NEWSBYWENDY JASON

In 1997, Patricia Wright was sentenced to life without parole for a crime she didn’t commit. Now, she’s facing another sentence, one no judge or jury can overturn: Patricia has stage IV breast cancer, and all she wants is to spend the remainder of her days at home, with her family by her side.

Patricia was convicted of her former husband’s murder 16 years after his partially-decomposed body was found in his motor home. Willie Jerome Scott had been stabbed numerous times; there was a knife sticking out of his chest and a plastic bag covering his head. Patricia complied fully with the original investigation of the crime, and wasn’t a suspect because none of the blood or fingerprints found at the crime scene matched hers. The case was eventually abandoned.

But in 1995, the LAPD established a “cold case” task force, and after lying dormant for 14 years, Jerome’s murder became a priority case.

Since 1990, University of Michigan students have been offered unique, transformative opportunities to learn and create side by side with incarcerated youth and adults. Through coursework that often leads to participation in the university-sponsored Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), undergraduates have collaborated with professors, alumni and community members to facilitate arts-based workshops in 24 prisons, six juvenile facilities and seven under-resourced high schools across the state.

Professor Buzz Alexander, founder of PCAP, had been teaching a class, English 319, about the intersections of theater and social change for six years when two lifers at the Florence Crane Women’s Facility asked to register for the course. He consented, and each week during that semester traveled to the facility with two students to meet with the incarcerated women. During these meetings, students and professor engaged in improvisational theater activities, analyzing the racial, class and power dynamics at play in the situations they confronted. They explored their shared space, including the similarities and striking differences in the contexts of their lives.

Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced last week to 10 days in jail -- after being originally sentenced to five years behind bars -- 80 hours of community service and three years of probation for falsifying residency records so that her two daughters could attend a school outside of their district.

We all seem to agree that the sentence handed to Williams-Bolar, who wanted only to ensure that her daughters were safe at school, is absurd and unjust. We are shocked and angry, as evidenced by the outpouring of support for a letter calling for her to be pardoned.

This case forces us to look closely at the deeply embedded structural inequality and institutionalized racism that exists within our public education and judicial systems. It also beckons us into dialogue about the effectiveness of a punitive, retributive philosophy of justice that deems it appropriate to “make an example out of” a mom who is doing whatever she can to guarantee a bright future for her kids.

Those of you who've read the posts in my Beyond Incarceration series know that I'm a huge advocate for prison arts initiatives. Art has the power to change lives -- not just of those who are incarcerated, but of those entering prisons from the outside to share their passion for creative expression.

I've experienced this myself, having facilitated a creative writing group in a county jail, and I hope that my stories will inspire readers to get involved, either through volunteering their time with a prison arts organization or by speaking out to ensure that prison arts and education programs get the funding they need to survive. The book I review here is a testament to just how valuable these programs are -- to prisoners and to us all.

Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson come from vastly different backgrounds, and their day-to-day lives share few commonalities. They are an unlikely duo, it seems - folks who wouldn’t typically cross paths. But Spoon and Judith are connected by something that will forever keep them bound: the shared experience of a space that allowed them to be fully human and completely real. And they found this space in the most unlikely of places: San Quentin.

Spoon and Judith first met 25 years ago, when Judith, a shy and at times anxious Jewish woman, was asked to facilitate a poetry class in the prison through California’s now-defunct Arts-in-Corrections program. Spoon, a quiet, solitary African American man who had only recently learned to read beyond a sixth grade level, was one of her students. In By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, Judith and Spoon weave a heartfelt story of art, friendship, meaning, and hope. Their memoir is not only a beautiful story of human possibility, but also a candid first-hand account of the shortcomings of both our criminal justice and education systems.

From February 28th -- March 2nd, Alabama will play host to formerly incarcerated activists from across the country as they convene in an effort to organize what may well be our nation's next major civil rights movement.

The conference, which is being organized by a steering committee comprised of prisoner rights and criminal justice reform activist leaders, will draft a campaign platform calling for the restoration of civil rights, a halt to prison expansion, the elimination of excessive punishments, and the protection of the rights and dignity of family members of the incarcerated. Conference events, which are slated to occur in Montgomery, Dothan, and Selma, will include a backwards march over Edmund Pettis Bridge.

Who better to lead this movement than those who have first-hand experience of the dehumanizing, unjust nature of our prison system? They know all too well the inequities that exist within the system, the abuses that occur behind prison walls, the suffering that families of prisoners must endure, and the struggle that those returning from prison face in the search for housing, jobs, and a sense of belonging.

The Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) was born in 1975 at Green Haven Prison in upstate New York. A group of prisoners concerned about increasing numbers of young offenders in the criminal justice system sought the support of local Quakers and began developing a program to teach youth about nonviolent conflict resolution. Together the volunteers and the prisoners created the first AVP workshop.

Since then, AVP has grown exponentially. Today, AVP workshops are held in prisons in 41 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as in more than 50 other nations around the world. Last year some 14,400 people participated in AVP workshops in correctional facilities, communities, and schools.

