by Peggy Rambach Address for the HOC Mural Project Unveiling Celebration with MIT at the Suffolk County House of Correction Feb. 15, 2019 Lately, we’ve all been hearing a lot about walls – whether we like it or not. And as a result, we can’t help thinking about what a wall represents: division, protection, confinement …

Continue reading “We, the Unbound”

by Rosie Worster, Director of Programmes at The Fair Justice Initiative Nsawam Medium Security Prison is the largest in Ghana, located not far outside the capital of Accra. It is a place associated with utmost shame, particularly for the eighty or so women held in the female section. Crime is thought dirty, ungodly, unfeminine. Many …

Continue reading Remember Me

by Treacy Ziegler  (This is the second installment on kindness in prison.  The first installment can be read at Incarceration of Kindness.) On my first trip to the super-maximum security prison, I see a high stonewall building perched over distant trees. There is something surreal in the sight of this fortress-like building with its small …

Continue reading Kindness as Hostage

by Mardie Swartz Mardie Swartz has spent 29 years behind bars in Texas. This poem is about the time approaching when she will finally be beyond bars. I remember beginnings – The first time I was molested Sold, abandoned, raped The first drink, snort, shot of Whatever would numb some of the pain. The first …

Continue reading As the End Comes (a tribute to Alice Walker)

by Treacy Ziegler   This post is written in installments exploring what is understood as kindness in prison.  In writing this post, I asked prisoners across the United States to share their experiences of kindness in prison.  Kindness makes you idle, worse, unnatural.         Douglas Oliver Richie is a student in my …

Continue reading The Incarceration of Kindness – Installment 1

by Mary Cohen, PhD After attending an East Hill Singers concert in January 2002 in Overland Park Kansas, my curiosity for Prison Choirs began. In graduate school at the University of Kansas, I spent a lot of time in Prisons, literally and figuratively—learning from Elvera Voth, the Inside and Outside Choir members of the East …

Continue reading Communities of Caring through Choral Singing: an update from the Oakdale Prison Choir

by Page Dukes I was released from prison last May, after serving ten years for a crime I committed as a heroin-addicted teenager. I have spoken publicly many times since, about the decisions and circumstances that led me to the criminal justice system. However, at the Art for Justice Forum held at Emory University Law …

Continue reading Making Meaning: a caged bird sings

by Treacy Ziegler As a landscape painter, I explore the interior and exterior configurations of space. In my own painted landscapes, boundaries between interior and exterior are porous and the line between landscape and dwelling is fluid; the sea does not stop at the door—it comes in. If prisons are defined by how space is …

Continue reading Crossing the Border: An artist’s experience of a super-maximum security prison