NEW
Library Project
Volume 2, Number 1 - Fall 2003
Stories
Release Bound Emotions
by Lauren K.
Erlichman
Over
the past few months, I visited the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton as
part of People and Stories and Princeton University’s Community Based
Learning Initiative. The program is completely voluntary—prisoners have
no incentive to attend other than their own desire for learning and
discussion.
In the course of these visits, I bore witness to
the power of the arts and humanities in bringing forth the emotions and
personal responses of what is likely New Jersey’s most emotionally
repressed population. I sat next to convicted murderers as we read short
stories, chuckled along with them at humorous points in the text and
listened as they shifted the conversation from the assigned stories to
their own. In doing so, I came to appreciate the utter necessity of speech
and reflection as aspects of the human condition; moreover, I saw
firsthand the role of the arts as a vehicle to that which cannot, and
should not, be repressed.
The first time I came to the prison, two or
three of the men—veterans of the People and Stories program who
understood the significance and rarity of this opportunity—dominated the
conversation. The second time, the discussion was more equally distributed
among the present inmates; in the third, which was the concluding session
of the program, every single man came forward with his own poignant
thoughts.
The men spoke of their feelings not because they
happened to be the most sensitive or effusive. You cannot simply place a
dozen or so men—let alone incarcerated ones—in a room and expect them
to have a candid discussion of their feelings. Rather, they must do so in
the context of their responses to a work of art or text, and they must
first see that such expression is not only acceptable, but encouraged.
“After this, we go back to normal. We can’t
‘reflect’ and be sensitive—you’ll get viewed as weak, and you’ll
get preyed upon if you do,” said one inmate in the final session.
Apparently, prisoners seek out their most vulnerable counterparts to
intimidate and steal from; they identify such individuals as those who are
seen discussing their feelings, reading poetry, etc. Repressing the
emotion that defines our humanity, then, becomes crucial to one’s
survival in prison.
Even without full participation in the first
session, I was astonished by the candor with which the men spoke. We read
a story by Catherine Ryan Hyde titled, “The Man Who Found You in the
Woods,” the touching tale of a man who refuses to give up on the boy he
takes into his home in spite of the boy’s egregious behavior.
The idea of such unconditional love and caring
struck a chord in the inmates; they were especially moved by the elder
man’s extraordinary commitment to visiting the boy in juvenile
detention. During the discussion, they frequently referred to a line in
the story in which one of the guards at the detention center marvels at
this consistency: “Three times a week like clockwork. I could set my
watch by you.”
One of the prisoners commented, “That’s when
you know someone cares—when they visit you in prison. It’s not like on
the streets, because there ain’t no fronting. If someone comes to visit
you in prison, it’s real.”
The men spoke of prison so objectively that the irony of
incarcerated men discussing a story about prison almost eluded me until
one man said, “Leaving the boy in prison forces him to become
responsible.” I realized that making this comment about his own life
would have made him sound self-righteous; the story made it possible for
him to share what he had learned without preaching to the other men.
Such was the nature of this first session; many
men hinted at details from their own lives in the context of the story. In
discussing a story about a neglected child who acts out and blames others
for his troubles, one man who rarely spoke opened up: “It always starts
from within. Your life can be messed up by someone else, but you can’t
keep going on blaming other people—it’s you.” Addressing the issue
of responsibility for one’s own life was made possible through the
framework of the story: this man could speak without having to directly
reference his personal experiences.
Once they saw that this environment was safe,
the prisoners slowly began to open their mouths with increasing frequency
and in escalating numbers. The words of psychologist Carol Gilligan serve
as an explanation: “To have something to say is to be a person. But
speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely
relational act.”
We all have stories to tell, these men included;
in the course of their incarceration, however, their stories have remained
untold because they lack willing listeners.
I do not wish to challenge the notion that these
prisoners’ actions render them dangerous and deserving of their
sentences. My intent is simply to put forth the notion that perhaps the
prison environment, virtually devoid of opportunities to express the
emotions that exist in spite of our perceptions of these men as “hard
criminals,” is just as dangerous as the men themselves.
We want our prisons to be institutions of
punishment and rehabilitation, and yet we provide astonishingly few
prospects to accomplish the latter. Many inmates in the New Jersey State
Prison committed what we used to call “crimes of passion”; their
feelings became so overwhelming that they killed. Do we really want to
deprive them of the chance to sit in a room where judgment and ridicule
are absent, where vulnerability and truth are extolled?
Many of the prisoners in this facility will be
released back into society at some point and find themselves unable to
relate to a world beyond metal bars, where the expression of emotion
through speech is a part of everyday life. If we fail to provide them with
some outlet for their feelings and a controlled environment where they can
speak safely, how will they ever be able to reintegrate themselves into
society?
Some may say that it is too late for these
hardened criminals to experience salvation through the arts. All I can
offer in response is what I have witnessed because I sat in a room charged
with the emotions of men who, with the exception of one hour a week, are
deprived of their human right to feel and be heard, to hear and be felt.