Pubdate: Wed, 18 Aug 2004
Source: Pulse of the Twin Cities (MN)
Copyright: 2004 Pulse of the Twin Cities
Contact:  http://www.pulsetc.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3183
Author: Lydia Howell
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

VOICES NO LONGER IMPRISONED

Ex-Prisoner Helps Stillwater Inmates Learn Creative Writing

Reggie Harris was sitting in a prison cell doing eight-and-a-half years 
when he reached in the book bin wheeled through the halls and picked up a 
battered fragment of August Wilson's play "Fences." Though he only saw the 
middle half of the play--he didn't learn how it ended until he was 
released--reading the drama that paralleled his own experience caused 
Harris to reexamine his life and rediscover his creative voice.

Now, seven years later, Harris returns to the Stillwater prison twice a 
week to work with 20 to 25 men in the Stillwater Poetry Group (SPG), making 
its first video public performance August 20 at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis.

"Wilson's play got me to thinking about how I ended up where I was at," 
said Harris, a 40-something-year-old black man with long dreadlocks, a 
smile that lights his entire face and a melodious voice made for reciting 
poems. After a total of 13 years in prison for drug-related charges, he now 
lives in St. Paul and is the founder of the writing group In The Belly.

"Looking at my father's arguing and whippings differently. Poetry became 
the vehicle to explore that. I'd always written love poems. The density and 
conciseness of poetry, how two words can be a paragraph, was a way to talk 
about things I wouldn't have so freely discussed. It was a form of release."

The prisoners Harris works with grow more numerous every day. In 1971, 
America's prison population was about 200,000. Tripling in the last decade 
alone, America now incarcerates two million people, more than any other 
nation on earth. The "war on drugs" with "mandatory minimum" sentences 
account for 60 to 70 percent of convictions, mostly nonviolent possession 
and sales of small amounts to support individuals' own addiction. Crimes 
from rape to sexual abuse of children and serious domestic violence are 
often "pleaded down" to sentences far shorter than those for $10 worth of 
crack cocaine.

"Angela Davis calls it the 'prison-industrial complex.' I make links 
between prisons and the plantation," he said. "Now, they're also holding 
pens for the homeless, the mentally ill, domestic violence issues." 
Nationally, the majority of prisoners are people of color. The Council on 
Crime and Justice, in its 2001 "Color of Justice" study, found that 
Minnesota has the largest disparity between black and white imprisonment 
rates. Race plays a role at every point in the process, from police stops 
to severity of charges -- made at the prosecutor's discretion -- to sentences.

Gaps for misdemeanors alone are stark: African-Americans are arrested for 
"disorderly conduct" ten times more often than whites, for "trespass" 19 
times more often and for the vaguely defined crime "lurking" 27 times more 
often. The study concluded that "prosecutors are more likely to file more 
serious charges and seek higher sentences for minorities than for whites." 
(For more information: www.crimeandjustice.org ) Crack cocaine -- used 
mostly by people of color -- brings sentences as much as 100 times higher 
than powder cocaine, favored by whites. Whites more often receive probation 
and treatment, while minorities are more often imprisoned. Despite 1999 
Congressional hearings exposing these inequalities, the Clinton 
Administration refused to change these policies, which continue to put more 
than one-third of African-American males, aged 15 to 30, into the criminal 
justice system.

Recent studies suggest that a third of prisoners have (usually) untreated 
mental health problems. While many Americans are beginning to acknowledge a 
national health care crisis, mental health treatment remains even more 
unavailable than medical care. Despite the huge number of drug-related 
sentences, most prisons have long waiting lists for treatment and therapy.

"It's almost misleading to call SPG a poetry group," Harris said. "They're 
doing a lot more than just writing poems. We've conducted 
critical-thinking, interdisciplinary workshops that addressed themes the 
guys wanted to address: What is manhood? What is feminism? Domestic 
violence, the breakup of families; how to parent from prison."

SPG member Sarith Peou writes in his poem "My Testimony" about how poetry 
can transform a prisoner's life. "Compressed thoughts/swell in my 
head./Hurt so much/I wish I was dead./I want to release them/drop them like 
lead./I change them into poems ..."

Instead of just bringing in books, Harris had writers, actors, dancers and 
activists engage the SPG men through their own experience-based art and 
analysis, inspiring the kind of process Harris began after reading Wilson's 
play.

"Members of SPG went from writing poems about being mad at the system to 
doing deep exploration about their own ideas and values," Harris said 
passionately. "Deconstructing their own beliefs and ideologies. Seeing SPG 
and themselves as a community within the prison."

Harris estimates that 90 percent of convictions are for "economic crimes," 
including theft, robbery, small-time fraud, "boosting clothes" and most 
drug charges. Only about 1 percent of inmates are incarcerated for murder. 
Labor Department statistics show African-Americans' unemployment averages 
twice the rate of whites. DePaul University sociologist Michael Eric Dyson 
documents how the export of American manufacturing jobs disproportionately 
impacted the black community, creating unemployment as high as 50 percent 
in some inner cities. Native Americans on reservations experience up to 80 
percent unemployment.

