Mass Incarceration in the United States: Can S-CAR Play a Role in Prison Reform Programs?

At the risk of sounding too optimistic, it feels as if the issue of mass incarceration may finally be receiving the groundswell of mainstream attention and critique that it so badly deserves.  This is not to say that the decades-old electoral mantra of being “tough on crime” has seen its last days, but with more than 2.2 million Americans behind bars, making the United States the world’s leader in incarceration,  American politicians on both sides of the aisle are publicly reconsidering the trajectory of our criminal justice system.  While Democrats Dick Durbin and Patrick Leahy are finding (rare) common ground with Republicans Rand Paul and Ted Cruz around drug sentencing, ordinary Americans are gathering around the water cooler to dissect the latest episode of Orange is the New Black and to lend their copy of Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness.
 
We here at S-CAR are also thinking and talking a great deal about the criminal justice system—its enormity, its inequities, its complexity—and many of us are wondering where we, as a field, fit into the equation of reform.  The possibilities for our contribution have yet to be fully imagined, but one avenue where we may play a role is in the proliferation of prison arts.  This October, I attended Marking Time:  A Prison Arts and Activism Conference at Rutgers University, and  was enlightened and inspired by the way incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are using art to cope with loss, foster hope, practice non-violence, and imagine new futures.

For men, women, and children behind bars, dance, theater, crochet, painting, poetry, song, pottery, model-building, photography, and drawing provide an outlet to express innermost thoughts and feelings that must usually be tucked away behind a tough or stoic façade.  These arts are bridges to their humanity, and they are inroads to non-violent dialogue with other inmates.  Throughout the conference, I heard prison program coordinators discuss how transformative these mediums are for the attenuation of violence in prison, how the life skills cultivated around the arts are helping reduce recidivism, and how violence inside the prison predictably escalates when programs like arts and other forms of therapy are suspended due to budget cuts.

One of the most memorable presentations at the conference was that of a formerly incarcerated man who had served over five years in a federal prison for non-violent drug charges.  As a white man entering the prison for the first time, he knew that most people were expecting him to gravitate to the Aryan Nations prison gangs for protection in this new, racially-segregated environment. Instead, he turned to art and became an “independent.”  Though on his own in many ways, this man’s art began to draw curious onlookers, and their questions about his projects turned into conversations about one another.  He credits his independent-artist status for facilitating friendships with several men of color who, like him, were resisting the racialized hostilities of prison through their own artistic endeavors.  Now freed, he looks back at these art projects as a testimony of what he endured and ultimately transcended, and he advocates for innovative prison reform by putting a human face on a dehumanizing and often invisible experience.

I look forward to learning more about how the field of conflict analysis and resolution can participate in the process of prison reform, and I am eager to see how we can work with communities that are disproportionately devastated by mass incarceration.  Let’s keep the conversations going!

### Photos - San Quentin State Prison: California's Oldest Prison with a design capacity of 3088, by Flickr user Sean Duan.

Angola The State Farm Louisiana State Penitentiary 2009 Maximum Security Prison Museum by Flickr user mrchriscornwell.