Dancing in a Maximum Security Prison

• In Event: Dance and Social Justice

Abstract

In this chapter, I chronicle my journey teaching dance to men in an all male, maximum-security prison, the first class of it’s kind in the United States. Prison quickly dehumanizes it’s citizens; strips from them all ability to integrate with outside world upon release. Though dance, the arts in general, the prisoner students rediscover the importance of space and how to interact with others in it. Slowly, as the course unfolds, they open their minds and bodies to possibilities that their history and gender preconceptions previously considered impossible. In the end, The teacher and students move through a myriad of barriers both social and bureaucratic, finding a new way to paint a grim, incarcerated world.

Author

• Jacqueline Young, John Jay College of Criminal Justice