One of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had. I had to keep telling myself, “I’ll just
write about it. I’ll just write about
it. I’ll just write about it.” As if the
capacity to get it all out into language could have anything to
do with the capacity to make sense of that experience.
My notes, in italics.
1. SEX/VIOLENCE
-------------------
the comeback underdog
As we waited for the ceremony to begin, J, a man I know who
is a writer, came in and sat next to me.
We got to talking about the nature of doing our work in the context of a political landscape where Donald Trump
seems to be the current winningest communicator. J explained to me: Sex and violence are
always going to win the attention of the American public. But we also really love to root for the
underdog. That’s us. The underdog.
We just gotta communicate that better.
How?
2. LWOP’s circle of
influence
In the same conversation, I told J that I was having a hard
time wrapping my head around offering GED prep to men who are never going to be
released (not all of our students, but some).
I told him that I was rethinking what it meant for education to be
instrumental – outside of the economic and political ways we typically think
about it. He insisted that I was wrong,
that I wasn’t considering the LWOP’s (Life Without Parole) circle of
influence. Just because he isn’t getting
out, doesn’t mean his homies aren’t. Doesn’t mean his kids can’t be moved by his
example. He told me about a guy he knew,
LWOP, who was taking college classes and whose son was incarcerated at another
institution. When his son read about his
dad’s accomplishments in the prison newspaper, he quit gang-banging and went
back to school, too. Pretty cheesy
example, but still. Yeah, I gotta think
about that.
3. “guys in blue”
A jazz band (made up of musicians who are incarcerated) was
playing up at the side of the stage. A
White guy, some prison staff member, walked over to one of the guys and said
something to him. One of the guys in the
band came to the microphone on the stage and said, “Guys in blue, we gotta
return to our cells for count.”
Somebody was missing, so all of the guys in the prison were
being sent back to their cells so that they could be counted and accounted for.
Guys in blue. Fifty
or so of the men in that space were wearing black caps and gowns over their
prison blues. They stripped them to go
back to their cells.
M, who was sitting with us, reassured us, “Don’t worry. We won’t be gone for long. They’ll probably find him. If we don’t come back, I’ll see you
Thursday.”
“Guys in blue.” That
language. I’ve only ever heard prison
staff refer to the men as “inmates.” Not
sure what to make of the staff member passing off the voice of the command to
one of the men. But not sure what I
would have made of the staff member voicing the command himself and using
“inmates.”
4. “Hopefully, he’s alive. Don’t forget we are up in here.”
As the last of the men trickled out, one of the family
members, a Black woman, stopped the White staff member who’d passed off the
command, “Why do they have to leave?”
While he was like, “Ma’am, security measures, inmates’ locations, mumble
mumble,” she just looked at him. Then,
with him still standing there, she addressed the others sitting near her, a
whole bunch of other Black women, “When they find him, hopefully he’s
alive.” She turned away from the staff
guy, “Don’t forget we are up in
here.”
Sandra Bland had been found dead in her cell less than two
weeks before this ceremony.
The White guy stood silent for a couple more awkward
seconds, then walked away.
5. “You’re a brave woman.”
While the men were off being counted, we were encouraged to
get some fresh air, have some coffee.
(Oh yeah, the coffee tasted so much like chicken broth. It was uncanny.) We milled about. I noticed one of the guards was
pregnant. One of the visitors, as she
walked past her, told her, “You’re a brave woman.”
Yeah. What? Need to think more about pregnancy inside a
prison.
6. color guard’s tucked in shirts
The men came back.
The ceremony started with a colors ceremony. That means the presentation of the US and
Californian flags. Four guys from a
Vietnam vets group did it. All the usual
fanfare: the orders, the synchronous marching, holding the US flag a little
higher. And all four of them had tucked
their prison shirt into their prison pants.
What.
7. “forward thinking prison,” “we have a lot in
common,” “empower the people that are within our custody to give them the
tools”
Lines from the keynote speaker, a local sheriff, patting
this prison on the back – and likening it to his own jail. As if somehow it’s possible to be both an
instrument of incarceration and of
paternalistic “salvation.” This “we give
the tools” talk is common in most schools, though, and I’m sick of it. Blahhhhhhhhh.
