OPEN STACKS | #51 Prison Nation: James Forman, Jr. & Sarah Shourd

This week, a further look at the mechanisms of incarceration. 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning professor, legal scholar, and author James Forman, Jr. discusses Locking Up Our Own and prisoners rights advocate Sarah Shourd recalls and contextualizes her own and others' experiences in solitary confinement.

James Forman, Jr. spoke and conversed with a packed house at our 57th Street Books location last May. Congratulations, belatedly, to Forman for being awarded the 2018 Pulitzer in general nonfiction. Forman's Critical Reads include "brilliant, informed, and highly readable" titles "to understand race, crime, police, and prisons." Revisit his list here. 

A sketch of Etheridge Knight by poet Terrance Hayes. Hayes' rumination on the former poet is excerpted in the Paris Review.

Who was Etheridge Knight, and why should he be of interest to me, or more important, to you? Knight himself thought it was enough simply to say, on the back of his 1968 debut collection, Poems from Prison, “I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.” If you’ve read anything about him, you’ve likely encountered these lines. Just behind their resurrectional vibe are several unwritten chapters in the biography of a talented, ex-con, con man, blues-blooded rambling romantic.

Sarah Shourd is a contributing editor at Solitary Watch, a national nonprofit watchdog group that provides information on solitary confinement to the public. They have produced a number of infographics including the following, as well as Hell is a Very Small Place. 

The Co-op has something of a relationship to Chicago's Prison + Neighborhoods Arts Project. By their own words, PNAP is: 

a visual arts and humanities project that connects teaching artists and scholars to men at Stateville Maximum Security Prison through classes, workshops and guest lectures. Classes offered include subjects ranging from poetry, visual arts, and film study to political theory, social studies, and history. Classes are held once a week, on a 14 week semester schedule. Each course results in finished projects—visual art, creative writing and critical essays—with specific audiences and neighborhoods in mind. These works are then exhibited and read in neighborhood galleries and cultural centers. Over the course of an academic semester, artists and scholars on the inside and outside address key questions:

What can we learn from each other?
Who are our audiences?
What materials and methods best relate our concerns?
What can we say from inside a maximum security prison?

The arts and humanities have always provided essential vocabularies for discussing challenging topics and pushing the boundaries of our thinking. The goal of PNAP is to foster this kind of exploratory thinking with incarcerated students at Stateville, who have a wealth of knowledge and keen perspectives to share about the world around us.

Learn more on their website, including about upcoming community events like May 26th's print portfolio release party at In These Times.

Interested in more resources on prisons? Black Perspectives has published a comprehensive syllabus covering everything from theories of punishment to firsthand accounts of incarceration.