Prison Writing

I was recently reading an article by Kristin Bervig Valentine about how she supposedly liberated prisoner’s minds after hosting a creative writing class in a female prison in the United States. I enjoy the prospect of prison writing because there is seemingly much that goes on there to create a vast and exotic universe to the many readers who have never gone to prison. This can also help (as was stressed in the article) the writers become better people. Valintine also stresses how her writing class can offer more opportunities inmates who get let out of prison. I cannot grasp how a simple writing class can help inmates succeed in the world. After leaving the protective doors of a prison, doors in the real world close for these people. Simply writing her worries away won’t help when a woman leaves the prison to enter a world of non-opportunity.

This article has caused me to become very confused about what my job might be if I continue on in academics. What kind of impact can I possibly make? This article brought my hopes up for a brighter future of helping people and then threw them back onto the floor when I began to reflect on what was being left out. I realized that there was nothing that this little writing program can offer to an inmate besides a nice place to go when she is frustrated.

The reality outside the prison bars of poverty and petty crimes leading back to more prison time is a more common one than Valentine’s proposal of a better life outside of prison because of her writing class. Valentine describes the women in her classes as eager to express themselves in light of their experiences in prison. Her class was also offered as a privilege to inmates who could attend with the threat of this expressive experience being revoked. She was very adamant throughout the article about how effective her classes were (because a few of the girls got published and so on) but did not talk about the majority of students in her classes. There were no statistics about how well her students did after they left the prison system. What happened to them? Why was there no follow up study? This makes her essay inconclusive in my eyes. She has a point that this sort of mental healing through creativity is effective, but what does it actually do if someone ends up back in prison? I would also have liked to know how much money was being spent on her class to begin with. Could that money have been spent in a different and more effective way?

Valentine wanted to keep her job of course! Who would ridicule their own source of income? It would be very silly to put down your own very controversial job of advocating freedom of speech in a jail. I am going to look for responses to this article to figure out what other people have thought and I will add it to the bottom of this post if I find any.

There are so many questions whirring through my mind at this point. It is possible that some women were healed in ways that weren’t described in the paper. I definitely felt a healing presence in the PBS documentary “What I Want My Words to Do to You” by Eve Einsler. It seemed as if it was almost pacifying for the women to go to their writing classes (yes, this brings up a whole whack of other issues) and I cannot imagine a different process that would suffice as a way of coming to terms with life in prison. On the other hand, I have not seen any videos showcasing psychotherapy or even interprisoner therapy (the latter seemed to poke though in Einsler’s film) so I cannot make a good judgment about the relative effectiveness of this program.

This, like everything I post here, is a work in progress. Suggestions on readings and the like are welcome. As I explore different regions of this topic, I will post more about it.

Citation: Valentine, Kristin Bervig (2006) “Unlocking the Doors for Incarcerated Women Through Performance and Creative Writing” In Madison, D. Soyini and Judith Hamera (eds) 2006 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. pp. 309-324