Poetic Justice: Restorative Writing as a Means of Connection Between Incarcerated Women and Undergraduates

• In Event: Connecting Arts, Media, and Criminology

Abstract

1) Poetic Justice (PJ), a not-for-profit based out of Oklahoma, offers a transformative writing program to individuals who are incarcerated at women’s prisons and jails. Through volunteer-based, creative writing exchanges, PJ allows women to process trauma and reclaim personal narratives. Meanwhile, the societal tendency to pathologize criminals poses challenges when instructing crime-based classes. Providing opportunities to interact with people who are system-impacted can allow more humanization of the carceral experience. Students in an upper-level crime course engaged in PJ’s restorative writing program during a semester-long collaboration. 2) For this research, Poetic Justice’s volunteer coordinators and a professor at a Liberal Arts institution partnered to explore Fall 2023’s joint effort by examining the perspectives of both sets of students and the project leaders’ autoethnographic reflections. 3) Through analyzing poetry submissions, findings suggest that relationships were built and mutual vulnerability was shared between PJ and Augustana writing partners. End-of-semester evaluations indicated that minor setbacks needed to be sorted out but the initiative is worth continuing. 4) Poetic Justice and Augustana partnered in the first classroom-wide volunteer opportunity and cultivated a long distance, transformative learning space for poetry exchanges between system-impacted women and undergraduate students.

Authors

• Katherine E. Brown, Augustana College

• Erika Marley, Poetic Justice