8/30/2015

Notes from a graduation ceremony in prison

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. 

Maybe it’s because by this point in the talk, he was pissing me off real bad, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to liken this thinking to the thinking of plantation owners who used the labor of the people they enslaved for their purposes.  I mean, the owners’ use of the enslaved people’s time was productive.  They got so so rich.  And they deeply embedded our system of White supremacy such that as a country, we still, apparently, aren’t outraged at theu se of largely Black and Brown (and poor, and addicted, and mentally ill) labor for “our” profit. 

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.

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