R. Dwayne Betts – “a good student from a lower-middle-class family” – carjacked a man, went to prison, and has written a book about the experience. Betts was sixteen when he committed the crime, but tried and convicted as an adult; he served eight years in Virginia prisons. He’s been out for four years now and in that time has earned a BA, founded a book club for young men (YoungMenRead), been an intern at The Atlantic, married and become a father. Betts is now a graduate student at Warren Wilson College. His book of poetry – Shahid Reads His Own Palm – won the Beatrice Hawley Award and will be out from Alice James Books in May 2010.
A Question of Freedom is getting lots of attention (from NPR to HipHopWired), and I’m very glad. Those of us on the outside – the ones making decisions about who we lock up – need every report on prison we can get from those who’ve been there. Betts’ report is that of a very young man – a teen-ager still (“Sixteen years hadn’t even done a good job on my voice,” is the book’s first sentence) – and therefore shines important light on this aspect of contemporary US incarceration practice.
What I appreciate most in A Question of Freedom are the ways Betts attempts to:
understand why he was drawn to the uncharacteristic moment that brought him to prison;
express the responsibility he feels, especially to his mom;
speak out about all the young black men in prison with him, while at the same time working hard for a complex – rather than a simplistic – analysis of this fact;
present the varieties of senselessness he encountered in prison;
describe the various ways he educated himself (with some, but not much, help from prison programs or staff);
claim how literature – reading and writing – shaped the man he became as he walked out of prison.
Betts is no longer a teen-ager, but he is still a very young man. A Question of Freedom is being marketed as the first work of an emerging author, and that description makes sense. The book has the virtue of rawness – conveying as it does the confusion and circuitous thinking experienced by a child locked up with adults – and some beautiful writing. Betts’ telling also bears the (probably inevitable) limitations of a young mind that has not yet developed enough scope or distance to create a coherent whole. No matter the “more” I wish from the book, A Question of Freedom is important and I’m very glad to see it building a large readership. (written by Judith Tannenbaum)
We are pleased to share with you a link to the NPR/WLRN radio piece that aired on June 29, 2009. The spot highlighted the ArtSpring program facilitated by Amy Carol Webb and Lela Lombardo at Broward Correctional Institution.
Please follow this link and scroll down to June 29, 2009 to hear the recorded program. The audio report by Chris DiMattei is listed under the heading “Local performing artists use song writing to help women living behind bars.”
Artspring gratefully acknowledges Public Domain Foundation, Puffin Foundation and Seminole Tribe of Florida for supporting this project.
Thank you for your continued support and interest in ArtSpring. We hope you are having a great summer!
Stefan Säfsten, a Swedish composer, has written two choral suites whose text
is the poems of Spoon Jackson (who is serving life without possibility of
parole in California). The church choir, Järva Röster, has performed the
songs in Europe and the United States. Cds of the work — Freedom for the
Prisoners and the recent Words of Realness — can be purchased at: http://www.nosag.se/catalogue163.html
Spoon played Pozzo in San Quentin’s 1988 production of “Waiting for Godot,”
has published widely, and has won awards from the PEN Prison Writing
program. He is writing a two-person memoir with Judith Tannenbaum, his
poetry teacher at San Quentin; “By Heart” will be out in May, 2010.
Stefan has been a church musician in Kista parish outside of Stockholm since 1983, and was educated at the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm. He has worked with choirs spanning all age groups in the Kista parish. Stefan has conducted and led many different ensembles and choirs even before he began working in Kista. Stefan has a wide experience within most musical styles, and is as happy performing sacred music and chamber music as he is playing jazz, pop, and dance music. He has played in big bands, brass bands, and rock bands. He has also performed quite a bit of chamber music.
Stefan has also composed and arranged much music for different types of ensembles. During 2002 and 2003 he toured Germany and the Czech Republic with his choir, Järva Röster, performing the mass “Leva i världen” (Live in the World, nosag CD 057), which Stefan wrote in 1998.
Artwork is on display at the Queens Museum from artists incarcerated on Rikers Island. The New York Times ran the following story about the exhibit. Be sure to scroll through the images in the article to view the artwork:
They fell into trouble with the law, but now they are making art as they pursue their studies.
A variety of artwork — paintings, drawings, poems, plays and even pocketbooks made from newspapers — will be on view at the Queens Museum of Art tomorrow through July 5. The works were created by jail inmates at Rikers Island and juvenile delinquents participating in city-run programs for youthful offenders.
