Abstract
For the past 3 years, I have been teaching two courses, Cultural Perspectives and creative writing, in a Nevada medium-security men’s prison. Here is a story from that life-affirming experience—strange as that adjective applied to a prison setting may seem. It’s 7:30 on a December morning and several class members wait to greet me at the gate, broad smiles all-round. Nevada is a mass incarceration state—African Americans make up 9% of the general population and 29% of the prison population—and the classes more or less reflect that.
Today, in creative writing, we are reading Emerson at the request of Will Johnson (not his real name), a class member who is white, born-again, a Marine veteran, and at 73 serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Will reads Shakespeare and the Greek classics avidly and is a big fan of the transcendentalists. Hence Emerson. Following Will’s creditable overview of transcendentalism, we read “On Nature” aloud. The men as always are fully engaged. There are several like Will who maintain a deep connection with the natural world, which is not that easy in prison.
Mid-discussion, Ahmed Moore (not his real name) breaks in with the comment that transcendentalism sounds a lot like Sufism. Ahmed is an African American man in his early 60s who has been a practicing Muslim for nearly 40 years. He reads the Quran daily and can recite long passages in Arabic. Will assures him that there is nothing of Sufism in transcendentalism and we go one with the discussion. I, however, am intrigued, and at home Google transcendentalism/Sufism and discover it’s a whole field with books and scholarly articles in abundance. Amazingly, Emerson himself encountered the 13th century Sufi poet Hafiz midlife and until his death considered Hafiz a principal muse. I copy two of the articles and take them in to class with a request that Ahmed and Will lead a further discussion the following week. I bring along a poem by Hafiz, too, which everyone loves. The air is electric and everyone is grinning, save perhaps for Will who is not entirely sure he appreciates a Muslim mystic being associated with transcendentalism. Somehow, we instinctively get the import of this completely unexpected connection between worlds: 13th century Persia, 19th century New England, and 21st century mass incarceration—all of it happening in a crummy prison classroom. It’s an affirmation of the men’s intellect and hearts—and their and my connection with each other.
Bryan Stevenson (2015), the heroic director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, uses the word “proximity.” He credits his own proximity to men on Alabama’s death row with changing the course of his life and quotes his grandmother’s words: “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close” (p. 14).
I believe that social workers including feminist social workers need to get a lot more proximate with the issues of mass incarceration and with the men, women, and young people who languish in U.S. prisons. I need to qualify that statement, however. I have taught a university social work course, “Mass Incarceration, Race and Justice,” for the last several years. At the beginning of the course, I ask students, “How close is this subject to you?” I was blown away the first time—fully 20 of the 50 social work students had a personal connection with someone imprisoned: “my mom who has mental illness,” “my dad,” “my childhood friend,” “my cousin who was detained for two years then deported,” “my best army buddy,” “my fiancé,” “my uncle who was a Black Panther,” and “myself.” These students were already proximate; no one knew it though because the stigma—even that in a school of social work—is enormous. But once the classroom space is opened, a large silent population emerges. Their knowledge, of course, transformed the classroom, as did their eagerness to bring a larger, more penetrating analysis to their own loved ones’ lives.
In schools of social work proximity also means examining classes and field placements for the presence or absence of incarceration-related scholarship and opportunities. Social welfare policy; child welfare; individual, family, and community practice; aging; research; and Human Behavior in the Social Environment (HBSE)—to leave incarceration out of any of them is to leave out too much. Of course, social work faculty will protest with reason that they lack expertise in this field. It’s true—most of us were never taught it. So we must learn. Proximity also means welcoming previously incarcerated students, staff, and faculty to social work and supporting them on their paths.
What is most important, though, is that we as students, practitioners, and faculty living at this critical moment of history, bring a full-blown analysis to the table. I myself am a prison abolitionist. That means that while I work for reforms like prison education, ban-the-box, and re-enfranchisement, in the long run I and others have our eyes on something that is truly transformative and revolutionary. As Michelle Alexander (2010), the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness puts it, that goal is “to unravel a caste-like system that operates to lock people into a permanent second-class status and is sustained by an economic system that is immoral” (Alexander, 2012). The roots of today’s justice system are easily traced to the genocide of Indigenous people and the brutality of slavery—historical eras in which the law was clear: neither the killing of an Indian nor the killing of a slave qualified as murder (see Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). Such a system demands radical analysis.
Radical analysis is at the heart of feminism as is activism and sisterhood, in the broadest sense of that word. It is no surprise then that feminists have been in the forefront of struggles against mass incarceration—Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Elizabeth Hinton, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Affilia’s own Patricia O’Brien, my friend Cassandra Little, among them. I am particularly in awe of the work of formerly incarcerated women like Susan Burton (2017) who grasp so well the relationship between reforms as basic as a place to sleep for women coming out of prison and the systemic brutality of U.S. “justice.” (I highly recommend Susan Burton’s book, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women, for classroom use.)
There will be those in social work who walk blinkered through these times that call for action. There will be women, too, who decline to see or are too afraid to be proximate. Fortunately, in our often accommodationist profession, there has always existed a strain, a legacy, of bold analysis. I see it today in the women and men who are emerging as beautiful young leaders. Feminist faculty! The great challenge now is to mentor those young progressives. To provide them with placements, protection and encouragement for their activism. To model courage.
In our prison classroom, a favorite book is Greg Boyle’s (2010) Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. Kinship, the idea that “no daylight separates us,” is key to Father Boyle who writes, “Serving others is good. It’s a start. But it’s just the hallway that leads to the Grand Ballroom” (p. 188). That idea, that we belong to each other, is not alien to prison life. I close with a poem written by class member Alex Wakeman (2016), a Lakota poet, in response to Boyle’s chapter on kinship. For me, it captures the individual yearning and connection with the whole that together sustain so many of those whom we in all our wisdom incarcerate. Mi-ta-ku-ye O-ya-sin, Mi-ta-ku-ye O-ya-sin, Mi-ta-ku-ye O-ya-sin…All my relations, all my relations, all my relations—easily remembered, easily forgotten—the two legged—the four legged—the ones who fly and soar –the ones who live in streams, rivers, lakes and oceans—the ones who borrow—grasses, plants, shrubs—trees of the youngest, smallest sort to those of the oldest and tallest—all of whom are regarded as the sacred standing peoples…. Oneness, wholeness, miracle, mystery—every moment abounding—blended into a Holy Spirit essence—Beckons—for you I am waiting—Mi-ta-ku-ye O-ya-sin—all my relations—easily remembered—easily forgotten—guide the decision—guide the choice I will make.