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?
Steve Emrick makes his living trying to provide ways out. Emrick, who runs the Arts in Corrections program at San Quentin State Prison on the north shore of San Francisco Bay, has spent the last twenty years teaching creative skills to men who have done truly horrible things.
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.
However, through private funding, Emrick was able to maintain his chapter of the Arts in Corrections program and keep teachers coming into San Quentin. Recently, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a plan that would earmark $41.1 million for anti-recidivism programs. It remains to be seen how this would affect programs like Arts in Corrections.
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.