The power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or education.
-Michel Foucault
A Christmas story (Linda). When Karen invited me to accompany her to a Christmas performance of “Shakespeare Behind Bars” inside the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky, I thought it was an intriguing idea for professional development, but also a complicated one.
The Comedy of Errors performed by inmates at the Correctional Facility seemed an apt metaphor. Errare is Latin for wandering, and I was feeling trapped. Karen’s offer felt significant; I could escape from the chaos that is life at Christmastime in many institutions. We were in the midst of an ensnaring transit strike in the city; my mother was lying terminally ill in hospice care; my adult children were arriving home from California. There was no way for me to go. And escape seemed the clearest option.
Foucault’s prison. It was my first year teaching seventh grade at a New York City startup high-tech university lab school. Its curious and inhospitable use of space daily recalled Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault had informed my contrarian thinking disposition and my dedication to the teaching life, which he describes as a subversive activity that reclaims for the next generation what has been marginalized by the hierarchical elites of the previous one. Foucault’s parsing of social structures and systems of dominance and control struck a powerful note too.
The cell as backlit theater. Foucault devotes an entire chapter in Discipline and Punish to “Panopticism,” the concept of spatial partitioning, the European response to the deadly infections of the plague, wherein “the gaze is alert everywhere.” Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was an architectural design based on visibility and surveillance. As Foucault wrote: “All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy...They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
The pod. At times, the seventh-grade community functioned in a form of lockdown. This was a new, urban, high-tech, 1:1 laptop school, with a surveillance system, security guards, web cams, and windowless pods behind multiple barriers and doors, technology everywhere. Isolated in the classroom pod, three cell-like rooms opening onto a small central communal space, behind two sets of steel doors, the students wrestled as a group with issues of democracy: empathy, compassion, shared goals, individualism, and the collective. They questioned everything about school and institutional life: hall and bathroom passes; line-ups and transitions; no recess, no play, no snacks, no unscheduled time; no place to wander, get lost, or hide.
Exemplar 1. "Come, let's away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds I' th' cage." (King Lear 5.3.9)
Role playing (Karen). I, too, wanted an escape to prison. My father was battling terminal cancer. I was teaching kindergarten in a pod at the startup school and tending our two young daughters. Thoughts of Ibsen’s Nora sifted through my hurried consciousness. The ironic subtext of plans for a dollhouse for the girls on Christmas morning was underway. Literally and symbolically, I did not know how I would wrap it all up. My multiple responsibilities suggested I ought not to have been contemplating any absences. A road trip to Luther Luckett seemed an oasis of possibility.
The Panopticon. Although Bentham proposed his 1787 design for a prison, he suggested that it also could be useful in “houses of industry, work-houses, poor-houses, lazarettos, manufactories, hospitals, mad-houses, and schools.” His Panopticon Writings contain Enlightenment ideas about inspection that prefigure modern notions of dehumanization, commodification, and consumption.
Dress rehearsal: I maintain an active status in Actors’ Equity. Since I have become a wife and mother, I rarely perform. I teach and interpret a canon for childhood that includes Shakespeare alongside William Steig. I wonder: What does it mean to raise a literate generation of students in the 21st century? What compels students to listen? Screen time is on the rise, yet young children innately thirst for stories. I wanted to shift my attention from the doll corner in my classroom to Shakespeare Behind Bars. Curt Tofteland and I had met one year before in Rhode Island when we had addressed a group of college seniors in a theater seminar about the power of Shakespeare in Curt’s prison program and my kindergarten.
Prison protocol. Curt writes. Only bring car keys and photo ID. Surrender ID for a prison badge that is clearly visible at all times. Your person is subject to search at any time. No khaki.
Entr’acte. Damp night, winter in Kentucky. We park ourselves by a roadside motel just off Interstate 264. We are 45 minutes from the correctional facility in LaGrange, and approximately 10 hours from meeting up with Curt Tofteland -- at that time the artistic director of The Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, the director of the program Shakespeare Behind Bars, and subject of the eponymous Sundance Film Festival release. We are seated in the lounge. The lyrics of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” resonate. Dinner options are slim: mini-bags of potato chips and a bowl of mixed nuts. It is an unlikely but satisfying scenario: two city teachers out late on a school night, on the lam in a small town.
Setting. Luther Luckett Correctional Facility is plunked down in some flatlands in the middle of a modest suburban neighborhood. Evidence of Christmas abounds. Outdoor lawn decorations are larger than the houses. Grazing cows appear as an afterthought in this barren landscape, left behind from a more pastoral antebellum Kentucky. It is all grey, windless, bone-biting cold.
Evidence A. “It costs Kentucky taxpayers more than $19,000 per year to keep one inmate locked up. Compare that to how much tax money Kentucky spends on a student in elementary or secondary education- just over $9,200 a year- or on one full-time higher education student-- just under $7,000 a year. Kentucky is spending more to address the costs of failing to invest in education than it is on the students who represent the hopes for the future. Meanwhile, according to a 2010 PEW report, Kentucky has one of the fastest growing prison populations in the country.” (Pew, 2013)
Evidence B. Children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman is working to reverse the Cradle to Prison Pipeline. In a March 2011 news release, Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund stated: “Poverty, racial disparities and a culture of punishment rather than prevention and early intervention are funneling tens of thousands of children into the prison pipeline each year.” Edelman is quoted in the release: “A toxic cocktail of poverty, illiteracy, racial disparities, violence, massive incarceration and family breakdown is sentencing millions of children to dead end and hopeless lives, and threatens to undermine the past half century of racial and social progress.”