According to the AVP manual, AVP is a voluntary process of “seeking and sharing, and not of teaching.” Working to empower people to lead nonviolent lives through affirmation, respect, community building, cooperation and trust, AVP encourages every person's innate power to positively transform themselves and the world. This belief, termed “transforming power,” affirms that each of us can choose to respond to conflict in a positive, nonviolent way. This notion can be empowering to incarcerated people because it reminds them that they have the power to break the cycle of violence that landed them behind bars -- and reminds them that they deserve a life free from the pain of violence.

On January 3, four prisoners who were sentenced to death after being wrongfully convicted of crimes following a 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio, started a “rolling” hunger strike to protest the conditions of their confinement.

The prisoners, unlike the 125 death row inmates being housed at Ohio State Penitentiary, are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours every day, completely isolated from contact with others and prevented from ordering necessary goods such as clothing to keep them warm in their cold cells. They are aslo denied medical treatment and access to computer databases necessary for preparing their appeals, and despite their ongoing cooperation with prison programs, they have been refused privileges typically granted to prisoners for good behavior.

This treatment has been ongoing for over 17 years.

If moved from solitary confinement to death row, the prisoners would be able to have semi-contact visits from their families and interact with other inmates. But they have been told that they will remain in isolation, locked behind a solid cell door, until they are put to death.

In a public statement, Bomani Shakur, who began refusing food on January 3, states: “This is a protest, the only nonviolent way I can think of to express the deep disdain I have for the unjust situation that I am in … to continue on in this way would be to lend legitimacy to a process that is both fraudulent and vindictive; this I am no longer willing to do.”

During a meeting with Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) officials last Friday, the Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights was given permission to send a fact-finding delegation into Macon State Prison to interview prisoners and assess prison conditions. Macon is one of 10 facilities across Georgia in which prisoners recently staged a nonviolent protest to demand basic human rights, such as being paid for labor, educational opportunities, decent health care, nutritional meals, an end to cruel and unusual punishments, and an end to unjust parole decisions.

The delegation, comprised of representatives from the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, the U.S. Human Rights Network, the ACLU of Georgia, The Ordinary People Society (TOPS) and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, visited Macon Wednesday. "The corrections department made the proper decision by allowing us to review conditions and speak with inmates in this historic first step toward learning what is happening behind prison walls," delegation member Rachel Ross of the NAACP stated in a press release.

Prisoners reported many concerns to the delegates, including having to pay for medications, but not getting paid for their labor, having to adhere to disciplinary policies that lack clarity, and being isolated or transferred for reasons that are unclear. Latino inmates reported that they are not typically provided information in Spanish and therefore are barred from fully understanding their rights and prison regulations -- and are hence restricted in their ability to successfully navigate the system. An overall lack of educational and self-improvement opportunities was also apparent to the delegation. Prisoners shared that their families are experiencing significant frustration and hardship due to challenges in visiting their incarcerated loved ones.

Since 2000, Baltimore’s Community Conferencing Center (CCC) has been providing a venue for city residents to “safely, collectively and effectively” transform conflicts into cooperation.

Dr. Lauren Abramson, the founder and executive director of CCC, first learned about the process of community conferencing from colleagues in Australia. Adapted from the ancient traditions of New Zealand’s Maori society, community conferencing is a process of conflict transformation that invites all who have been affected by a conflict or crime into dialogue, including those who have caused harm, those who have been directly harmed, and family and community members. Community conferencing, like other restorative justice practices, acknowledges that the impacts of conflict weaken the seams that hold communities together, and that in order to mend these tears, communities must work together -- and that by doing so, people can build even stronger communities.

The community conferencing process values the feelings that fuel and are fueled by conflict. Abramson believes that, “We need the space to say how we feel when something happens, or else we’re left with just anger and fear.” Conflict, she maintains, can be an opportunity to explore the feelings that are most often neglected.

The mass media is reporting that the prisoner protest in Georgia is over, but those who listen keenly to reports coming from independent media sources know otherwise: many striking prisoners continue to hold their ground, refusing to perform their jobs until their demands are acknowledged.

The strike, which began on Thursday, December 9 and is the largest in U.S. history, has included thousands of prisoners who have banded together to fight for their common humanity. According to a striking prisoner who spoke with Black Agenda Report, “We have the Crips and the Bloods, we have the Muslims, we have the head Mexicans, and we have the Aryans all with a peaceful understanding, all on common ground.” Prison authorities, seeing the potential strength of this kind of cohesion, have reacted with violence and intimidation.

In addition to destroying prisoners’ personal property, depriving them of heat and hot water, and brutally beating some protest participants, prison authorities are utilizing divide and conquer tactics to break down the foundation of the protest. Numerous prisoners have been sent to isolation cells, while some who are believed to be protest organizers have been moved to other facilities. Other leaders are sure to step up, though, and the authorities may find that their actions have strengthened the resolve of those who are most committed.