Wet Paint with nigel brookes

There is a logic of institutions and in behavior and in political relations. In even the most violent ones there is a rationality. What is most dangerous in violence is its rationality. People accept as truth, as evidence, themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.
~Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault used Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor of how society polices and imprisons itself. A perceived absence of true privacy in a culture of total information awareness entails a spiral of silence, within which voice is given only to those expressions that are deemed, “appropriate.” Fundamental aspects of our souls that exist outside the bell curve of “common sense,” potentially unpatriotic and subject to social stigma are placed in solitary confinement, for our own good. In a panoptic culture, we are encouraged to passively sit on comfortable furniture, our manicured hands folded neatly in our laps, defer to self-appointed authority, mimic the “aristocracy” and accept the range of “given” roles as the entirety of what is possible. Creating our own idiosyncratic roles might bring unwanted attention from the panoptic gaze, might potentially transmute our experience from a figurative to a literal prison. The Panopticon is the Matrix, the prison of the mind—or so my muddled thinking goes.

Foucault’s fixation on the metaphor of a societal prison helped me think through some of my own psychological issues. However, I realized this metaphor helped me primarily because it fit many of the interpretations I had already made about the world. I’m sure there are plenty of people who never felt imprisoned by their circumstances. And, of course, I realize creating narcissistic little scenarios about societal imprisonment from the comfort and privilege of grad school is a fairly hypocritical endeavor. Nevertheless, as a way of seeing, it is a metaphor that has some merit. And it became a framework for thinking about the value of art in our culture as a force to confront our societal and self-imposed prisons. Like the sound of Joshua’s horn at the walls of Jericho, only in reverse, I want to believe people can sing their “body electric,” and sound their “barbaric yawp” loudly enough to crumble the walls we construct. Of course those walls are psychological and social, not material. It doesn’t mean they’re not “real;” they’re just made of a different kind of “stuff.” No doubt though, there are other types of walls, of brick and mortar, the kind we literally build, behind which we literally imprison the Other.

Although I have long contemplated the role of art in affecting people’s perceptions of figurative imprisonment or emancipation, I didn’t give much thought to literal prisons until I spent a year doing program management for TKF, the Tariq Khamisa Foundation (www.tkf.org), whose founder Azim contributed an expert column for this issue of Concrete Magazine. Tony Hicks, who was just a fourteen year old boy when he shot and killed Azim’s son, was the youngest person in California history to be tried as an adult. He pled guilty to first-degree murder and is now serving a 25 year to life sentence in state prison, a literal prison. The Foundation’s mission, to stop kids from killing kids, emerges from a commitment to compassion and restoration, rather than the more politically correct model of revenge and punishment. Both models aspire to create justice, but work from radically different definitions of what constitutes justice. The TKF model is also preventative. It reaches out to youth through the ancient power of first-person storytelling, helps them understand murder as the agonizing, unfixable tragedy it is—instead of a Mortal Combat score—and systematically places individual choice at the center of a strategy to avoid the criminal path and its final destination: literal prison or death.

I am enough of a mushy-headed tree hugger to believe the purpose of prison should be simply to separate dangerous people from society, instead of a depository for all those society prefers not to look at. And I absolutely do think predatory sociopaths should be separated from vulnerable communities. But I did have a disturbing observation while working for TKF. The program was targeted to youth “at risk” for violent crime, identified through matrices of various sociological and demographic data. And in traveling to the schools where the program was delivered, in reading the data, I discovered in addition to racial disparities, strong correlations between risk and poverty, or risk and literacy. These correlations partially undermine a “throw away the key” attitude for even violent offenders. More disturbing still, the majority of prisoners in this country are non-violent offenders and are culled from these very same risk groups. If race, low income, and lack of education are so strongly correlated with incarceration behind the walls of literal prisons, perhaps the walls of figurative prisons are more “material” than we might assume.

In 1998 Eric Schlosser wrote The Prison Industrial Complex for Atlantic Monthly; it is an exhaustively researched documentation of the mutual rise of privatized incarceration, increasingly punitive policy, and an exponential increase in the USA’s inmate population. According to that article and several social research studies I read for this writing, America currently has the greatest absolute and per capita inmate numbers in the world, out doing Communist China by half a million. In the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, new incarcerations went from 50% nonviolent offenders to more than 70% nonviolent offenders. About half the inmates are illiterate and 85% are substance abusers. Although opinion polls demonstrate a majority of Americans have in the past and still consider drug abuse a public health issue more than a crime, jail sentences for drug abuse have increased in severity during this time. In spite of a recent orgy of prison construction, prisons are becoming more overcrowded.

