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What is the project vision?
Writing is more than simply the production of the written word as a final product. Rather, it is a process that involves successive stages of creation and conceptualization, organization, expression, reflection, and self-realization that can be truly transformative. When shared with the wider world, writing moves beyond an act of individual consciousness and self-expression to become a communal exchange that creates knowledge, compassion, empathy, recognition of shared conditions and analysis of social dilemmas. This is the vision behind the “Writing Beyond the Prison” project.
“Writing Beyond the Prison” is an interdisciplinary public humanities project, led by faculty from three academic departments-Africana Studies, English, and History–working in close partnership with two nonprofits that have turned to writing as a process of personal and social transformation in their work with individuals and communities impacted by incarceration. Our humanities program to preserve, publicize, and utilize narratives of people “within the carceral ecosystem” as what we call a “Living Archive” takes inspiration from the New Deal-era Federal Writers Project’s initiative to record and preserve narratives of formerly enslaved people to advance democratic practices and ideals during a moment of national crisis. Similarly, our project will amplify the testimonies and narratives of incarcerated authors to reveal how they experience the modern-day captivity of mass incarceration.
This project is also an outreach effort beyond Stony Brook University involving two grass-roots organizations: HERSTORY and the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation (UBFSF), which was founded by an incarcerated author who turned to writing and a life of the mind as an escape from his 23-hour-a-day isolation cell. It is through their collection effort that we have so many works of incarcerated authors to offer the wider public.
How is the project funded?
The project was funded by a $224,000 grant from the American Council of Learned Societies “Sustaining Public Engagement Grant” which are “designed to repair the damage done to publicly engaged humanities projects and programs by the social and economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The project was coordinated within the Humanities Institute (HISB) at Stony Brook University (SBU), which serves as a vibrant hub for interdisciplinary collaboration, scholarship, teaching and public humanities initiatives at SBU. The Carceral Studies Fellowships for graduate students who worked on this project was supported by the Center for Changing Systems of Power at Stony Brook University.
This digital humanities project will do more than help those whom society has silenced to create their own powerful testimonial literature. Indeed, our focus on dissemination and curriculum building around prison narratives—not only of this carceral literature but also of our pedagogical tools–will nurture new writers, speakers, community organizers and leaders while also creating an ongoing public history digital archive that makes these narratives available for use by future humanities scholars, activists, communities, and policy-makers. Our project will have an immediate impact on democratic practice and racial inequality in America, while working toward reshaping the “carceral ecosystem” by amplifying the voices of the incarcerated and their families.
How did the project start?
This project integrates and builds capacity for several existing HISB initiatives addressing the broad social impacts of incarceration. In 2018, HISB partnered with Herstory Writers Workshop to create a credit-bearing internship that encouraged students to connect their personal experiences and academic pursuits to larger social issues by participating in Herstory’s story-based movement for change. In just three years the program has grown from 6 interns to over 70 per year. Herstory’s work is grounded in a belief that personal stories, shaped and shared in community, have the power to enact individual and social transformation. For over 25 years, Herstory has used a unique empathy-based methodology to help some of the most marginalized and silenced members of our society—including the incarcerated and their families—transform their lived experience into written testimonials powerful enough “to change hearts, minds and policies.” Through writing workshops held in jails, shelters and in underserved schools, Herstory has gathered hundreds of narratives that speak to the isolation, stigmatization and hardships suffered not only by the incarcerated but also by their families. They have brought together returning citizens to write side-by-side with criminology and law students sharing their very different perspectives on the “justice” system.
As the Herstory partnership was growing, faculty in several departments began an initiative (sponsored by HISB and the CAS Dean) titled “Abolitionist Futures” to explore the work that remains to be done to abolish barriers to a just and equitable democracy. As part of this initiative, Professors Robert Chase and Zebulon Miletsky (co-directors of this grant) led a study group investigating “Global Carceral States and Networks.” For over two years, 16 faculty and graduate students gathered weekly to examine historical and theoretical perspectives on carceral systems and began to build a network of scholar-activists to address structural inequalities and systemic racism within the carceral ecosystem. Through these efforts, SBU developed a partnership with the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation (UBFSF), a non-profit founded by the incarcerated activist Ivan Kilgore with the mission “to create a culture of higher learning within these [incarcerated] communities.” In 2020-2021, Professors Chase and Miletsky worked closely with UBFSF to place a call for manuscript submissions from writers in prisons across the country. The response was truly amazing: over 100 manuscripts were gathered, including essays, poetry, articles, books, and pamphlets that reflect upon social, political, economic, and racial inequalities within underserved communities bound to the criminal justice system.
How did the pandemic influence the project?
