KIRPAL
GORDON: Since the mid-Eighties you’ve been involved
in a number of pioneering writing projects with prisoners in upstate New York Prague
LAURA
ROGERS: I have to be honest and say that I got started in prison work because I
needed a job. I was very young and inexperienced at the time; I had been
tutoring writing for several years in a Higher Educational Opportunity program
(HEOP) and had taught maybe one or two classes in that program. I think I had
one graduate course in composition/ rhetoric/teaching in a master’s program at
the State University of New York at Albany and was just about to start my
doctoral program there at the same program that Jody Swilky was in (editor’s
note: scroll down to the previous interview). The college where I was tutoring
in the HEOP program ran a small correctional facility college program at three
prisons in upstate NY. For some unknown reason they hired me to teach a
developmental writing class. I look back now on how naïve I was and how many
mistakes I made. There was really very little in the field of composition and
rhetoric at the time to guide me, but that has really changed. I still have
vivid memories of my early teaching in prison.
KIRPAL
GORDON: Would you share an example for those Giant Steps Press readers who have
never worked inside the walls?
LAURA
ROGERS: Here is an excerpt of my dissertation about the experience of initially
going into the prison environment:
“Empty
your pockets. Put your hands up. Put your hands down.”
“I
don’t know why this goes off every week; I don’t have anything I’m not supposed
to” I replied to the middle-aged, heavy-set officer who seemed to be on duty
every Friday night at the medium security prison.
“These
things don’t always work right,” he replied as he ran the hand-held metal
detector up and down me. “It might be something as small as a ring or a belt
buckle that makes it go off.”
I felt humiliated even though I had done
nothing but walk through the front door on the night I was scheduled to teach
my writing program class. The walk-through metal detector seemed to go off
every week no matter how careful I was about removing rings, watches or belts
with metal buckles. I dreaded the loud buzzing of the ultra-sensitive machine. It
made me feel dehumanized and somehow, ironically, criminal. It also forced me
into further interaction with the corrections officers. No matter how friendly
and polite they were, I was always uncomfortable around them…they seemed like
people from another planet to me, a seventies’ liberal, with their uniforms,
badges, and their talk about hunting and fishing. When I was in college, police
were the “pigs.” Those of us in college in the early seventies were the tail
end of the “Woodstock
The
“border crossing” of going into the prison always seemed especially stressful
to me.
I
taught in three different prisons in the correctional facility college program
until that program was ended by withdrawal of state and federal funding in
1995, largely due to pressure from a public who did not understand that these
programs were the only documented programs that had an impact on the recidivism
rate; more of their tax dollars are being spent on incarceration than
education, which has a demonstrable impact on keeping people out of prison. After
the college program ended, I wanted to stay involved with working with
incarcerated writers as I had experienced some of the most interesting,
challenging teaching of my career with committed, involved and interesting
students. I knew there was a history of prison writing workshops and took the
opportunity to start a voluntary writing group at Greene Correctional Facility
in Coxsackie, NY, where I had taught in
the college program, with the key help of Jack Kilrain, the prison librarian at
the time. Without Jack’s support the group never would have happened. We have
met every other Tuesday night, weather permitting, since 1995. We have had two American Library Association
grants, brought in several visiting writers, and have published four collections of the group’s work and are hopefully
starting on a fifth. The workshop is a place where writers share and respond to
each other’s work, read the work of other writers, and write. I hope the group
is also a place where writers understand that their experiences and their
languages are real and important, where they can think critically, collaborate
and participate in public presentation of their work. Below is the foreword to From Within, the first publication of
the group’s work, which was collaboratively written by group members.
Ignorance is the biggest crime facing
our society today. Every other Tuesday night, Greene Correctional Facility
challenges ignorance by supporting a creative writing group…Together these
participants express thoughts which can inspire each other, even under the
present conditions.
Within this group, some have
fifty-dollar words, million dollar life experiences and diverse ethnic
backgrounds that when put together create a culture that keeps each session
real. They share their knowledge non-competitively and use their writing skills
as a true form of healing therapy. This enables students the opportunity to see
where lifelines converge in the written word.
These men have shown that the creative
writing program allows the bright to be bright and the creative to be creative.
Ultimately, ignorance will continue to be defeated on Tuesday nights at Greene
Correctional Facility.
KIRPAL
GORDON: I think those three paragraphs in From
Within tell the real value of writing workshops inside the walls. Has your prison work shaped your Doctor of Arts program or
vice versa?
LAURA
ROGERS: I did start my prison teaching before I started the doctor of arts in
composition and rhetoric at SUNY-Albany, which was probably a mistake as I was
a very uninformed and unpracticed teacher. The work I did in the Sage College
of Albany’s Higher Educational Opportunity Program, however, allowed me to work
with students who came from very different backgrounds than myself- a Jersey
girl from the suburbs- and who were struggling with academic writing as well as
with many personal, social, and economic challenges, so in some ways it was
good preparation for teaching in prison.
The DA program at SUNY-Albany, as Jody pointed out, was a wonderful one that
allowed and encouraged students to make connections between different genres. The
courses I took in that program helped me enormously as a teacher and a scholar.
My experience with prison teaching also evolved into my dissertation. I want to
second what Jody Swilky said about how the program allowed/encouraged us to
cross over into multiple genres; I was so grateful that I was not only allowed
but encouraged to write a dissertation about my experience of teaching in
prison that was grounded in narrative/storytelling but also layered in
critical/theoretical/academic analysis.
My colleague and fellow DA student at SUNY-Albany, Meg Woolbright, wrote
in the foreword to her book Stories from
the Center: Connecting Narrative and Theory in the Writing Center about the
difference between a “study” and “a story.” I had no interest in writing
studies.
Meg
writes that “A study, it seems to us, is a
story of sorts, but a story about other people’s lives, with other voices and others’
authorities dominating. A story has a point of contact with one’s own life. A
study makes some attempt or pretense at being controlled or objective, whereas
a story considers events in light of their own subjectivity…Narrative provides
a way to speak things otherwise unspeakable, to give voice to that which would
otherwise go unheard.”
Meg
goes on to define the pieces in her edited collection as “academic narrative”
that “tangle story and theory inextricably.” That is what I have tried to do in
my work.
KIRPAL GORDON: Has your day job as a writing professor for the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences affirmed your notion about narrative as well?
LAURA
ROGERS: I think my position at ACPHS (Albany College of Pharmacy and Health
Sciences) has done this in many ways. At the time I started at ACPHS I was
teaching in the college prison program and had been teaching/ tutoring in the EOP program, Job Corps, a drug rehab center as well as finishing up my
teaching assistantship in SUNY-Albany, so teaching at ACPHS was something very
different for me. The ACPHS students are a very particular and in many ways a
unique group of students; they are very focused, committed and hard-working. They
have made a commitment to a professional path at a very young age. At first it
was difficult for me to make connections between teaching prisoners and
teaching students in a health care school as they are profoundly different
groups of people. However, the longer I taught at pharmacy, I began to see that
those students struggled with many different issues, needs, and complexities of
life. I began to think about shaping a class to meet the needs of a particular
group of students in a particular context/environment. I try to bring certain
things to a classroom in any environment; I work to create a classroom
community in which students feel safe to write, read, work collaboratively and
think/analyze. There are clear differences between a prison classroom and a
classroom on a college campus, but I hope to be able to work to achieve these
goals with all students.
KIRPAL GORDON: How has being married to a prison educator---as
well as being a mother--- influenced your experience of prison teaching?
LAURA ROGERS: My husband, Craig Hancock, first
suggested to me that I teach in prison as he had been teaching in prison for
quite a few years. For several semesters we carpooled to the college programs
at Greene and Mt. McGregor Correctional Facilities, so I learned a lot from
Craig about prison teaching and teaching writing in general. At the time, Craig
was involved with a group called the Hudson Valley Writers’ Guild that he
helped found; he was also involved in the editing/production of their literary
magazine Groundswell. He brought to
his teaching an interesting background as a teacher/writer/poet which seemed
common at the time for people teaching in prison. I thought Groundswell was a wonderful experiment
in trying to create a local, community-oriented lit mag. Craig wrote some very
powerful poems about teaching in prison that I think were in that magazine; he
also interviewed Joe Bruchac for Groundswell,
who, in addition to directing the University Without Walls program at Auburn,
taught in prison and published many prison writers in The Prison Writing Review. So there were those connections between
Groundswell and prison teaching.
Craig and I have two sons, and I remember going in to
teach in prison in the college program while I was pregnant. I was going
through a door inmates were walking through; one of the men rushed to hold the
door open for me and said to his friend, “watch it man, can’t you see that
she’s pregnant!” This made me feel simultaneously very vulnerable in that
environment and yet oddly protected.
When I first started teaching, particularly at Greene Correctional
Facility where I currently have my writing group, many of the men in the
college program were older men – many of them Viet Nam
KIRPAL GORDON: How has working in jail changed you?
LAURA
ROGERS: I think teaching in prison has profoundly changed me in so many ways. I
grew up in the NJ suburbs; I think one of the most important things prison has
done is put me in contact with so many people I would never otherwise have
contact with. I think it is a sad statement on our society that so many separations
exist between us. I have had a profound education in how difficult and complex
people’s lives can be, in how our society is so stratified and divided, and the
prison-industrial complex. Although I cannot say I understand what it is like
to be incarcerated, I have had the opportunity to hear people tell me what that
experience is like. Consequently I have been educated in the profound waste of
human life and potential that is the US
Teaching in prison has made me think about how to work to engage students. Prison teaching has taught me to pay more attention to the contexts of students’ lives and to try and tailor/create a classroom/curriculum that will fit their needs. It has made me think about the place of reading and writing in people’s lives and how institutions- prisons or schools- can work to enhance or undermine that. There is a wonderful book, Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons by Megan Sweeney, that provides a very powerful look into the place of reading in the lives of people in prison. I have tried to combine reading and writing for the men in my group; we have been fortunate to have had two grants from the American Library Association which provided the group with six novels and a funded visit from the writers of one of those books (Coe Booth).
I
hope my on campus students see me as someone who is engaged in working with community
literacy and begin to think about the importance of that; we have a
responsibility, an obligation, to step outside the boundaries of the academic
world and engage with the most marginalized of our society. The general public
has so little knowledge of the prison industrial complex, the experience of
incarceration, or the people who end up in prison. What they know is largely
drawn from sensationalized media accounts and Hollywood movies.
KIRPAL GORDON: Meanwhile you’ve been collecting the experiences of
other writer-teachers and speaking at conferences on prison education.
LAURA
ROGERS: When I first started prison teaching in the prison, there was very
little scholarly work available to help guide me on my way. My dissertation was
a creative non-fiction piece that blended narrative with theoretical/critical
work that helped me make sense of that experience and put it in a framework. I
think the work I have done has in some ways reflected the shape and trajectory
of the field itself; I have moved from narratives based on my own experiences
to projects that have allowed me to get more distance/ a different perspective
on this experience. I became very curious about the history and context of
teaching writing in prison; I knew, for example, that there have been writing
workshops in prison since the early 70s or late 60s and that these workshops really
flourished post-Attica. To me, it became vitally important to understand this
history and context and that this history become part of the narrative of the
field of composition and rhetoric especially as prison literacy teaching
uniquely intertwines the fields of creative writing, basic writing and
composition. I also felt that there were many important voices, such as yours,
Kirpal, and the other writers who pioneered that work that needed to be
included and heard. You connected me with Darrah Cloud and Jeanne Clark, who
also talked to me about their prison work. It has been fascinating to me to
hear people’s stories and to begin to understand the social, cultural and
educational context of this history. I did talk about this project at last
year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication conference and am
really looking forward to presenting an expanded version of this at the Fourth
Global Conference: Experiencing Prison in Prague US
KIRPAL
GORDON: Why is the US
LAURA
ROGERS: This is a very complex question. There is no doubt that the US US
Why
is the US Texas
I
think there are other factors such as our both positive and negative attitude
towards individualism, our racial problems, and a misguided sense of reform
(the first prisons were started by Quakers) that contribute to this.
KIRPAL GORDON: Prison has been described as a get-over experience
of exploitation, mendacity and hustle---in short, a life conflicted at Erik
Erikson’s famous first pillar of trust-mistrust. Why do so many people related
to prison--- whether inmates, guards, administrators, civilians---go through
this?
LAURA
ROGERS: This is another big question. I agree that everybody working/ incarcerated
in the system has to go through this or else struggle against it. I think NY
times reporter Ted Conover’s book Newjack,
in which he describes his experiences working undercover as a guard at Sing
Sing prison, helped me understand what working in that system can do to a
person. After a while, Conover did not like the person he found himself
becoming and realized that if he stayed in that position long-term, it would be
very destructive. I’ve known some of the guards at Greene Correctional, where I
have my writing group, for a long time and have talked to some of them who
express the same feelings.
I
think that everyone who works in the correctional facility system is trapped in
an inhuman system which has as its purpose to degrade and dehumanize people and
which gives some people extraordinary power over others. Human relationships
are so regulated, so trapped into boxes of what is or is not appropriate that
normal human relationships and ways of interacting become almost impossible. Interactions
or things that may be taken lightly in other settings become large and
uncomfortable issues. Everyone is pressured to act in an inhuman way in this
setting.
That
being said, however, it has been extraordinary to me to see how many people are
able to enact something approaching normal human relationships in that setting-
the corrections officer, for example who stood outside of the building where my
group meets one cold, snowy night and talked to me at length about the assignment
guards most dreaded- accompanying an inmate to a funeral, not, he said, because
of the chance of escape or problems with the inmate, but because the family members cried and held on
to their loved one, never wanting to let him go. The officers who let the group
run past our official closing time so the writer can finish reading his piece
to the group and hear their reaction. The GED teachers, whose work I once
dismissed without knowing anything about what they do, and the extraordinary
lengths some of them go to. I made many assumptions about the GED teachers, I
think, when I first started teaching in prison. However, when I actually
started talking to them, I saw that many of those assumptions were wrong.
KIRPAL
GORDON: What do you think is the best thing that can
happen with literacy programs, college education and the incarcerated?
LAURA
ROGERS: While I am aware that there is a long-standing tradition of prison
writing workshops and university/prison collaboration, it has been very
heartening to see that in the last ten years, even with budget cuts and
withdrawal of federal and state funding for prison education, to see so many of
my colleagues in composition and rhetoric become involved with prison literacy
programs and prison advocacy. Some of these folks are involved in university/ prison
or jail collaborations and service-learning partnerships, and others have
developed their own programs independent of their institutions. Many of these
people operate as volunteers, after a long day of teaching, and often drive
distances at night to whatever prison or jail they are working with. It is so
heartening to see a whole new generation of composition scholars- people like
Tobi Jacobi, Patrick Berry, Wendy Wolters Hinshaw, and many others- beginning
important and insightful research and scholarly projects. We just had a
wonderful pre-conference workshop at the Conference on College Composition and
Communication (in Las
Vegas Nevada
The
best thing that could happen with prison literacy, college education and
prisons is that there be more of such programs. Many of my colleagues who have
ties to prison literacy say that at this point, our discipline “gets it,” and
they wish there could be more outreach/activism in the community- for example,
publishing in journals/magazines other than scholarly venues, more outreach and
activism in the community, or the opportunity to reach out to teachers other
than university teachers in our discipline. This is why I see Tracy Huling’s
work with the Prison Public Memory Project as so important; I attended a
wonderful presentation by this group at the Hudson , NY Hudson , NY
Additionally,
there needs to be restored funding for post-secondary education in prisons on
both the state and federal level. Statistics show that involvement with post-secondary
education is one of the only programs that has a significant impact on the
recidivism rate. Taxpayers spend more to keep a person in prison for a year,
which has been demonstrated to have little effect on the recidivism rate, than
they would to educate that person. I am aware of the many issues surrounding
access to a college education and the incredibly high cost of that education,
but as my colleague Joseph Lockard has pointed out, we need to think of
education as a human right such as food and shelter and begin making sure it is
available to everyone.
