What Good is Literacy and the Humanities After Prison?

• In Event: Decarceral Futures: Dismantling Carceral Architectures in the Late-Stage American Empire

Abstract

This presentation examines the role of literacy and the humanities in the lives of formerly incarcerated individuals, emphasizing how mass incarceration impacts them long after their release. It surveys the limited support available to individuals post-incarceration in the United States, analyzing how literacy and the humanities are undermined by rhetorics that perpetuate oppressive structures and exacerbate inequities. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others remind us, “life is precious,” and responding to crime in “violent and life-annihilating ways” is not the right solution. With limited funds and no job prospects, formerly incarcerated individuals are released into a system stacked against them. How can we intervene within and against such oppression? What role, however modest, can literacy and the humanities play?

It was in prison where social critic and author Earl Shorris found inspiration for the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a program that offers humanities courses to economically disadvantaged individuals in five disciplines, where students explore great works of literature, art history, moral philosophy, and American history. “Why do you think people are poor?” he recalled asking one woman who was incarcerated at Bedford Hills. Rather than speaking of “jobs and money,” she spoke of the “moral life of downtown,” which she explained could be built by providing children with access to the cultural capital—the “plays, museums, concerts, lectures”—that they were often denied. Shorris persuasively shows how engagement with the humanities is a social justice issue. To explore this further, I turn to Project Mend, a digital storytelling and publishing initiative featuring the work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals and their families. It focuses on how individuals learn to write themselves into a world that too often denies their lived realities. Through narrative accounts, we see how writers challenge the prison industrial complex, advocate for abolition, and urge readers to see their humanity.

What can literacy and the humanities do to intervene in structures of systemic racism and discrimination? Using Project Mend as a test case, this presentation aims to answer these questions by analyzing this community-based digital storytelling and publishing initiative for formerly incarcerated individuals and their families in Syracuse, New York, one of the poorest and most racially segregated cities in the United States. Given seemingly insurmountable odds, literacy and humanities may appear secondary concerns to some. Yet they represent a critical intervention, requiring us to come to terms with how we understand the value of deep learning, reflection, and engagement for all people. Moreover, I argue that we must resist binaries that too easily separate humanities and professional studies and reconsider points of intersection.

Author

• Patrick W. Berry, Syracuse University