California mirrors this national trend, with a state prison system 40% larger than the Federal prison system and housing more inmates than Japan, Singapore, Holland, France, Germany, and Great Britain combined. The state built twelve prisons from 1852 to 1984 and twenty-one more in the last two decades, with predicted construction of 30 to 50 more to address an increasing inmate population that has already grown 800% since 1985. The entire system operates at double the intended capacity. Building prisons to reduce overcrowding may sound good on the surface, but let’s not forget, “if you build it, they will come.” Do you live in an area where more roads were built over the years to reduce traffic congestion? How’d that work out? Increased capacity creates an incentive to fill that very capacity, whether it’s residents of new housing developments filling up the roadways or importing prisoners to fill empty beds. 

Public support for this huge capital outlay and the redistribution of funding away from education, health care services, park systems, and social programs is garnered within a culture of fear. Television news editorial policy “if it bleeds, it leads” gets good ratings from bad stories. Fostering a fear of crime makes good business sense. A political climate that continuously recycles a “tough on crime” rhetoric in the service of both so-called conservative and liberal candidates reinforces this fear and invites people to believe more prisons equal less crime. Single studies that suggest rehabilitation does not work are used as “logical” justification for a more punitive system. The privatization of the prison system is sold as cost savings. More prisons built in economically depressed areas are sold as jobs and increased revenue. Fear of crime, fear of poverty, fear of loss are the authors of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the most incarcerated population on earth.

We allow these policies to exist because we honor the “experts” who tell us it’s for the best. We have institutions full of experts who perform all kinds of functions requiring expertise. We look to experts to design how we should think about our wellbeing. Experts are expected to help us confront our fears, cure our illnesses, educate us, raise our children, council us, help us work on our issues, assist us with our grief. When we have someone perform bodywork on us, we are paying an expert, possibly a complete stranger, to touch us and make us feel good. Indigenous communities have traditionally performed these functions for themselves, but they’re probably not experts. And when we experience crime, we again rely on the experts, experts representing the state. Linguistic frames such as “the State of California versus John Doe” reinforce the centrality of institutional experts and removes individual people and communities from the picture. Communities are not part of the process and the process doesn’t take place within our communities. And at the end of the trial, the perpetrator is expelled from the community to a cell, and the community hires or is assigned an expert to achieve closure.

When I do something wrong that annoys my wife, she lets me know it. In order for me to have closure I must not only apologize to her, I must mean it. If, on the other hand, some experts came along, without my wife personally expressing her annoyance to me, and they dragged me off to a cell for a couple of months to “pay my debt to society,” I probably wouldn’t feel like apologizing, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t mean it. I would be expelled from my marriage, my family, in the same manner real prisoners are expelled from their communities. If I were a danger to my wife, I should be expelled from the marriage. But if I was just annoying my wife, I would want a chance to work on the relationship, in the context of the relationship, even if I should sleep on the couch for a while. In fact prisoners do interact with our communities when they clean the freeways, when they manufacture license plates, when they package Starbucks coffee beans, when they book our travel arrangements over the phone. We just prefer not to notice it. We want to position them as the Other. And when they get out (and mostly all of them will get out), we hope the experts sufficiently prepared them for their re-entry back into the community. We hope they are rehabilitated, even if we voted for politicians who said there’s no such thing. In essence, we hope they are human. But do we ask what kinds of stuff makes us human, and do we make sure that kind of stuff is in prison? We certainly don’t if we only rely on the experts.

Something that makes me human is art, both experiencing the art of others and making and sharing my own. And this humanizing process is inseparable from the communities out of which it emerges and which, in turn, it helps create. Shockingly, I have learned that I am not the only one who feels this way; many others also think art is pretty cool. In 1968 then California governor Ronald Reagan signed a Prisoners’ Bill of Rights into law. I guess in the 1960s even conservatives were mushy-headed enough to still believe in rehabilitation. Rehabilitation encompassed such things as offering classes for high school diplomas, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, counseling, and art. Art is a way for prisoners to interact with a community, even when separated from that community by brick and mortar. The making and sharing of art is necessarily always about community in dialogue. A community in dialogue is rehabilitative and makes its members human.            

