Ronnie Goodman, Deep Thought, acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”, 2006
A black female teenager in a black puffy jacket and a black baseball cap lowered her hand and stood before the darkened crowd. As soon as she rose to speak, it was clear she was different from the other crowd members who had spoken at the symposium on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The others had the same dark skin, but they were all much older. Their voices were different too. Their bile-corroded words flew across the small auditorium of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts like angrily thrown grappling hooks.
The criminal justice system, it seemed, existed only to move units—them—from one taxpayer-supported entity toanother. They had been commodified, they claimed, and a system that was supposed to help them square themselves with society appeared to be more interested in keeping them as budget-legitimizing assets.
Parolees who participated in the Arts in Corrections program had a “favorable outcome” rate of 74.2%, compared to 49.6% for those who had not.
When the moderator had first asked for feedback from anyone who had been a part of the penal system, the girl in ebony streetwear mumbled something to the person seated next to her. As she whispered, her back hunched in an unsure arc. Finally, after several others had aired their frustrations, she slowly lifted her arm, more like a question mark than an exclamation.
She hadn’t been through the adult criminal justice system, she said, so she was unsure whether she should even comment. But, she explained in a wavering voice, she was living on the streets, had been busted for multiple graffiti offenses, and had been fined. She didn’t have money to pay for it and didn’t know what she was going to do. She wasn’t in the California correctional system yet.
“But,” she said, “I’m almost eighteen and I guarantee they want to take me.”
This scared girl hadn’t yet been harvested into the catch-and-release-and-catch program described by the other audience members. But what if she is? What if she enters the prison system? Will she ever be able to find her way out?
His program, which serves 300 of the 2,500 San Quentin inmates classified as “mainline,” offers classes in painting, drawing, printmaking, creative writing, poetry, Shakespeare, and music. Emrick’s program is currently one of only two at California’s thirty-three state prisons that bring in outside instructors to work with prisoners. The teachers, who either volunteer or receive grants, lead weekly classes in the above disciplines and occasional workshops in skills like songwriting and bookbinding.
Emrick says that part of the benefit of having a variety of classes is that it allows inmates to explore new ways to learn.
“We are able to help channel a lot of the skill and desire those guys have. They do bring a lot of creativity. There are different kinds of learners. A lot of the guys who wind up in prison weren’t successful in school. You find out that a lot of them are natural musicians, natural artists. They can visualize and see and learn that way. They’ll get enough confidence doing drawing or another class and they will go back and try to work on getting a G.E.D.”
This self-improvement tends to lead to more productive lives. According to a California Department of Corrections study conducted for the years 1980-1987, parolees who had participated in the Arts in Corrections program had a “favorable outcome” rate of 74.2%, compared to 49.6% for those parolees who had not participated in the program.
Despite this, the state of California in 2003 slashed the Arts in Corrections program twenty-three years in. Budget cuts eliminated all funding for the arts programs in California prisons, leaving only the resource-deprived arts administrator job to serve massive inmate populations. Eventually, even the arts administrator position was eliminated.
Visitors to the art facilities at San Quentin find a setting that could easily be imagined as part of a community college campus. Past the locked checkpoints at the outer walls, through an oddly placid courtyard, and down a connecting corridor with a striking view of Mt. Tamalpais is a lean-to shed with plywood floors and small loft in the back. Though its 600 square feet of space can only accommodate fifteen or so students, on a warm day with the door open, it feels roomy enough for its purpose.
With generous sunlight pouring in from a bank of wire-reinforced windows and chattering birds lending levity, it’s easy to forget that you are in an area that used to be called the “O.K. Corral” for its Old West-style acts of vengeance.
Where the classroom sits now was in the past a blind-spot bathroom — a nook just off the prison’s upper yard that guards had a tough time monitoring because of its squeezed-in location. It was here that many scores were settled, many cruel endings to unfortunate lives realized.