The participants in the show are working toward high school diplomas or General Educational Development high school equivalency diplomas, at the Austin H. MacCormick Island Academy and the Horizons Academy, on Rikers Island, and the Passages Academy, which works with juvenile delinquents in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
For legal and privacy reasons, the artists are identified only by their first names and last initials. The organizers of the art show wrote in a short catalog accompanying the exhibition:
During the three years in which we have produced this joint art show, we have learned that to underestimate the creative potential of young minds is to waste an opportunity to witness the ability of the human spirit. These students continue to thrive under extreme and exceptional circumstances. The creative potential is unlocked by the commitment and relentless determination of great teachers.
The title of the exhibition, “Underestimate Me…No More,” was inspired by a poem by one young artist, Antoine B. The poem states, in part:
I will show you my worth
Show you my value
Underestimate me
Doubt me
Never
No More
I will rise
I will rise 2 every occasion
And I will continue to rise
Even when u think I’m falling
And when the dust settles
And you c me again!
You’ll underestimate this man
Never more!!!
NY1 also ran a story on the exhibit. Check out this video clip to hear interviews with family members of the artists and see some of the art displayed at the gallery.
A new project for us (Judy Dworin Performance Project) in our four years at York Correctional Institution for women in Niantic, CT is a program for Moms in Niantic and their kids in the Hartford region and beyond. For seven weeks we did workshops with the Moms and the kids in Niantic and Hartford independently with a related structure of songs, dance and art-making and this culminated in a sharing at the prison.We just had our Moms and kids sharing this past weekend and it was really beautiful– from a spontaneous welcome song created by the Moms 15 minutes before the kids arrived and sung as they entered the school to an equally spontaneous letter to Mom written by one of the sons and read as an unexpected finale to the morning event. He asked why every visit couldn’t be like this one and talked about faith and trust and possibility. It was a wonderful morning of song and verse and dancing and photo taking and making frames for the photos and everyone felt full, even those women who chose to participate anyways after they learned their children would not be coming. Some of our assistants became surrogate daughters and sons for the day and the women whose children were there and the children themselves showed such compassion and thoughtfulness for those without. It was deeply moving and yet one more reminder of why this work feels and is so meaningful.
With a new bag of pens and some legal pads, I invited the men to write their ways out. I did not teach the guys who could not write their names—the ones with deficits, disorders, dementia, or some intractable disaffection. There were no serial killers, complete psychos or pedophiles. I didn’t go to reach the unreachable. I didn’t want to be a hero. My currency was common sense. I refused to believe they were always and forever products of some environment. But I also refused to believe they owned every choice that got made in their lives. Five months into the workshop, a core group had emerged: Ron Fountain, Stan Craddock, Andre Simpson, Greg Carter, Chuck Hicks, Kelvin Belton, Naji Mujahid and Dean Turner. These were the ones who kept writing after our time at the jail had come to an end, sending me drafts from prison, keeping me up to date on their progress into their new lives even when they found it hard to write. And these were the ones who helped expand the idea of the workshop: in prison, Kelvin sent Terence Scruggs; Naji sent Brad Greene, Kyle Brown and Tony Martin. Phase Two, the correspondence course had began like that.
Before any of these men joined the project, they had already taken the first steps toward change.They were tired of falling.Through their families and friends, their own reading and praying, they had already resolved “no more.” But they had not been challenged to narrate their lives, to reason, morally, by making a story. “These men pour their hearts out,” writes Naji Mujahid when I asked him to explain what our book will be about. They “allow you to enter the most intimate and painful moments of their lives in the hopes of shedding a new light on the causes of crime.”But the reader is cautioned, he also writes “not to interpret the stories as selfish pleas for pity by individuals seeking to blame their circumstances for their own bad decisions. The opposite is true. “Some of these men have served or are still serving hard time for crimes that they have committed. They have accepted responsibility for their actions and are now sharing their stories seeking answers, solutions, and a means to curb the cycle of dysfunction not only in their lives but in their communities and ideally society at large.Their concern is for the millions of children who are trapped in the very same circumstances they found themselves in and who are about to take their first steps down the dark road of incarceration and recidivism.Their concern is for the indifference to this tragedy.”
R. Dwayne Betts – “a good student from a lower-middle-class family” – carjacked a man, went to prison, and has written a book about the experience. Betts was sixteen when he committed the crime, but tried and convicted as an adult; he served eight years in Virginia prisons. He’s been out for four years now and in that time has earned a BA, founded a book club for young men (YoungMenRead), been an intern at The Atlantic, married and become a father. Betts is now a graduate student at Warren Wilson College. His book of poetry – Shahid Reads His Own Palm – won the Beatrice Hawley Award and will be out from Alice James Books in May 2010.