Back in the time when rehabilitation was a valued concept, Eloise Smith was the director of the California Arts Council. After a tour of Vacaville Prison and a conversation with inmate Vern McKee who passionately expressed the need for outside artists to come inside the pen and teach art, to construct a bridge between prison art and art on the outside, she was visited by a particular muse. At Vacaville she created an intensive art program for incarcerated men and women in the state of California now known as Arts-in-Corrections. The individual programs are administered by an artist facilitator, a full-time civil service position created by the California Department of Correction's Community Resource Division. Three studio artists were initially hired from the community to come to the institutions to design and implement a comprehensive, multi-arts program out of a void.

The official goal of the facilitator and the outside artists is to use the arts to improve the prison experience. The Arts-in-Corrections program also helps inmates begin changing their attitudes toward themselves and others. It is designed to not use art therapists or social workers. Professional artists from the street bring with them a knowledge and experience of career art; art that is being made for the purpose of public exposure through stage performances, exhibitions and publications. Over time, the instructors model what it is like to be a working artist on the other side of the wall. The inmates are treated and challenged as artists. And many of the artists see their work in the prisons as part of their job in society. In its first twelve years Arts-In-Corrections grew from a tiny pilot program at Vacaville Prison to the largest institutional arts program in the world.

In 2000, Jeff Irwin was hired as a permanent full time ceramics instructor at Grossmont College; prior to that he taught part time at various community colleges and, for ten years, twice a week in the Arts-in-Corrections program at Donovan State Prison on Otay Mesa. He didn’t seek the work; they called him, because he had a reputation as a quality ceramicist and teacher. He was one of the first to teach in the program. He had no mentors, instructor manuals, or templates to work from; he made it up on the fly. He decided to let the volunteer participants tell him what they wanted. The first project was a tile mural that utilized various symbols the inmates individually made then collaboratively assembled. After that he determined the inmates wanted more control and autonomy to work with their own ideas, so future projects were designed as individual efforts.

He wanted to stay out of their creative way, however he noticed that inmates’ first artistic efforts were more often reproductions of existing standards, derivations of things they had already seen and categorized as “art.” So he did gently prod them to explore their unique perspectives, their idiosyncrasies, to “push their envelopes and comfort zones” so the initial simplicity would give way to a complexity that expressed their depth. “I found my inmate students were more willing to experiment than my college students.” Perhaps that perception was because Jeff’s own experiences teaching in prison were experimental. The inmates were mostly non-white and raised in a significantly lower socio-economic condition than the primarily white middle class youngsters who attended his college classes. He had to broaden his number of communication styles. He felt, for better or for worse, the lives inmates lived, that had brought them to the point of incarceration, had been nevertheless creative and experimental (figuring out how to scam the so-called system) and, as such, they had experiences with disregarding rules that lent them a type of artistic confidence lacking in more traditional classroom settings.

In the first years of the program, inmates were able to own their artwork, usually shipping it to friends and family on the outside. Within a few years, however, the prison administration decided all the work produced in the program would remain the property of the prison itself. Jeff said enrollment in his class dropped by about one third after that policy change. “Some inmates just wanted to make a nice box for their mom.” He did say those inmates who continued to participate were obviously less interested in having an object, and were more interested in the process, were closer to being what he thought of as artists.

Although Jeff never conducted any research on the effects of his class in the lives of his students, he did notice changes in demeanor that he attributed to an emerging sense of pride from receiving praise and acknowledgement for achievements that were valued and socially acceptable, achievements that were previously unimagined. Additionally, they created something “real,” artifacts that documented the process, talismans that held a residual magic and served as reminders of what was possible. And the relationship Jeff had with his students reinforced thoughts of possibility. He was “normal;” not a fellow prisoner, certainly not a guard, but a bridge to the “real” world who showed up because he was passionate about his art and wanted to share that passion. “They were amazed that I found such joy imagining and creating things that had absolutely no purpose whatsoever.” His students asked him to bring in slides of his works and the exhibits where he had shown them, almost to be sure there was such a world where people gathered and interacted “for no purpose,” other than to have an intangible experience. When I asked him whether he had any regrets or unresolved issues from his days working in the prison, he said, “I’m very happy with the life I now lead, but I do miss those times. And I do wish I could know what happened to my former students.”

