Our Side of the Story”: Privileging Incarcerated Youth Voices

• In Event: Stopping the STOPP: An Urgent Call to Critical Educators to Interrupt the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract

In the 21st century the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country. While the numbers of incarcerated males far outnumber incarcerated women, there are still great concerns about the growing female prison population. While 1 in 355 White women ages 35-39 are incarcerated, 1 in 297 Latina women and 1 in 100 Black women in the same age range are incarcerated. In fact women of color are experiencing a “global lockdown”—that is, they are being incarcerated at disproportionate numbers to their peers from other ethnic groups (Sudbury, 2005). This fixation with incarceration and building prisons has trickled down to America’s children as well. Recent studies examining “education’s prisoners” (McGrew, 2008) or the “celling” of urban youth (Duncan, 2000), posit that the rise in the incarceration of young people “was accompanied by the unraveling protections developed for children, along with the very concept of adolescence” (McGrew, 2008, p. 21). Drawing from a three year ethnography of a playwriting and performance program for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls in the urban southeast, Girl Time, this paper presentation examines the intersections of language, literacy, and the school-to-prison pipeline. This study looks at how the school-to-prison pipeline has been raced, classed, and gendered while contributing to a small but growing discussion of the increasing numbers of incarcerated girls and women in America’s criminal and juvenile justice system. In this paper, the author will specifically examine the ways in which incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls use fantasy and desire as a metaphor for their lived experiences. Here, the author focuses on plays that employ traditional fairytale elements to critique and challenge incarceration discourse while using their plays to both talk back and acquiesce to institutions of power. This set of plays raises a set of questions including: How do incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls use playwriting the challenge and critique incarceration discourse? What role does fantasy and desire play in the Girl Time process? Ultimately this paper will explore the tensions between and among traditional storytelling genres and urban realities through a content analysis of plays, discourse analysis on conversations that formerly incarcerated girls have about the plays, and qualitative interviews.

Author

• Maisha T. Winn, University of Wisconsin - Madison