However, not all corporations are pulling jobs from American cities and 
sending them overseas. Some are moving them directly into the prison 
system, where prisoners can work for Third World wages. "Private industry 
has a captive labor force. No unions, no sick days, no paid holidays -- 
hell, no holidays!" Harris said. "No way to express grievances."

He explains that, while incarcerated, he built furniture and after various 
"deductions," earned $5.86 a month. "All the clothing shops, furniture 
stores, services that use incarcerated help, it's pure profit for them," he 
said. "There was a time they sent those jobs to Latin America. Now, they 
have them here with two million people at your disposal."

By the mid-1990s, a U.S. News & World Reports headline said, "Need Work? Go 
To Jail" (12/9/1996), noting that Stillwater prisoners made 40 cents an 
hour. Nationally, prisoners make 50 cents to $2 an hour, averaging $1.10, 
making designer blue jeans, Victoria's Secret lingerie and computer 
components, as well as taking airline reservations and calling homes for 
marketing research.

The prison system is increasingly being "privatized," as corporations like 
Corrections Corporations of America have increasingly taken over the task 
of managing prisons. News reports have described how CCA has cut health 
care and education programs to prisoners and hired doctors whose licenses 
had been suspended. Prisons have been a highly profitable business for some 
companies, but less profitable for the Americans inside; Amnesty 
International and other organizations have documented widespread abuse in 
the American prison system. MINNCOR (started in 1996) made $12,244,800 in 
2002 profits from Stillwater prison labor. Their homepage boasts, "Some of 
the most successful companies take advantage of our expanded and diverse 
production facilities, flexible production scheduling and reliable, 
consistent workforce." MINNCOR CEO Dan Ferrise was made Stillwater Prison 
warden last September.

"Times are getting harder./Now, the only question is, harder for WHO?/ They 
can cut and paste any angle on the 10:00 o'clock news/ to have you believe 
a horse is a mule./If they said it/it must be true," said SPG co-founder 
David Doppler in his scathing poem "Don't Call A Horse A Mule," which 
describes his struggle with a society increasingly obsessed with social 
control and consumerism. Like two-thirds of SPG members, Doppler is doing 
life without parole.

"Freedom has to mean something different to that person," Harris said. 
"Liberation means something different. I did my last bit -- 8 1/2 years -- 
because I knew I'd get out and feel that breeze in the trees again." Harris 
voice drops in volume, rises in intensity. "These guys have to bring the 
breeze inside. They're doing it by breaking boundaries, crossing borders, 
reaching out to each other."

Harris tells the story of Jacob Hernandez: gay, exploited and brutalized by 
other inmates and unable to find any allies -- even in SPG.

"He was so totally isolated, he went to his cell and hung himself," Doppler 
said. "Totally isolated around 1,300 guys -- guys incarcerated and 
oppressed for much of the same reasons he was." Harris says the men in SPG 
were stunned by Hernandez' death. "The next week, they brought in another 
guy falling into the same traps as Hernandez. They weren't trying to change 
him. Or tell him what being a man is or what being black is or what being 
an inmate is. They were just trying to support this guy. That's the kind of 
change I see needed out here."

As agribusiness and Wal-Mart destroy rural and small-town economies, 
prisons that warehouse largely urban minorities are a main source of jobs 
for displaced white workers. Former president Bill Clinton pressed states 
to try more juveniles as adults and lengthened sentences, and his "three 
strikes and you're out" policies for (often nonviolent) felonies keep 
prison cells full, while "welfare reform" legislation has made poor and 
uneducated women the fastest growing prison population.

No one expects the number of prisoners to decrease anytime soon. 
Legislators predict the number of future prisoners according to the number 
of children in Child Protective Services, said Minnesota sociologist 
Michael Tikkanen in his article "Invisible Children" ( 
www.dissidentvoice.org ). Abused and neglected children are 66 times more 
likely to enter the juvenile justice system, and, ultimately, adult 
prisons. Minnesota's 12,000 to 14,000 abused and neglected kids, many of 
whom spend most of their childhoods in foster care, are mostly poor and 
minority. Minnesota's social programs are better funded than those of most 
states, but it still spends far more on incarcerating adults than on 
providing for children.

Tikkanen quotes now-Governor Tim Pawlenty as saying in 2001, "Children who 
are the victims of failed parental responsibility are not my problem. Nor 
are they the problem of the state of Minnesota." (Communication with Andy 
Dawkins and David Strand, September 2001).

Reggie Harris is adamant that he is "not doing missionary work," saying he 
learns more than he teaches at SPG.

"I don't think it's even possible in prison to rehabilitate," he said. 
"Prisons are designed to oppress, dehumanize, control and give us the 
illusion of safety ... How do you humanize people locking them in cages 
with flashlights up their behinds? Art is a way to connect inmates with 
their humanity, but also to connect us to the humanity of the inmate."

Inside/Outside Joint presents projected video performances of SGP poets 
with Twin Cities artists Will Powers, Desdamona, Ed Bok Lee, Carolyn 
Holbrook and others, $10-20 benefits SPG. Fri. Aug. 20th at 8 p.m. at 
Intermedia Arts, 2822 Lyndale Ave. S. Minneapolis. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake