Author Archives: Jean

Comics that Tell Stories of Struggle Behind Bars

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Cartoons by artists behind bars give them a way to express themselves without words.  A chance to speak out their conditions, pains and losses as well as use humor to alleviate some of the deepest pains or anger. 

Lois Ahrens at the Real Cost of Prisons Project has comics by many artists behind bars and they tell amazing stories. One of the artists whose work is featured on the home page is Jacob Barrett.  He portrays the brutality of prison with a dark humor in this cartoon titled "Mass Incarceration."

Here he uses color to give us the punch of the "D.O.C." and help us see bodies hauled off in the same kind of vehicle that picks up trees or trash.  The DOC driver looks almost jubilant and the lilting tone contrasts with the awful reality of body after body after body being essentially warehouse.

On Ahrens' website, two complete books are available that tell researched and documented stories of incarceration — all in comics. "As of February 2010, 125,000 copies of the comic books have been printed and more than 115,000 have been sent to families of people who are incarcerated, people who are incarcerated and to organizers and activists throughout the country."  Check out the website if you or your group is interested.

Another place I've found some wonderful comics is on the website Between the Bars.  If you've never visited this site, do.  Many pieces of art some touching writing — all by prisoners across the country. Steve J. Burkett created the piece below around Christmas this past year.

Channeling humor, loss and the feelings of isolation at holidays, Steve puts his shipwrecked, totally surprised-to-be-there-in-spite-of-the-drink Santa on an island. No man is an island?  Go to prison and see if you still feel that way. 

Drug Sniffing Dogs: Wait! You’re only Visiting a Prison.

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Please see my new article at  about the impending new policy coming to Massachusetts — dogs who will sniff visitors for drugs at state prisons.

Here's how it begins:  "By now, everyone has heard about the amazing sense of smell of bomb-sniffing dogs, who we saw on the front lines of the Boston Marathon bombings. But a new policy coming to state prisons that involves dogs trained to sniff out drugs could rattle some cages, and it should cause us to ask: Is Massachusetts turning down the wrong criminal justice path, aiming to fix a problem without getting at its core cause?"

Be sure and watch the video.  Do these digs remind you of other dogs, anywhere else?  One thing that didn't make it in my article is this:

In an interview, Marina Drummer, Director of the Community Future Collectives in California, said Louisiana has a particularly horrendous drug-sniffing policy: “Visitors line up and go inside a little shed, individually. Around the bottom two feet is chicken wire—each person goes in the box and the handlers take the dog and walk around the shed with the dogs sniffing.” She called it “a terrifying experience for children and humiliating for everybody else.

Reading Plato on Death Row

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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."

Another Day, Another Report on Massachusetts’ Botched Prison Policies

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Check out my newest blog post about the new report issued by MassINC and Community Resources for Justice (CRJ) on– guess what — the sagging state of criminal justice health in Massachusetts.

"The report points out well-worn zingers such as “A decade ago, higher education surpassed spending on corrections by 25 percent. Today the higher education budget is 21 percent lower.”

The report, titled Crime, Cost, and Consequences: Is It Time to Get Smart on Crime?, asks a good question, and it provides some good suggestions for change. But it seems like, year after year, another report comes out that recommends significant change to the system. And it seems that, year after year, we look over our policies, brood over how much money we’re spending, shake our heads at how many people keep returning to prison, and then, just like that, wash our hands and choose not to follow the recommendations."  More.

Reflections on The Past Week

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This was a difficult week to be a prison activist.  Just as it was undoubtedly difficult to work for the rights of immigrants and the mentally ill.  It was a week in Boston where four lives were lost and 170 wounded by a truly senseless act of violence committed by two young men bent on something we do not yet understand. And the last thing anyone wanted to discuss was how we need to make sure Dzhokhar Tsarnaev gets a fair trial and is not mistreated behind bars.

As I listened to the cheering on the night that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was caught, and all our officials expressing hopes and prayers for the 58 who, as of today, are still in the hospital, I thought of many moments from this week.  My students told me these stories: one went to the hospital to visit her ailing uncle in the Brigham and Women's ICU when those who had lost limbs were wheeled in; a student rushed from Lowell into Boston to try and find her father because she didn't know if he'd been hurt; and a Vietnam vet who had gone to see the Sox got lost on his way home because of the confusion. A friend's husband saw his company's restaurant's windows blown out, just across the street from the grandstand at the finish line; a friend's son who had been in New York and close to the tragedy of 9/11was about to get on the T in and instead turned around when he heard screams nearby.  It was a very unsettling experience to feel that our houses, our business, our institutions and our loved ones in the city we call home, could be unsafe.

And yet, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is 19.  He is the age of the students I teach.  He went to U Mass Dartmouth and wanted to go into the medical profession.  In fact, for whatever reason, he was seen at U Mass in his dorm, just 2 days after the horrific act he is accused of perpetrating with his brother. He had friends. He supposedly had a girlfriend.  He is, and I say it again, a student. I do not want him to be mistreated in prison; I do not want  him to get the death penalty, if he is tried in the federal courts.  I do not want any less for him than I want for any of the prisoners who commit heinous acts and live behind bars. For most of them, I want change, believe they are capable of transformation, and deserve options behind bars and in our system that give them a second chance.

Justice does not mean mercy.  That I know.  But justice must be tempered by mercy.  As we send out love to all the victims and their families, I hope we can remember the family of the Tsarnaevs.  I hope we can remember than everyone who enters our criminal justice system has a story.  Just like the doctors who labor to heal all who are hurt– no matter what the injured have done or who they are — we too, need to keep in our hearts that compassion cannot be piecemeal.   Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's acts were evil but can we really say that he is only the sum of this horrible crime?