“If the Guards Only Knew”: Communication Education for Women in Prison

Abstract

The next time you listen to legislators, reporters, and prison officials speak on the topic of criminals and prisons, note how rarely the reference is to a female. The generic “criminal” or “prisoner” is unquestionably assumed to be male. This condition may occur because, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (1991), women make up less than six percent of the state and federal prison population in the United States. Yet the alarming fact is, as Bloom (1997) points out, that during the twelve months ending June 3D, 1996, the number of women under the juri sdiction of state and federal prison authorities showed an increase of 6.4 percent while the number of men rose 5.2 percent (p. 7). My interests in writing this commentary are to point out that there are women in prison in increasing numbers; that we can do something to make the time they serve more productive, especially with educational programs designed to increase their mental well-being; and that we might thereby aid in decreasing recidivism. With these points in mind, I propose two objectives in this essay: (1) to encourage women in communication to investigate in their own communit ies the degree to which educational opportunities for incarcerated women are lacking; and (2) to develop communication programs to benefit the women who are incarcerated. In these pages, I describe the course I have developed which is centered on the creation and the communicative performance of poetry, prose, and other aesthetic literature by women incarcerated in an Arizona medium security prison facility.