Each partner in this project has suffered losses of funding, staffing and program capacity due to COVID-19. When the pandemic struck in March 2020 it brought an end to all in-person programming by Herstory, which eliminated income from grants for work with correctional facilities and contracts with schools (averaging $90K/year) and loss of staff for these programs. They adapted to the new conditions by quickly developing a version of their curriculum that could be delivered synchronously online, but many of the most vulnerable and isolated communities they serve (including the incarcerated) did not have access to the high-speed internet required. This grant enabled Herstory to rehire experienced teaching staff to develop a version of the Herstory curriculum that can be delivered online asynchronously thus enabling those without reliable internet–or the incarcerated who are not allowed to participate in synchronous online learning–to benefit from the empathy-based pedagogy and curriculum that Herstory developed over 25 years working with emerging writers of all ages and educational levels. Over the course of the grant year, the staff developed online curriculum and guides to bring the voices of those most directly impacted by the carceral ecosystem into schools, community organizations and training programs for law enforcement and social service agencies.
The work of UBFSF to publish and disseminate the writings of incarcerated authors was also severely impacted by the pandemic. Incarcerated people are among our society’s most vulnerable populations, and the pandemic only increased their suffering and isolation. The Prison Policy Initiative reported that “prisons have been a hotspot for COVID-19, with case rates in prisons between four to five times higher than in the general population.” The epidemic spread of COVID-19 within U.S. prisons has severely interrupted communication between incarcerated authors and made the collection and dissemination of their written work a daunting undertaking. In a time of societal and economic distress, it has also become increasingly difficult for UBFSF to find student and community volunteers to work on the prison publication project. With limited access to formal education under the best of circumstances, incarcerated authors have found few opportunities to further their writing through prison education during the socially restrictive pandemic. Our project fills this gap through Herstory’s creation of a writing curriculum that can be delivered effectively even under the most isolating conditions. The Living Archive website, and the initiatives associated with it, will provide incarcerated authors a means to communicate their work beyond the prison so that they can have a voice in shaping the scholarship, community programs, policies and social attitudes that directly affect them.
What impact do you hope the project will have?
This public engagement project will have profound and long-lasting impact. For scholars and students of the humanities, it will further our understanding of mass incarceration and its collateral damage beyond the prison. The curricular component of the project will support the work of incarcerated writers while also bringing voices from the carceral ecosystem into diverse public arenas: new and existing courses at SBU; K-12 classrooms; community programs; training programs for social service and law enforcement agencies. The publication, curation, and dissemination of these narratives through our curriculum-building initiative will document today’s mass incarceration as a genuine crisis of American democracy, democratic practice, and racial equality.
To maximize the impact of our project among diverse audiences, we held three public-facing events. First, we held a community event with Long Island-based Youth Strong that brought the project directly to the impacted communities and encouraged their active engagement in the project. Second, a student symposium in December 2022 showcased the work of students who used the Living Archive in course-related or faculty-mentored research projects to provide a model of how the archive furthers student research and educational development. Our capstone conference, held in April 2023, brought together scholars, community organizers, writers (from the carceral ecosystem) to create a lasting network of scholars, activists and writers of carceral literature who shared ideas on the (scholarly and community) import of the project and its future directions.
Like the Federal Writers’ slave narrative archive held at the Library of Congress, our Living Archive will preserve testimonies of those living within today’s carceral ecosystem. As a digital public humanities project, the Living Archive provides a unique research resource for scholars and students of the carceral state. More than simply presenting the work of incarcerated authors, we have interacted with their written works in the archive through curatorial blogs written by our Carceral Studies Fellows that provide historical context, analysis, and societal import to make these writings more meaningful as a humanities initiative. This archive of the modern-day experience of mass incarceration will have tremendous value far beyond the grant period. To ensure lasting impact and longevity, the Stony Brook University’s special collections division of the library will maintain an open-access archive of the manuscripts.
What's the bottom line?
In summary, “Writing Beyond the Prison” will significantly repair damage produced by the COVID-19 pandemic to the university, our community partners and our society. The benefit to the university and our graduate students will be immediate as it will fulfill our mission of original research, educational advancement and community engagement. For our partners, Herstory and UBFSF, the grant funding will be absolutely essential to restore the productivity that was so damaged by COVID-19. The project will have lasting and far-reaching impacts as it empowers incarcerated authors and their families to illuminate, though their own voices and experiences, how we are all bound up in the wider carceral ecosphere—and how our awareness of that fact can bring us all closer to the ideals of justice and inclusion that are fundamental to a strong democracy. In all the ways described above, “Writing Beyond the Prison” meets the ACLS-SHARP aims to address racial equity, strengthen democracy, and explore America’s diverse history while deepening understanding of the crucial and restorative role of humanities in our society.