MRPJ#15/Moving Communities: “Working Through Walls” by Grady Hillman

Prisons are dangerous places in that the rules of law don’t really apply. The punitive nature of prisons in the States require that they make conditions uncomfortable for inmates. They are warehouses where people are moved back and forth between little cages and big cages, and these cages are not private; they are shared with others. The primary motivation for inmates is not to get out of the cages—they have no control over that. The primary motivation is to make oneself as safe and comfortable as possible inside the cages, and the resources are spread very thin between many equally motivated comfort seekers.

Prisons are weird laboratories for studies in personal power, and no one is exempt. Alliances are made for personal security. Some gain power through access to drugs or contraband. Some achieve power through control of educational or treatment programs in the prison.

When I first started my writing program in the Walls Prison in Huntsville, Texas, one inmate, a “politician” who was editor of the inmate newspaper, told two other inmates that he would get them into my writing program without their having to submit an application to me. He thought his clout inside the prison administration could be used to get an edge over these two other guys. It was a boggling exercise for me as an artist because I was trying to put together a class. The Black Muslims were checking out how many of their number would get in as were the Mexican Mafia, the Texas Syndicate, and white guy “politicians” while I was receiving these memos from other inmates which had subtexts under their subtexts alluding to some mysterious entry process that I had no clue about.

In Texas, I had an opportunity to start a program from scratch, whereas most artists going into prisons today work with an Education Department which will select inmates to come into the classes. Often times this selection process becomes a negotiation between the personal power of inmates and the administrative powers of Education people and has little or nothing to do with the artistic talents or desires of participants.

Let me amend that. Most inmates will be there for an art class and its benefits, but somebody may be there just for access to art supplies, somebody may be there to check the space out for possible entry by a more powerful inmate figure or member of an inmate group, somebody may be there…the list goes on. In some prisons where I’ve worked, the prison administration maintains control through an elaborate “snitch” system, so that there are inmates looking for useful bits of information that will increase their access to the resources of the prison.

But basically, information is power, so an artist should be prepared that inmates will not readily open up about their personal lives in an honest way, especially about the things and people they hold dear. Divulging such information in a workshop might give another inmate “power” in that they uncover the first inmate’s “weak spots,” where they’re emotionally vulnerable.

I’m reflecting on the system here since I recently conducted a workshop at a women’s prison in England. According to James Thompson, who runs the Theater in Probation and Prison project out of Manchester, the UK employs a sort of hybrid “therapeutic” arts model scheme. Artists are not trained therapists, but they are generally expected to create an environment of self-expression where inmates can explore their personal history and work through their problems using art as a tool.

At Bulward Hall I was working with Rebecca Prichard, a dramatist I have working with in the States and Ireland, and who places a high value on creating a workshop where aesthetic values and professional artistic challenges are of more than passing significance. In fact, she brought me in because the women wanted to explore publishing their work and Rebecca thought I could provide some help in that area. There was also a woman who was writing poetry, and Rebecca hoped that I might work with her individually, given that is my area of expertise.

I worked with the women in the class individually instead of as a group. In the States, I might have a large group which turns into an egalitarian workshop where work is shared with others in a personally non-critical environment. The emphasis is on craft; I am considered the master artist and they are my apprentices. I don’t want to know how they wound up in prison or whether they were sexually molested as children. If it should come up (as it often does), I react on a real human level, but I profess no expertise in therapeutic matters and let the “artist,” not the inmate, take it where they will.

The women in the Bulward Hall program did not show any more sense of trust than their American counterparts—in fact, “bullying” in British women’s prisons was a fairly big criminal justice issue while I was there—so in that “therapeutic” environment, their instinct was to reduce communication to the artist alone. Rebecca explained that she worked hard to generate a workshop environment but it tended to evolve into an individualized tutorial setup.

While I think that both systems hold merit, the therapeutic arts programs work well in Britain because the system there is less overtly punitive than in the States. They have a treatment philosophy which we do not. At least one of the women would not share her work with others, yet she worked with Rebecca. Here, she would probably not be accommodated and would be excluded from arts programming.

For the artist, my recommendation is to be real and honest with your class. Don’t try to get prisoners to “spill their guts” and open up to you as a peer. You are not. You may be the same age and sex but they have to deal with being a prisoner and you do not. Your value is your professional knowledge and experience. They are starving for such information. Wannabe therapists are generally perceived as naïve and exploitable as best, to be avoided because they create dangerous situations at their worst.

Compassion is certainly a valid motive for an individual artist to work with prisoners, but the artist has to keep in mind that the negative energy of a prison is crushing. Inmates have to live in an environment which is psychologically predatory with antagonism coming from the ranks of other inmates as well as staff while the prisoner is forced to live in a disorienting milieu of selective sensory deprivation. Whatever transcendent processes take place in the creation of art must be under the control of the inmate. Given the punishment orientation of U.S. prisons, I think professional arts workshops are probably the most effective humanizing agents with the greatest transformation potential in our criminal justice system, and I think arts practitioners who can work in that environment with care and sensitivity are the spiritual healers of our society.