The Arts-in-Corrections program at Donovan prison started in 1987 and was placed under the direction of San Diego artist David Beck-Brown (www.davidbeck-brown.com). David’s official title is Institution Artist Facilitator, and he was authorized to hire from 8-12 artists at a time to teach various media, including Jeff Irwin for ceramics, Spike Sorrentino for acting, and David Strumsky for poetry writing. Over the years informal research conducted at Donovan demonstrated inmate participants in the Arts-in-Corrections program had lower rates of recidivism and (perhaps more important in David’s opinion) were significantly less likely to be involved in violent behavior while in the prison. “The prisoners knew that violence and other rule violations would exclude them from the program, so they had a strong incentive to behave themselves. The convicts really took ownership of the program; they wanted to make sure nothing threatened their ability to make art. Never in the time from 1987 to 2003 did any equipment get vandalized or stolen.”

David has a pretty good idea of how the program worked only until 2003, because that was the year the Gray Davis administration effectively ended Arts-in-Corrections. “Governor Davis’ director of the Department of Corrections had no background in law enforcement or corrections; he was a financial guy. He was focused on cutting costs and thought art had no value to the prison system.” After that David and some friends made a documentary emphasizing the benefits of the program and used that to lobby State legislators to reinstate it. His position, Institution Artist Facilitator was returned, but he no longer has funding to hire any outside artists, so the program is essentially skeletal. “Governor Schwarzenegger is changing the name Dept of Corrections to Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” David reports. “Probably the money to simply change all the business cards and letterhead would be enough to fund the program.” David has seen data that inmate violent acts against inmates, staff, guards, and even involving full-blown riots have risen since the elimination of the program. One of the most important things about the program, according to David, was that it kept the inmates busy, it kept their minds occupied. Even “lifers” who participated exhibited less disruptive behavior. David remains committed to reinstating and even expanding the program, because he is a passionate artist, and because he knows it works for everyone. “For some of the students, it was the first time in their lives they ever created anything. It gave them incredible insight to their own creativity and challenged what they believed possible. I have several memories of students who came to me as they were being released from prison, to thank me and the other artists for saving their lives.”

Arts-in-Corrections has been an effective and perhaps imperfect vehicle for getting art into prisons, but it’s not the only way. Paula Cronan and Julianna Snapper are two San Diego working artists who wrote a grant proposal to conduct an art program they titled Inside Out at Vista Detention Center for Women. They were awarded the grant, and soon after were rising before dawn every Saturday for a six month stretch in 2002 to drive from downtown to the North County prison. In addition to being a visual artist, Paula is a licensed Holistic Health Practitioner and wanted holism to be integral to the experience. She started off the classes with deep breathing exercises and a session of QiGong, before she and Julianna segued into more traditional art making. Paula taught the visual art, and they team taught writing to their students. Julianna is a classically trained opera singer and voice coach, so she was in charge of singing exercises. The two of them saw the breathing exercises and singing as conceptually and experientially related. “I assumed that after having the types of lives that led those women to be in prison, they needed to experience being grounded, which breathing exercises can provide. Conscious breathing and singing ‘activate the voice’ which is usually suppressed in women from abusive backgrounds.”

In addition to singing, the women inmates were asked to create a visual musical score. They were taught the basic concepts of what written music represents and crafted collages of various symbols distributed over a meandering line that signified the passage of time, bracketed within a simple “beginning” and “end.” Later, a composer created short pieces of music inspired by each of the individual scores. That was burned onto a CD and brought back to the Detention facility for the women to hear.

The inmates also had the opportunity to write on such topics as dreams, memories, and cravings. These were compiled into in-house magazines called Prison Blues and Hear Your Voice. The “zines” were then photocopied and shared with other inmates. In addition to writings, they contain photo collages juxtaposing various advertising imagery, tribal peoples in ceremonial outfits, icons of popular culture, or single words or phrases that have specific meanings for the women who made them. In their radical self-expressions, their barbaric yawps, a syntax emerges. The syntax is self-organizing, with its own logic, unconcerned with the logic of the institution. An art theorist might call it “outsider art,” but it is quintessentially insider art, inside the walls of brick and mortar, which are themselves inside social walls, concentric rings within rings.

I asked Paula about the benefits of art programs in the prisons. I had been reading enough studies to have a head full of terms like “reduced recidivism” and other “measurable outcomes.” Measurable outcomes are useful for gaining political support, but art is a practice that produces many different outcomes, many of which are not measurable at all. Because Paula works in the holistic health field, she is attuned to the “subtle energies” that are inherent to wellbeing. “The value of art cannot be captured by a theory. Theory that is produced from the outside is always ‘about something’ that the theorist is thinking. The value of art is not in thinking about it. Experience and doing ‘teaches’ the value of art. People who take the time to make art know this, because when you make your own art, other’s art becomes so much more precious. In the prison setting, art is really about empowering people for the betterment of society. In a culture of strategic disempowerment that fractionalizes our humanity, art can make us whole by engaging all of our different intelligences. It is a spiritual pursuit.”

If, as I agree, art is spiritual, then it involves “connectivity.” Connectivity expresses itself in human culture as community. So I asked Paula about this, about how she benefited by working with the women. “As an artist who’s had my own struggles and creative blocks, working with these women helped me forgive myself. When your behavior is driven by the marketing of art, it’s easy to feel like a loser if you aren’t prolific enough or you aren’t getting into enough galleries. I could see these women were often stuck in some of the same places I get stuck in. It helped me remember the importance of sticking with art as a practice and a process for transformation, because I saw them transcend their limitations. True healing always comes from forgiveness. In order to forgive others, we must learn to forgive ourselves.” 

Paula’s comments resonated with me as well. I like to think some of the art I have produced is pretty good, but I have also produced a lot of very “bad art.” Bad art carried a stigma that I attributed to myself. It was after all my imagination, my invention, my self-expression, an artifact of me. Others might have and sometimes did criticize my art, but none in a voice more harsh than my own. Sticking with the practice, in spite of the internal critic, does require that I “forgive” myself for making bad art. Forgiveness requires placing “bad art” in a reasonable perspective as unavoidable and perhaps even necessary. And to some extent “bad art” is simply a metaphor for the parts of myself I’ve learned to label “bad.” Because I have never been in jail, my ideas about what art does for me may be overly idealistic as far as the effect on inmates. So I set aside time to talk with a couple of fellows who have been to jail and get their perspective.

It’s been over thirty years since Southern California painter and art instructor Owen Barkley was last incarcerated. Since that time he has supported himself in the “real world” as an oil painter, muralist, and art teacher. Prior to the mid 1970s, he lived in prisons more than fifteen different times while passing from ages 13 to 33, with sentences from a couple of months to a couple of years. During those twenty years he was correctly found guilty of driving under the influence, being drunk and disorderly in public, breaking and entering, burglary, grand theft. Neither violent nor victimless crimes, Owen admits his guilt but claims to be guilty primarily of stupidity. His self-described non violent nature is suggested by the fact he was incarcerated in minimum security work and fire-fighting camps instead of what he calls the, “big cement hotels.”

Nevertheless, violence was the social condition of even minimum security facilities. Inevitably, when someone tried to take his possessions, Owen necessarily had to physically confront the thief. To do anything less resulted in only more frequent and more blatant invasions of his personhood. Owen explains this by noting that all prisoners believe they are no good, and when they get locked up, everything they experience reinforces that belief. He believes this unworthy self concept is internalized and even valorized by the prisoners themselves, as alluded to in such common utterances as, “he’s a bad motherfucker,” used as a show of respect. And he believes an unnamable fear underpins their negative self-image. The fear is unnamable to Owen because he’s carried it from the womb, before he had the capacity to name. He only knows until his mid thirties the fear prevented him from taking the kinds of psychic risks he needed to take in order to broaden his experience beyond the self-loathing he thinks prisons traditionally reinforce. “I was pretty fucked up on drugs when I was on the street. Those drugs were just to cover up the fear, fear of risk, fear of failure, fear of facing yourself. In prison you don’t get access to as many drugs, and your fear just gets converted into anger, violence, and eventually boredom. You can’t see yourself as good person or a responsible person; you’re just what they say you are—a criminal.”

The last time Owen was incarcerated he took some risks and faced some fears. He had developed a noticeable skill for drawing, originally reproducing from photographs pictures of other inmates’ children, lovers, families and “sexy, girly pictures” that he bartered for cigarettes and other “comfort items.” Eventually he evolved to the point of creating full-blown oil paintings on stretched canvas. After several failed starts, he enrolled in and completed a high school degree program. During that time, prison staff invited him to teach art classes to other prisoners. As he slowly pieced together a “demonstrated record of success,” he also received recognition and acknowledgement, not only trophies and certificates from staff but also heart-felt gratitude from fellow inmates for the painting skills he was able to impart and for the effect that process had in their lives. He was tapped to be “Senior Lead Man,” an inmate/staff liaison and to run orientation for new prisoners. He recalls, “my self image was changing. Being an “artist” had never been on my radar; I thought I was destined for jail sentences and lots of menial jobs. I had a spiritual feeling of possibility, of who I could be. Suddenly I was thinking, ‘I could do that, I could be that.’ I was also confronting a lot of fear. It was just showing up all over the place, all the time.” But instead of covering it up with drugs or retreating behind a protective wall of anger and hostility, he was learning the importance of risk-taking, of passing through that unnamable fear. And art-making was integral to his process.

Owen philosophizes that our egos, our divided selves are fear-based constructs. “When you’re separate, detached, and stuck in your head, the intellect thinks it’s the only part of the personality. This is all a reaction to fear. Painting gets you out of your head and places ‘you’ squarely in the center of a process of creativity. There is no ‘you’ there anymore, no you as ‘prisoner,’ no you as ‘not prisoner,’ no you as ‘artist,’ just process. All the fear that prevented me from reinventing myself was tied up in some false image I had of myself; painting, the process of creativity dissolves all those images and allows something new to emerge.” When I asked Owen to describe what the process of creativity feels like he rejected the very premise. “It defies description. It is an experience, a phenomena beyond my reasoning.” But he did offer that it gave him, “an awareness that I’m part of something larger than what I call myself. It opened a door to the feeling of expressing the process to others, of contributing something of value, and that gives you a feeling you have value, that you are good, not bad. This is something prisoners need to learn. Prison is chock full of creative people, because they can’t fit into a slave system; they need help to create their lives in a healthy way.” 

Matt Forderer (www.mattforderer.com) has called San Diego his home for 17 years. His face has a decidedly adolescent quality that belies his more responsible roles of husband, father, or Photo-Shop Master for a local greeting card company. Looking at his permanent grin, “hard core criminal” is absolutely not a label that occurs to describe him, “hard core artist” perhaps but not criminal. Nonetheless, if at a key moment his life had taken a slightly different trajectory, the criminal path might possibly have carried him in a very tragic direction.

Growing up in the Midwest during the 1970s and early 1980s, an initially undiagnosed and then poorly treated bi-polar disorder gave his formative years a bitter-sweet quality. Back then the clinical term was manic-depressive, “but I was mostly just manic,” he recalls. If, instead of the 1970s, Matt lived during the 1070s, he might have been diagnosed as touched by the gods, or as a vessel for the Muse, a daemon, or even the Furies, such were the framing metaphors of earlier cultures. Fury was still an apt term, even during the time he was growing up. “Because of some of the dynamics in my family and how I felt treated by grown ups during school, I had a real problem with authority or anyone who tried to force me to be a certain way.”

As with many art makers, he began drawing in public school and found the creative process offered him a way to focus and express some of his “manic” energy without eliciting frustration from the grown ups. But with the manic energy such a prevalent part of his day-to-day experience, art making by itself was insufficient to safely navigate Matt through his youth and early adulthood. Matt remembers receiving odd stares from people when, for example, he’d wear a bathrobe in public but he reports, “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”  Public bathrobe-wearing correlated with other faux-pas, and over the course of a decade, starting when he was 19, he intermittently spent brief periods in jail for being under the influence or in possession of various naughty substances.

Occasionally Matt’s jail sentences were commuted to time in mental care facilities, although he still perceived stigma and hostility from some of the “grown ups.” Once, when being transferred from jail to a state hospital, his armed escorts treated him with perhaps even more condescension than they treated other prisoners, laughing at his predicament and consistently remarking they were taking him to “the funny farm where he would enjoy talking to the little duckies.” In his experience, many of the guards he encountered had equal disdain for traditional criminals and mental patients. “When cops handcuff you and escort you somewhere or admit you to their facility, they only need to do their job. There’s no reason for them to be verbally abusive, to send you such negative energy.”

The last time Matt went to jail, it was a total of 35 days for possessing illegal mushrooms while passing through the “Show Me State.” Apparently, he didn’t pass through Missouri quite fast enough, and of course there was that business of driving an iconic Volkswagen microbus, and needing a shave. While awaiting trial in what he calls, “the grimmest of places, just horrendous, with no windows or decent lighting, surrounded by squalor,” he was asked to create illustrations for other inmates. He produced a bird image for an “in-house” tattoo. He also sketched a portrait of another inmate to be sent to that person’s girlfriend. While he was working on the pen & ink drawing, his subject told him, “they don’t take mushrooms lightly here. You’re definitely going to prison, and you’re going to be raped, because you’re pretty.” Even without any mushrooms, Matt was having a bad trip. His court-appointed lawyer told him much the same thing. He would do what he could, but said Matt should expect a sentence of from six months to a couple of years.

After 35 days in jail, his unshaven face was even more scraggly, but he was not allowed to groom himself. Matt prepared for the worst. Somehow his father, armed with Matt’s medical history, was allowed to approach the judge and advocate for leniency. The judge accepted his father’s promise of accountability and granted probation and therapy in his home state. Matt knew then he escaped a bullet and framed his experience as an epiphany. And we know now the judge’s leniency would no longer be allowed under today’s mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws that ties a judge’s hands and gives a prosecution’s charge the final say. After that close call, Matt located effective therapy and rebuilt his self image and his life. Crucial parts of that therapy are his daughter and his wife, who “doesn’t let me get away with any shit. She nips it right away before it gets out of hand.”

Art is also a part of that therapy. Art allows Matt to “bring my subconscious to the surface.” Jail is now just “a colorful story that affects the art.” But those colors are dark. “Jail is not just like ‘going to your room.’” There’s a friction in his work, a “stormy cloud” that is ultimately inescapable, and in some ways, Matt thinks that’s not such a bad thing. Like Owen, Matt thinks jail is fraught with creative people who don’t believe they fit in, who don’t know they have something beautiful and important to contribute. Matt further believes the lack of an artistic frame in one’s self image, develops in grade school when children don’t get gold stars on their drawings for failing a teacher’s arbitrary test in aesthetics. “When little Johnny learns his art isn’t as ‘good’ as little Billy’s art, he learns he, himself, isn’t good. And there goes art, and their goes staring at clouds, seeing joyful patterns and expressing that joy in a way that keeps life precious.” 

Art was part of the process Matt used in jail and continues to use that keeps his life precious. When he makes his art, his inherently human frustrations are, “taken out on a canvas instead of other people.” But mixed with frustration is “a vision of how I see the future,” and it evokes pride and strengthens his self image as he “hones creativity and craftsmanship, masters skills that produce something tangible.” When I asked him how he thinks art making produces the benefits that art makers intuitively perceive, Matt uses the metaphor of the psyche as a garden that needs tending. “We want to plant seeds that will grow into our dreams and we must water and nurture those seeds. We must also remove the weeds that threaten the health of those new growths. But you just can’t go in and start hacking away at things; the roots will remain and they will grow back even worse. Art is a way of mindfully identifying what are the weeds, where they are, and pulling them out by the roots, with finesse, so they won’t grow back.”

What are those weeds? We all have them, doubts, fears, low self-esteem. Some of us are able to “practice weeding” in our gardens. We want to keep the weeds in check so we can nurture our chosen crops and celebrate their harvests. Some call the weeding practice yoga, meditation, prayer, or art. Some people don’t practice weeding so much as try to poison the weeds with a type of Malathion, booze or other medications. For some people, obviously, the weeds grow out of control, becoming woody, prickly brier patches, encircling and blocking out the light, obscuring the paths in and out of their gardens. Feeling stuck and ensnared in a dark and thorny mass feels like being in a type of prison. Whether the prison is imposed from the outside or self-imposed from the inside is irrelevant. In a community, people trapped in brier patches wouldn’t be tolerated; the community would remove the growth and insure its members had the education and the tools to tend their own gardens.