Another way to think about what happens in education spaces
is that authentically humble educators listen, learn, and tap into the “funds
of knowledge” that exist in the communities they serve (not my phrase –
Moll’s). Or, like they say in Teaching as a Subversive Activity:
Contrary to conventional school practice, what [educate]
means is that we want to elicit from students the meanings that they have
already stored up so that they may subject those meanings to a testing and
verifying, reordering and reclassifying, modifying and extending process. In this process, the student is not a passive
“recipient;” he (sic) becomes an active producer
of knowledge. The word “educate” is
closely related to the word “educe.” In
the oldest pedagogic sense of the term, this meant drawing out of a person
something potential or latent.
8. “then a supporter
of mine when I ran for supervisor,” “campaigned on redemption,” “we were part
of that five,” “Bobby Kennedy’s daughter”
Speaker moved on from saving the graduates before him to
ignoring them for the sake of just straight up bragging about his own
self. How progressive his jail is. (Oxymoron.) Bobby Kennedy’s daughter omgggg sat on the panel that would
ultimately decide whether or not his jail gets some big award.
9. “not just a GED, a
high school diploma”
At his jail, the “inmates” can earn high school diplomas,
not just these piddling GEDs, he says to a gathering of forty or so men who are
beaming with the pride of having earned their GEDs.
Dumdum.
10. “for us to use your time in the most
productive way”
For US to use YOUR time.
Good god.
11. “Somebody get this guy a baby to kiss,” “Hey,
they have hearts, too, okay?”
M, my incarcerated colleague’s whispered comments as the
speech rolled out on top of us.
12. letting family in
This was good. The speaker
went on and on about how important it is for the leaders of carceral
institutions to be mindful of the effects of incarceration on families. As he did so, M whispered to me that the
warden at this prison had recently announced that this would be the last
graduation ceremony to which family members of graduates could be invited. And that warden is sitting up there on the
stage right next to the podium.
13. reduced phone
charges by 70%: “Did he just call us poor?”
Speaker brags about his work to reduce the cost of phone
calls for prisoners by 70%, so that the system wasn’t getting rich off of “poor
families.” Okay he does have a point
there, that’s some useful (if incremental) reform.
M leaned over to me and said, with a wry smile,“Did he just
call us poor?”
14. Grey Poupon
Speaker said, jokingly, if it was up to him Grey Poupon
would be served in jail chow halls. Huh?
15. “I’m living as a
memorial to him,” “I love you guys, and I’m proud of you,” sitting together, “I
apologize to everybody”
Cut to the speech by the valedictorian of the daytime GED
class. I was struck particularly by his
dedication of this accomplishment to the memory of his victim, for whose lost
life he expressed great remorse. “I’m
living as a memorial to him,” he said.
Dang. I had a hard time moving
past that as he went on to congratulate his peers, to apologize to society.
As we listened to his speech, I looked around and realized
that almost every guy in the room who is a part of our evening program was
sitting within a few feet of us. We
never talked about sitting together, we just were. Sometimes, it’s hard to feel like much of a coherent
community since we only get to meet twice a week, we’re separated into to
classrooms, there’s so much work to be done, etc. Looking around and seeing us all together
really made me wonder.
16. print keyboards
After the ceremony, L, one of our students, came to me to
give me some feedback as he knows that we’re in the middle of planning next
semester. We really need typing
practice, he told me, and I know we can’t get computers, so is it possible for
you to print out a picture of a keyboard so that we can practice with paper
copies? I know it’s not ideal, he said.
Fuck.
17. team leader
The same guy, L, suggested that we need to offer some
student leadership opportunities. He
knows he can motivate some of his classmates to get together and study outside
of class, he said, but it would be way easier if he were somehow “officially”
endowed by us with some role, like “team leader.” Genius.
One of the most exciting things about this work, so far, is how
much brilliance and how many deep relationships there are for us to build
from. I know that these things exist,
too, in every high school classroom (and every other classroom), but there’s
something particularly… something…
happening in this peer-led space.
