Speaking Out for Social Justice: The Problems and Possibilities of US Women's Prison and Jail Writing Workshops

Abstract

Through community-based literacy work, writing teachers can encourage the development of prison narratives that counter social and media-driven stereotypes of prisoner identity. Such work thus situates writing workshops and other literacy-inspired programming for women as part of the emergent US prison abolition movement. This is a complicated equation to work through, however, given the sometimes competing sponsors of such literacy work and its reception within and beyond institutional contexts. This essay suggests that a nuanced reading of prison literacy programmes and their sponsors is necessary for contemporary educators interested in contributing to both educational prison programmes and the abolition movement. In order to explore such challenges and to illustrate individual and public tactics for emergent social justice, this essay offers sample texts and commentaries from the SpeakOut! women's writing workshop in the western US as a starting point for a larger consideration of the complexities that literacy educators confront when designing and facilitating such programmes.

Using A Culturally Safe Creative Writing Programme to Empower and Heal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Men in Prison

“…In essence, the men, who are normally voiceless and powerless both in and outside prison, wanted others to know who they were, why they did what they did, and that they were ‘not that bad’ (participant #13, aged 38 years). This suggests a desire to counter public assumptions and stereotypes of people in prison, as well as a desire to seek personal redemption, themes that have emerged in previous studies of prison writing programmes (Jacobi 2011). One of the men posited that the ‘Prime Minister might pick it up one day and that's just a little influence, isn't it?’ (participant #6, aged 44), suggesting that there is a degree of political activism at the heart of some of the contributions.…”

Sponsoring True Feeling

“…. That scholarship describes sponsorships as arrangements yielding creative resistance (Plemons, 2013); control over one's life (Chlup & Baird, 2010;Jacobi, 2011); critical literacy for the nonincarcerated (Kerr, 2006); success in legal proceedings (Brandt, 2009;Tomlinson, 2011); opportunity for civic engagement (Jacobi, 2009;Wright & Gehring, 2008); disruption of identities (Shethar, 1993); conflict between interlocutors' beliefs about literacy's power (Berry, 2014); and sponsor enactment of a hero narrative (Rogers, 2011). Literacy studies has embraced Brandt's formulation, since it accounts not only for the way in which literacies traffic in power differentials created by various kinds of symbolic capital, but also for the complex, recessive, and competing traditions of literacy that shape individuals and communities.…”

“…Though prison literacy practitioners are wary of the “sponsorship” designation—a term yoked, as Tobi Jacobi (2008, p. 83) notes, to religious and substance recovery programming (Jacobi & Johnston, 2011), they nevertheless invoke it with some regularity. That scholarship describes sponsorships as arrangements yielding creative resistance (Plemons, 2013); control over one’s life (Chlup & Baird, 2010; Jacobi, 2011); critical literacy for the nonincarcerated (Kerr, 2006); success in legal proceedings (Brandt, 2009; Tomlinson, 2011); opportunity for civic engagement (Jacobi, 2009; Wright & Gehring, 2008); disruption of identities (Shethar, 1993); conflict between interlocutors’ beliefs about literacy’s power (Berry, 2014); and sponsor enactment of a hero narrative (Rogers, 2011).…”