Editor's Column: Prisons, Activism, and the Academy—a Roundtable with Buzz Alexander, Bell Gale Chevigny, Stephen John Hartnett, Janie Paul, and Judith Tannenbaum

Abstract

tors appear on page 567. America’s prisons and jails house more than two million inmates. At least half the prisoners released in 2008 are likely to be returned to “correctional” facilities by 2010 (“Second Chance”).1 What is the academy’s responsibility to the men, women, and children who live behind bars? What is its responsibility to those who are released? Over the last fifteen years federal and local governments in the United States reduced or ended funding for educational programs in prison. These programs helped reduce recidivism and offered lifers and other long-­term inmates the resources to invent more mean-­ ingful lives. This Editor’s Column features a conversation among educational activists who have confronted these tough financial and ideological facts and who continue to work with prisoners against all odds. Judith Tannenbaum is a poet who worked through California’s Arts-­in-­Corrections, a statewide program that for more than twenty years has paid professional artists to make art with people locked up in California state prisons. With the help of University of Michigan undergraduates, Buzz Alexander started the Prison Creative Arts Project in 1990, and PCAP has facilitated hundreds of workshops, readings, exhibitions, and performances throughout Michigan. Janie Paul, a curator of PCAP’s Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners, has facilitated art workshops in Michigan prisons and teaches PCAP courses that train and supervise art students who are sent into Michigan juvenile facilities and prisons. The author of Incarceration Nation, Stephen John Hartnett has spent eighteen years teaching and protesting at America’s prisons; he also runs a weekly poetry workshop at the Champaign County jail in Illinois. Finally, Bell Gale Chevigny is the editor of Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years 1 2 3 . 3 ]