In our culture gardening tools take on many forms; literacy is one of the most useful of the tools in the garden shed. In spite of the tough on crime rhetoric that justifies more incarceration for more people, and dismisses rehabilitation as “unproven,” more punitive policies do not result in less crime. And in the last few decades, the sophistication of “meta-analyses” has shown recidivism is absolutely reduced among inmates who participate in “gardening” classes. Whereas previous single studies with small samples measuring a single variable (e.g., group counseling) were not able to achieve statistical significance, meta-analyses of hundreds of studies do reveal significant change. When the data from individual studies that measure the effects of group counseling, conflict resolution, problem solving, job interviewing, and many other skills are combined under the broader concept “rehabilitation,” the small individual samples become one massive sample, and what is identified as insignificant on a small scale becomes very significant on a massive scale. Meta-analyses of these data consistently demonstrate reductions in recidivism by approximately 15%. One variable that shows up unfailingly as related to reduced recidivism is literacy. And that is likely because basic literacy is an indispensable first step to developing every other type of skill that empowers an individual in this culture. The ability to read and write is the ability to dialogue with culture, through history, science, theology—to, in effect, be an interactive member of the community.

Other types of literacy are important as well, emotional literacy, media literacy, and what we can call “aesthetic literacy.” Aesthetic literacy is sometimes used in art theory to describe a certain facility to appreciate art. It tends to be limited, however, to “educating” people to go to museums or galleries and look at “fine art,” probably produced and curated by “experts.” But aesthetic literacy is not limited to the proper consumption of fine art, and it doesn’t require being an expert. We are taught to value only the perfect, photographic fidelity in painting, global popularity in music, Hollywood Blockbusters as the definition of “film.” And we are invited to believe that art that isn’t perfect isn’t worth producing. But true aesthetic literacy enables people to see art as a process and more than just a product. We all understand the benefit of exercise and athleticism in our lives, even though we can’t all be Olympic champions. Aesthetic literacy is something that can be taught, in community. And when developed as part of an aesthetic practice, it empowers and makes whole our participation in the aesthetic dimension of human culture. The aesthetic dimension is a place where we perceive our personal histories, our present situations, and visions of our futures in aesthetic, mythic, and archetypal ways.

Jimmy Santiago Baca knows first hand the power of aesthetic literacy. Imprisoned for selling drugs and being in the wrong place at the wrong time during the shooting of a law enforcement officer in the course of a drug bust, he was functionally illiterate and hostile to authority. After being denied the opportunity to study in prison for his high school diploma, he absolutely refused to cooperate with the prison’s requirements that he work. He ended up spending much of his sentence in a subterranean dungeon for the worst offenders. It was during his time in the hole that he first took on the task of teaching himself to read and write. At first he sent crudely worded letters to some people on the outside asking for their support and encouragement in his endeavor. Over time with the use of a dictionary and feedback from his pen pals, he pieced together a writing voice, eventually specializing in poetry. After he was released, he attended college, receiving first a BA and more recently a PhD in literature.

In his autobiographical book, A Place to Stand, Baca describes his entry into the aesthetic dimension through teaching himself to read and write in prison:

Language was opening me up in ways I couldn’t explain and I assumed it was part of the apprenticeship of a poet. I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft lightning of language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way. I had transmuted the barb-wire thorns’ hostile glint into linguistic light that illuminated a new me. In a very real way, words had broken through the walls and set me free.

And in an interview he described why he now volunteers teaching poetry to gangbangers and convicts:

They can't believe language can carry so much power, and once they get hold of that, they begin to unteach what they were taught about who they are. If they were taught to be racist or violent, language has this amazing ability to unteach all that, and make them question it. It gives them back their power toward regaining their humanity. The whole thing is this: If you don't use just basic grammar, if you don't get the language down, you're not going to have access to a tool that people use as a weapon against you. The only reason I was never taught to read and write was because it was easier for them to lead me. But the second I learned to read and write, I began to lead myself.