Article summary
For the past four months, I have been volunteering with the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) initiative as a facilitator running creative writing workshops inside Ann Arbor prisons. Coincidentally, here at Atomic Object, I am currently working on a team creating digital systems for the Michigan Court System. PCAP was a truly impactful experience, and has brought up some good questions for my day-to-day life: What is hiding behind the numbers of my product? How can I bring the same empathy and sensitivity to my everyday interactions with the people in my life? What can I take away from this experience to help me grow?
Teach and Learn
It is easy to say that I am aware of my privilege, but sometimes it just feels like I’m not aware enough — and perhaps that, too, is a privilege. But I want to have these kinds of discussions. I want this to be a chance to reflect on myself and on the world around me and expand my awareness.
One of Atomic Object’s values is “Teach and Learn”. As an Accelerator, I’ve been doing a lot of learning, and it was an absolute joy to explore the second half of that value with PCAP. Nerding about stuff is FUN, especially when the people I share my excitement with are genuinely interested in learning — and I learned just as much as I taught. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that not everyone develops their intelligence in the same way. That’s not to say the participants weren’t smart — on the contrary, they were wildly intelligent. They had wisdom I could do nothing more than witness; their intelligence just hadn’t been cultivated in a classroom.
Most of my participants approached writing practically. They wrote toward a tangible end rather than for emotional impact. I always knew there was a difference between book-smart and street smarts (WIS and INT for the D&D nerds), but I had never seen that dichotomy displayed so clearly before.
The participants seemed to genuinely appreciate anything that expanded their technical ability. For example, they very much enjoyed writing haiku. The established poetic form gave them something concrete to work towards, adding legitimacy to the exercises beyond “do this and it’ll improve your writing.” It also validated my own love for the more complex elements of poetry. It proved to me that writing isn’t something to be gatekept by one’s level of higher education.
Authenticity
Over time, I began to learn a bit more about my participants themselves. They didn’t volunteer information, but details emerged in the middle of discussions that gave me a better picture of what they didn’t say — inside jokes, words used in different contexts, names thrown out, cautionary tales of bad experiences. Some had lawsuits open against correctional officers. Others had accessibility cases open. Several had children or family members who had cut contact.
Throughout the workshop, we interrogated the concept of “authenticity.” How does authenticity compare to honesty? What does it mean for an incarcerated individual to be authentic? Authenticity, at its core, is a state of being true to yourself. It means facing the lies that you may have told yourself — or that others have told you — and acknowledging them. To be authentic is to claim a voice that is uniquely your own, despite opposition.
For each person in the workshop, the opportunity to be authentic was very rarely afforded to them. I was truly humbled to witness the power that speaking your own truth can give you.
Real People
My workshop participants are more than “prisoners.” Their suffering isn’t abstract, but we can also never truly understand the concrete reality of their lives. The participants I met all had stories of reaching out for resources or support, both during and before their time in prison. Those resources were oftentimes unavailable — denied purely by virtue of circumstance: where they lived, and what their lives had given them.
This is a humbling, unsettling, and deeply uncomfortable truth. I can’t always be sure whether my reservations about this work are a societal inheritance — impressions and apprehension passed down about the carceral system — or simply my own discomfort with confronting realities I have the privilege of usually looking away from.
What I do know is this: all I can do is make note of everything I see that I believe, in my heart, to be wrong, to be capable of being better — and hold it close. Because behind every data point in the systems I help build, and behind every statistic in the news, there is a person. And that person deserves to be seen.