Today, in honor of our freedom, I'm posting poems from prisoners who aren't, or at one time, were not free.

image from the University of York, UK

-Institutionalized-

As a female prison employee walks pass
I inhale and hold
arrested in my lungs her perfume
which reminds me of
freedom.

–Roland F. Stoecker Jr. 3/27/13 posted on Between the Bars

Pictures of a Daughter, Viewed in Prison

You set the photos down,
spreading time around you panorama-style.
Button-nosed baby, toddler, little girl, bigger girl:
Your eyes roam the chain of living paper dolls,
the side-by-side smiles posed just for you.
Time cannonballs you in the gut.
You think, When the hell did all this happen?
How did I miss so much?
Too late to cry, too late to mourn
the baby smell, the small heft, the music of her giggles.
The middle photos blur, become
the space between your first photo and your latest.
This is the abyss into which time has fallen.
Your reverie broken,
you gather up your painful collection and rise.
The clock reads 2:28.
Time has just stolen another hour.

—Christina Snow,  published in I'll Fly Away edited by Wally Lamb and posted on Oprah's website

Sequoia

Bark a mile thick and tough as anything you’ve seen
No sap in this old tree
The wind and fog know better than to venture near
Lest they be swallowed
I strip the fetid earth of all that is good in it
And cast my shadow on all that come near
I am invincible
Indestructible
Beyond reproach
For no one dares to challenge me
The lion of the forest
They’re smart for that
Because they do not know of what I’m capable
Neither do they know
That it is lonely when
There are no arms large enough to hold you
In their embrace

–Karter Kane Reed, in a letter to me

Sean Dobbin, who teaches at the Community High School of Vermont in the Northeast Correctional Complex calls his class "Cruciverbalism." And yep, that really refers to crossword puzzles. But Caleb, who's been incarcerated for 10 months, says he's learned more than how to solve and create puzzles through these classes.  He's learned speaking and language skills as well as what he calls how to "be the change."  Caleb says he is also helping others by "creating a superb environment in the English language that's easy to understand."

Pictured here is one student with a crossword he is solving.

Dobbin came to this class though his love of puzzles. He says he is always solving puzzles and has created crosswords for the likes of the NYTimes, two accepted via the master, Will Shortz. He's spent much of his career teaching English and always worked with seriously at-risk or incarcerated teens. The current class has been running for 4-5 months and he has seen a significant improvement in vocabulary skills. But, most importantly, he has found a fun and inviting way into teaching language arts, keeping his students engaged and challenged.

To earn credit, he says, "a student must solve a set number of puzzles, create their own puzzles, contribute to a class puzzle that is being groomed for publication, keep a vocabulary journal, keep a parts-of-speech journal, and produce written work that is guided by 'found' knowledge from puzzles." Dobbin says that the prison has invested in a professional program, Crossword Compiler, a crossword-construction software program used by pros.

David, at 29, recently earned his high school diploma in 2012 at the Community High School and took the Cruciverbalism class "to try something new." He says the class taught him "If I am determined enough and stay focused that I can accomplish any and all goals I set for myself." David now is the librarian at the prison complex.

Pictured here, another student, working on building a crossword puzzle.

Under Vermont state law, the Vermont DOC website states that "All individuals under the age of 23, under custody of the DOC, and without high school diplomas, have a mandatory education requirement. These students are enrolled upon admission." The Community High School of Vermont is accredited through the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC).

But school behind bars can be deadly. Keeping the attention of kids is not easy and engaging them in class means helping them learn, as Caleb says, how really smart they are. David too says it well when discussing what Crosswords do for students: They "work your brain and help you learn things that you never knew before."

Dobbin feels teachers at the high school are "encouraged (and expected) to be creative with the coursework they offer." But seriously, without giving kids behind bars opportunities to shine, there will be no door like the one below –a way into, yes, but no way out of the darkness.

I've been interested for years in the Italian prison theatre company featured this week in The New York Times.  Since 1988, Compagnia della Fortezza, the company named after the Medici-era fortress that houses the Volterra jail where the men are imprisoned, has performed a variety of Italian spectacles and tragedies. From Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization to Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio Does Not Want to Die, director Amando Punzo has dedicated himself to art behind bars.

This photo is one of many in the photo essay by Clara Vannuci, an Italian photographer who has documented in amazing pictures the essence of Punzo's vision.

For 21 years, working five hours a day, six days a week, Punzo has embarked on a challenging repertoire for the company, including per the NYTimes in an article they wrote in 2009,  "plays based on works by Brecht, Peter Handke, and even the tale of Pinocchio."  He says that it is not therapy that drives him but creating good theatre.

I too felt that way during the eight plays I directed behind bars. The idea was not to go after building self-esteem –although that happened — but to go after revealing the truth of the play and getting the women to be the best they could be at portraying their roles. Punzo says “It’s not about giving the inmates an outlet or a recreational break. It’s work.”  The side effect of theatre programs behind bars are self-respect, community building and a love for the stage.

The Italians love art so much, the rumor goes, that the prisons would rather risk an arrest than not show their performances to other Italians. Many shows tour and many prisoners work outside during the day. And believe it or not over half the 205 prisons in Italy have acting companies. Compagnia della Fortezza has won some of Italy’s most prestigious theatre awards and houses a gourmet restaurant where prisoners work and serve food to the public.

A 2009 show — Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization  (photo below)— was loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s masterwork, but the text wove in soliloquies from other authors, in this case Shakespeare (predominantly Hamlet) but also Genet, Pinter, Chekhov and Heiner Müller.

While Punzo, who has an acting background, creates a new play every July, his dream is to create a stable repertory company, with a winter season and a permanent theater, which would allow him to pay the actors. Ah Italy!

