Analysis: Marlene Martin THE 1960s were turbulent years; social change was in the air. Jim Crow segregation was dismantled, and the civil rights movement brought questions of racial and social justice into every household–and also into every prison. As people sought to change society on the outside, so did prisoners on the inside. The Attica
Prisoners have long written poetry from inside the prison walls. For incarcerated men and women—as for all who have the urge to write poetry—Robert Frost’s words ring true: the poem “begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” Poetry is the need to express what’s locked up inside, and for the prisoner, the bars are real. Photo courtesy of cain.ulst.ac.uk
Sending a poem into the blogosphere is, however, a relatively new way for prisoners to find their voice. Boston University’s Robert Pinsky, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, says in an interview on Big Think that prisoners serving a life sentence often write the best poetry since they have a lot of time to reflect and read. While many poems by prisoners wouldn’t make it past your high school English teacher, some talented jailed New England poets are emerging online.
The Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild publishes poetry once a month from those first published in its Mass Dissent magazine. The power of poetry is what helped Douglas Weed, incarcerated at MCI Norfolk, to dig deep into his crime and his subsequent remorse is not unlike Raskolnikov’s soul searching in Crime and Punishment. Here is Weed’s Ode to a Prison Prophet from October 2012:
By Jean Trounstine MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry tried to take a humorous approach to the unforgiving times we live in with her letter to a turkey last week, where she asked President Obama to pardon people—not turkeys. Pardon, the act of forgiving someone’s crime, has nearly dried up in the U.S. Of people who petitioned during
The most significant benefit of the Inside Out Parenting Program offered in Oregon prisons is increased visitation which results in a lower recidivism rate. Research has proven that inmates who receive abundant visitation are less likely to reoffend when they return to the community. Photo courtesy tracyschiffmann.com
Parenting Inside Out (PIO) is a parenting program offered in Oregon prisons for over ten years. The program was initiated by the Oregon Social Learning Center and the Oregon Department of Corrections. The reason why PIO works is the program encourages individuals to visit incarcerated family members often. The positive outcome is family relationships are nourished, which provides motivation for incarcerated parents to reconnect with their children.
The Oregon Social Learning Center conducted a randomized controlled study to test the outcomes of (PIO) participants. Empirical results of the study provided the impact PIO has on incarcerated parents. The study presents evidence that both male and female inmate parents who took PIO classes improved their parenting skills and relationships with their children.
359 incarcerated parents participated in the experiment. Both mothers and fathers were randomly divided into two groups. Half of the parents participated in parenting classes and the other half did not.
Jack Donson is the President of My Federal Prison Consultants, and the current Director of Programs and Case Management Services for FedCURE (a national sentencing reform coalition). He is a former Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Case Manager. During his 23-year career within the FBOP, he received several national awards including an award for Excellence in
Inmates incarcerated within the Federal Bureau of Prisons simply need to remain silent when talking to prison personnel. I know this is a basic concept from an attorney’s perspective, but it is often forgotten by incarcerated clients. As such, attorneys, and other defense specialists, should make a point of reminding their incarcerated clients of this
The Equal Protection Clause set forth in the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits denying any person “the equal protection of the laws.” Id. This constitutional protection does not stop at the prison gates, but its utility to the incarcerated is circumscribed, and efforts to violate rights under the clause can be fraught with difficulties related to the
A reader of my text, Education Behind Bars: A Win-Win Strategy for Maximum Security, recently notified me that the College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) has ceased offering their paper-based examination option. This means that CLEP testing is now technologically unavailable to virtually all incarcerated students, since most of these students lack access to internet connected computers or testing centers.
The letter from CLEP reads, in part: “Unfortunately, the College Board has decided to discontinue the paper and pencil testing program as of December 31, 2011 due to decreasing test-taker volumes and an increase in program maintenance costs. . . Since CLEP paper and pencil testing will be discontinued, you may want to investigate taking a correspondence course as an alternative solution to fulfill your educational goals. . . Once again, we at the College Board thank you for your interest in taking CLEP exams and we wish you the best of luck in your future educational endeavors.”
By William R. Piper
To begin, environmental survival concerns the ability of the prisoner to sustain his wellbeing given the rigors of prevailing prison conditions. Imprisonment entails a form of secondary socialization in which prisoners have to adapt to prison as a way of life. Old modes of living are shattered and they have to adjust themselves to the deprivations of prisons. They might do this in a number of ways. The range of such adjustment entail the pains of imprisonment in which prisoners must come to grips with a new reality, a new concrete situation in which the events in the prison setting fail to corroborate their prior social experiences.
Prison conditions constitute the concrete situation in which prisoners find themselves and which they must not only survive, but which they must transform and from which they struggle to free themselves. Although constituting the prisoners concrete situation, prison conditions should not be perceived as hopeless of unalterable, but merely as limiting and therefore challenging.
By Sean Shively
The suspense in the courtroom is thick enough to cut with a knife. I am waiting for the jury to come back into the courtroom with their decision on my case. A door opens and the twelve jurors start filing towards their seats. My stomach starts to cramp and I feel nauseous. The jury takes their seats and a deathly silence permeates the courtroom. The absence of sound is so deafening that when the judge’s gavel hits his desk, the reverberation causes my heart to palpitate.
The judge turns to look at the head juror and asks, “Has the jury reached a verdict?” The head juror responds, “Yes, Your Honor, we have.” The judge then asks, “What is the verdict?” The head juror states, “We find that the defendant is guilty on all counts.” The judge turns his head and looks into my eyes. I feel sweat starting to bead on my forehead as the judge states, “You have been found guilty of Forgery, a class C felony.” He then asks me, “Are you ready to be sentenced at this time?” I respond, “Yes, Your Honor.” He looks down at his papers for a moment then he looks back up at me and states, “I sentence you to six years in the Department of Corrections.”
We have profiled every prison within the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
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