One of the bitter ironies of the US prison system is that the emotions that cause people to end up in corrections — fear, detachment, hatred, anger — are often further fed by incarceration. Instead of a respite from these destructive feelings, prison tends to create a supercollider for them.
Scott McKinstry (above), Self Portrait (below), acrylic on canvas, 42” x 51”, unfinished
In Emrick’s view, it is in everyone’s best interest that prison arts programs exist to provide a buffer.
“Part of my pitch for the art program is that we’re helping guys come out better human beings. If you have someone who is locked up and they’re left in this culture that’s very negative, they’re going to come out angrier — or at least the same.
“If you have a chance to bring in some humanity, to bring in some outside professional artists who interact with them, who give them criticism done in a professional way and also give them skills, then that really helps transform them. We’re providing safety for the community because we’re having someone come out who’s not going to be angry, who’s not going to be bitter.”
The inmates in the Arts in Corrections program speak of the program’s snug art room as a sanctuary from the greater climate of acrimony in the prison. Scott McKinstry, an inmate who paints gallery-quality acrylics despite only being in the program for three years, points out that Arts in Corrections classes have an environment entirely different than the rest of San Quentin.
“The biggest thing in prison is segregation. Whites are here. Blacks are here. Mexicans are here. Asians are here. Everybody segregates and there are lines you don’t cross. You don’t play with each other. You don’t horse around. You don’t call each other names. You have that barrier. You come in here and we don’t have that. It’s like escaping that.”
In the art community, you meet a lot of people who talk about “living for art.” For the men in the Arts in Corrections program, that statement is more than just a platitude. These are people who might not be alive if it wasn’t for art.
Life in San Quentin offers numerous chances to be sucked into the cycle of violence and revenge. Being a part of the program gave McKinstry, who had never made art until he was several years into his fifty-one-years-to-life sentence, a chance to free himself from that malicious eddy.
“I bit into the prison politics. I was violent. I dealt with issues of disrespect or disagreements through violence like most all of us do. I don’t do that anymore.”
“From what I’m doing now, in expressing myself, my anger level has fallen way down. I’ve learned to deal with issues, not just swallow them and let them build up and have them come all at one time. I can get them out on canvas.
“Even if it’s frustrating and it doesn’t come out right, I still got it out in a positive way. It still may be aggressive, but it’s between me and an inanimate object, not between me and someone else.”
Even though McKinstry, who has served on various prisoner leadership and activities councils over the years, may never leave San Quentin, he is using the positive attributes he has developed in Arts in Corrections to help others who will.
Twenty-year program veteran Ronnie Goodman is one of the men McKinstry is currently collaborating with on a mural adjacent to the San Quentin art room. As Goodman points out, being a part of Arts in Corrections has not only changed his life inside prison, but given him a vision for a positive life outside it as well.
“I think art teaches you patience and compassion and really to enjoy the smallest things in life. I wake up and see the colors of the sky and see the birds flying. I never really focused in on that. Then you think about being free. It would be nice to be able to go to the park, kick back and relax and sit down and draw. To block off everything else in life and find your own little space.”
While the prison artists await their chance to rejoin the outside world, their voices are periodically carried out via shows of their work. As Emrick puts it, “They look at it as a way to get their work out and to get exposure, but also for them to show that they are something other than just this animal locked up inside, that they have this whole human side to them, and that they have a way of expressing their beauty.”
The proceeds raised from the selling of the inmates’ art goes not only toward funding Arts in Corrections but also to support youth diversion programs.
It is very easy to psychologically compartmentalize those inside the criminal justice system as having failed society. They chose to break the rules, the reasoning goes, and in doing so chose life as outcasts.
But these choices, as hideous as they may have been, were not made in a vacuum. It is just as valid to claim that society fails certain people, just like it was doing to that teenage girl at the symposium. Not everyone grows up having their needs met. The prison system, through programs like Arts in Corrections, gives the formerly ignored a chance to be heard.
– Buck Austin