Photographer Vannuci relayed in this week's article how she asked a prisoner why no one tried to escape. The response reflected how much theatre has the potential to change lives:  “Why should I run? Where would I go? Twenty years I’ve lived in prison. Now I have something to live for. Life has meaning.”

Years ago, when I first heard about the Clemente Course, pioneered by Earl Shorris, a social critic and author who believed in teaching  the Humanities to the poor and the vulnerable, I was intrigued.  The concept aimed to offer classics such as Kant, Plato, Socrates and Tolstoy to people who traditionally have no access to such work — the homeless.  Since the program began in the 1990's, the Clemente Course has expanded and now prospers world-wide.

In that vein, a fascinating venture is Lisa Guenther's work reading philosophy with prisoners on death row.  Guenther wrote a wonderful op-ed piece about solitary confinement in the NYTimes in 2012 where she said "There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged."

Guenther brings a bit of light into the dark hole of solitary.  On a blog called,  "New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science" she says "Last semester, we read Plato’s dialogues on the death of Socrates. The Apology was a great success. 'I want my lawyer to read this!' said one prisoner. 'Socrates is a badass,' another said approvingly. The Crito was another story. Socrates went from bring a principled badass to a spineless bastard, not just for refusing Crito’s offer of escape and exile, but mainly for his defense of fidelity to the law and the state, even when it has clearly committed a grave injustice."

Guenther's students on Death Row are in Tennessee. They are concerned about community and they are concerned about living a meaningful life– however much they have left and even though they live on Death Row. One student, Abu Ali Abdar Rahman, in a newspaper called The Maximum Times, published at the prison itself, wrote an article about the experience with Guenther and her grad students called "Transformative Justice: A Pilgrimage to Community Building and Conflict Resolution."  He says that the group appreciates the opportunity to learn, to think, to discuss and to "nourish our defects." 

Another student, Derrick Quintero in the same paper, said outsiders are often surprised that on Death Row, prisoners get to participate in programs, but Tennessee's Death row allows them such participation for "good behavior." The educational opportunities are transformative, he says, for the participants, both those inside and outside of prison.  He quotes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his article, citing his book A Saint on Death Row, and saying that they all have the potential to be "indispensable agents of change."

Guenther writes that the philosophy course used Plato's Phaedo, "the dialogue that recounts Socrates’ final hours before he is forced to drink the poison that will numb his body and stop his heart."  She recounts how some students "found Socrates’ arguments for the immortality of the soul compelling, and others thought he rejected the knowledge and pleasures of the body too harshly." One prisoner argued that state execution "twists the meaning of life and death."  In many ways, these kinds of insights are no different that students in any other part of the prison, or for that matter, in most classrooms.

Guenther says insightfully that "there are countless prisoners on death row who are working harder than we can imagine to transform themselves and to build a meaningful sense of community. We could learn a lot from these people if we weren’t so determined to kill them."

It’s not the fast-paced car chases, the explosions, or the careening out of control that impressed me about SNITCH; it’s the heartbreaking story about a father’s desperate attempt to save his son who is embroiled in the horror of mandatory minimum sentences.  And for that, everyone who sees the movie will get a visceral education.

Dwayne Johnson is surprisingly good as a father who is estranged from his son (Rafi Gavron) and discovers that the naive kid agrees to accept a package of drugs for his best buddy who wants to sell them around school.  The boy protests but he’s not strong enough to stand up for himself at this point, battered by a difficult divorce and furious at his father for abandoning him.  But when the brown paper package arrives at his house, I found myself screaming at the screen, “Don’t open the package!” –that’s how believable the scene was.  Of course he does, and of course the buddy has been set up.  A chase, bedlam, the boy is caught and imprisoned and given a mandatory minimum sentence of years and years behind bars.  Only the federal prosecutor can lower the sentence.

The two become close as the father (with the bland last name of  “John Matthews” who could of course be “Everyman”) discovers that the only way he can get his son’s sentence reduced is to bring the prosecutor a high level drug dealer.  She, of course, makes him go beyond what he promises and therein lies the excitement and terror of the story.

But the scenes between the father and his son who is being mistreated behind bars — beaten up for sure and God knows what else as it’s all implied- are what made me realize the depth of the snitch problem.  Who wouldn’t do anything to save his kid?  Who wouldn’t inform on friends or drive trucks across the border to get a break in draconian drug sentencing?  The idea that you shouldn’t snitch is ingrained in the boy who refuses to rat out his friends but how can a father refuse?

For those who criticized casting directors for choosing Dwayne Johnson, I beg to disagree.  I was surprised that he was so convincing.  But it seemed pretty plausible to me that someone who looks and acts like The Rock would be about the only thing that could coerce a Mexican drug cartel into believing he was on the up and up.

Other actors are also fantastic in this film.  Barry Pepper plays an enforcer working for the government who is the only one with a conscience. John Berenthal from The Walking Dead  plays a former low-level drug dealer who is trying desperately to stay out of the game and gets caught up again because of money.  If you were offered $20,000 in this day and age, what would you be willing to do, the film poses. He gets us into the grimy side of drug dealing and into the world of the kingpins where the wonderful Michael K Williams (The Wire) and interestingly-cast Benjamin Bratt (Law and Order) reign. The impossibly driven and mostly heartless Federal prosecutor played to perfection by the always-amazing Susan Sarandon.  And Ravi Gafron as Matthews’s son Jason has the perfect innocence and childlike despair for the role.

See it and enjoy the action.  Read my other blog about Snitch and the tragedy facing so many who make mistakes when they’re young and get incarceration rather than treatment.  And then remember that “48.7%” of those who were convicted of a drug crime carrying a mandatory minimum receive 10 years or more.