[On October 27th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]
[N.B. This
post on my inspiring then-colleague and still-friend Ian Williams’ experiences teaching in
prisons originally aired way back in my blog’s first month, in
November 2010. But it’s all still damn true, other than the sad fact that
we haven’t been colleagues for far too long.]
If you wanted to feel very
depressed, you could spend some time trying to decide which at-risk American
population is more elided in our national narratives and perspectives about our
current identity and community: certainly Native Americans, on whom I’ve
already focused a good deal in this space and will continue to do so, have a
good case (although probably it was better before casinos forced us to admit
that they still exist); the homeless and those living at the very bottom of the
economic ladder are definitely in the conversation too. But I think a very
strong argument could be made that the population we most consistently forget
to include in our sense of ourselves, until and unless there’s some sort of
scandal that makes us think about them but solely in negative terms (see
Horton, Willie), is the more than 2.3 million Americans—or more than 1 in 100,
and that statistic is from 2008 so it’s likely higher today—who are in prison. (Making
us, it’s important to add, the worldwide leader in both the overall number of
citizens and the percentage of the population behind bars.) It’s ironic but, I
believe, entirely accurate to note that much more press and attention was paid
to (for example) Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan’s couple of weeks in jail than
is paid to the millions of their fellow Americans who are spending significant
portions of their lives in that world.
There are all sorts of issues
associated with that world and this community, as well as an equally striking
number of complicating factors and influences that have helped create and
sustain it, and it would be irresponsible of me to pretend to know nearly
enough about any of them to focus on them in a piece here (I’m quite sure that
many readers will know a good deal more and should, as always, chime in). And
in any case, my focus today, in the first of three Thanksgiving-inspired posts,
is instead on an incredibly impressive kind of academic and American (in the
best sense) work being done in this community by a colleague of mine, Ian
Williams. Ian is, in his own ways, a model of the type of interdisciplinary
scholar and teacher and person that I consistently aspire to be: he teaches and
produces scholarship about American literature and identity and culture, as do
I, but he’s also a published and on-the-rise poet and author of fiction, has
taught dance and performance, and has entirely revamped our department’s
literary magazine and website, to cite only a few of his broad and meaningful
pursuits and accomplishments. But the most impressive of his efforts, to my
mind, is also perhaps the least overtly visible: he has over the last couple
years begun to go into local prisons and develop reading and writing
conversations and courses with inmates, dialogues that have continued well
beyond his individual visits and that have, without question, added
immeasurably to the world and possibilities of those imprisoned Americans.
I can’t claim to speak for Ian’s
experiences, and he has written a bit recently about them on his own blog [BEN:
Now sadly defunct, but trust me, it was great]. And I’m quite sure that he
would dispute my sense that this gig is a thankless one; whether it garners any
visibility or attention is not, that is, at all connected to whether it’s
appreciated or makes a difference, and the thanks, similarly, come not from
outside perspectives but from those impacted directly by the work. I agree with
all of those thoughts (that I’ve imagined into Ian’s perspective!), but would
also argue that the absence of visibility is itself a further sign of how much
we don’t include this world and community nearly enough in our national
narratives and consciousness. Every few years (at least) sees a new movie about
an inspiring teacher doing important work with public school students in the
inner city; I can’t agree strongly enough that such individuals are sources of
inspiration, and I don’t think we could make enough movies celebrating teachers
in any case (duh, I suppose). But the communities whom Ian is inspiring are
even more desperately in need of that influence—and while their inhabitants
can’t necessarily (or at least often can’t) get to the happy endings and
brighter futures that are often featured in the captions at the end of those
movies, that doesn’t mean that we should celebrate any less fully the teachers
and Americans who are doing what they can to connect with and impact their
worlds and lives.
I’ll stop there,
since I can already imagine Ian’s demurrals from much of what I’ve written. At
the end of the day, again, he isn’t doing this work so it’ll get written up,
here or in much more prominent publications or spaces. But that doesn’t mean it
shouldn’t be—nor that American Studies shouldn’t include and study the world of
our imprisoned fellow Americans much more fully than it often does. Next
prison story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d
highlight?
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