demonizing, unjust incarnations-- are evidence of our society in it most realized form (Foucault). 


The word "suffering" must have been said a hundred times.


There were moments when I felt close to tears. I feel that way when I read about prisons, too-- a sense of despair that these institutions are so entrenched that they seem beyond reform. 


It was a blessing, then, to round out the day with a conversation between public intellectual Cornel West and Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow.  West offered me hope-- he reminded me that I have the power, in our my own life, to infuse my work with a spiritual motivation. He spoke plainly, truthfully: Justice is love practiced in public. Michelle Alexander reminded me that for everything I'd heard, I have a responsibility to bring awareness to the issues surrounding incarceration and inequality.  I can change the words I use- I don't have to use the term "felon" to describe the formerly-incarcerated because I can use my language to show others than I believe in forgiving those who have done their time. I can work for reform and rule shifting but I can also work for a revolutionary transformation of culture.  There is hope in that. 


My favorite quote came from Khalilah Brown-Dean, and I think I might have to embroider it to hang over my desk as I write my dissertation:

"My research is my advocacy."

a radical turn.

When I was in Utah, I got involved with protest culture. Utah's is distinctive; participatory democracy goes a long way in the state and many groups have successfully found ways to build awareness about their causes. It was exciting to find opportunities to express my beliefs in the public sphere, particularly as I became more aware of my own politics and values after leaving the Church.


I took a class called "Urban Crime" this semester. It was poorly titled; its focus extended well beyond the urban and I learned very little about crime. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what constitutes a real crime and what crimes are constructed by society for sake of maintaining order and reducing risk to the middle-class.  That I came to conclude there is such a distinction is evidence, perhaps, that the crime part wasn't necessarily a misnomer.


The emphasis of the course was on incarceration.  There are over 2 million people presently incarcerated in the United States right now; over 7 million people have been incarcerated.  Up until very recently, historians have done little to explore incarceration and the punitive process in the United States.  I read the works of sociologists, legal scholars, historians.  I found their arguments very persuasive.  


The penal system in America is, amongst developed nations, one of the most punitive in the world.  Our systems of lawmaking, policing, prosecution, sentencing, and warehousing prisoners rest on racialized assumptions.  The poor and the non-white are disproportionately punished.  Politicians use crimefighting for political currency. A culture of fear has been built up, granting government carte blanche to prevent risk. The humanity of criminals and their potential to reform is, in many states, off the table.  While there are those who do deserve to be in prison, it is taken for granted that every person in prison deserves to be there.  The impact of incarceration on communities, partners, children, families is not a part of how we, as a nation, think about crime.


I point this out-- and give you this summary of what I took from fifteen books and probably as many articles-- because I recognize that I have developed this habit of blowing up my Twitter feed when a story pertaining to criminality or incarceration hits me a certain way.  There are things I never noticed that are now everywhere.  I am at the beginning of an activist moment.  I will stake my career on it; I believe the system is that unjust.  So bear with me this raised consciousness.  




If you can get your hands on this month's Journal of American History, make sure you seek out this article. If not, check out the JAH Podcast. It will give you some insight into the import of this emerging field of study and the scholars influencing my thinking.