Forensic decoding. Shakespeare presents worlds in which violence and aggression erupt with predictable suddenness. There is the pervasive problem of murder. A slash in the order of things; cosmos threatened by chaos. Hamlet’s indecision and hyper-awareness notwithstanding, the tragedy ends in catastrophe and carnage. Macbeth’s grim realization and bloody end show death as the only solution. His incapacity to interpret language and signs is terrifyingly real to adolescents beset with online and real world temptation, misalliances, and faulty advice of all kinds. Shakespeare raises many of the unsettling ethical questions that students meet in school life skills courses, which focus on behavior modification and conflict resolution around issues of online presence, substance abuse, sexting, bullying.
The play’s the thing. The National Center for Education Statistics reports, “Bullying is now recognized as a widespread and often neglected problem in schools that has serious implications for victims of bullying and for those who perpetrate the bullying.” A New York Times article by Hilary Stout confirms what I already know: “The culture of play in the United States is vanishing… Too little playtime may seem to rank far down on the list of social issues, but researches of the play movement say that most of the social and intellectual skills for success in life and work are first developed through childhood play.”
(Swearer, S.M., Espelage, D.L., Vaillancourt, T., and Hymel, S., 2010)
Wildness. Thoreau wrote in Walking, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1851, it is an impassioned plea for the pleasures of sauntering, a type of walking meditation that affords reflection, inquiry, and creative thinking. "Wildness" is my metaphor for learning. For thinking outside the box. I know after a few decades spent within a classroom that real learning occurs in the liminal space between order and chaos. I spend much of my time in classes guiding students to take risks with their thinking and learning. To free themselves for what Stanford University’s Tina Seelig calls "daring thinking" because initially they are very busy trying to figure out what the teacher wants. I hope that by sauntering -- by investigating a complex literary text -- students come to recognize something of themselves. That they can imagine lives, moral dimensions, ideologies, cultures about which they would otherwise know nothing.
Lucky duck. We drive through the wire topped fences. Curt directs our attention to a little wooden house. A brown feather juts from a crude, burnished wood sign, the kind a boy might make in summer camp. Curt tells us this fragile structure was built to house a wild Muscovy duck that flew into the prison one day, and stayed the year. The inmates tamed Lucky. When their little sons and daughters came to visit, the duck was a welcome distraction. Weeks before our visit, the cows on the other side of the wire had trampled Lucky to death. Many inmates wept. His tombstone sits atop a small fresh mound of earth.
Surveillance. Curt adds. “Remember that inmates are students of your behavior. Security guards will escort you through four sets of steel doors into the visitors’ room where the performance will take place.”
Protagonist. Curt Tofteland looks like William Shakespeare crossed with a Viking. He has an affable, somewhat inscrutable air. The Bard emanates from every angle: the cock of a black beret, flowing strawberry blond hair held back with a rigid headband, gold hoop in an ear, bristle of cropped beard. An uncanny fusion. He says: “I am all Shakespeare, all the time.” His leitmotif. He means his work as actor, director, producer.
Crime scene. The dust-free, spotless common spaces inside Luckett Prison appear cleaner than the interiors of many schools, and the sixty-five or so programs it offers inmates must place it at the zenith of the pantheon of habilitation.
The Theatre as the School of Morals. Philip Pullman, author of the children’s trilogy His Dark Materials, argues for theatre over theocracy in a 2005 lecture: “I think I can say something about moral education, and I think it has something to do with the way we understand stories.” Laura Miller’s New Yorker profile showcases Pullman’s theory that “people...wisely sought ethical instruction from the theatre and in novels. ‘We can learn what’s good and what’s bad...from fiction...there is no need to consult scripture....’Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.’”
Vital Clue #1. Regardless of their learning style, my five and six year-old students eagerly anticipate Shakespeare Story Theatre. Young children relate to the poetic and fairy world conceit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Many first graders lean into Romeo and Juliet with a proclivity that belies their inexperience. They render their varied understandings in vivid drawings, episodic oral or dictated re-tellings, and improvisations. One is Titania Queen of the faeries, or the reckless Tybalt brandishing an imaginary sword, or a horse galloping free from the tyranny of sitting still.
Vital Clue #2. Older students quickly lose interest in following an archaic story. Twilight and Gossip Girl offer more compelling and simpler variants of predatory behaviors. The vampire. The wolf. The wizards.
Tofteland’s creed. “Prompted by Aristotle’s dictum, ‘Know thyself,’ and Hamlet’s question, ‘What is this quintessence of dust?,’ members of the Shakespeare Behind Bars Restorative Circle of Reconciliation are driven to discover a path that will lead them on a life journey towards what it means to be a human being. Using art, theatre, and the works of William Shakespeare within a circle of trust, they seek to live by four essential questions:
- Who am I?
- What do I love?
- How shall I live, knowing I will die?
- What is my gift to the family of man? What does it mean to be a human being . . .?
Vital Clue #3. I teach with an eye to patterns and universal motifs: what it means to be human in a lower school social studies context. Literary archetypes are made tangible when children are introduced to an intentionally sequenced and curated progression of characters: Anansi the trickster, Aesop’s fox, the wily wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, William Steig’s foxy Doctor DeSoto, and a mischief maker like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This mix becomes a textual Stone Soup. Each tale and character becomes an opportunity for children to think comparatively and dialogue about concrete and metaphoric possibilities in stories. In a process that shifts between storytelling and reading, and relies on language as well as visual literacy as imagined in their dynamic drawings, the children listen, re-tell, re-enact, and act in the sacred Story Theatre circle.
Incarceration, 9:00 AM. Curt creates a circle of fifteen chairs. We are in the interior, on the other side of the razor wire. We wait inside the chapel -- a simple and quite beautifully imagined space. The prison was built in 1975 to house 485 men. At the time of our visit, it held 1,100 men.
The inmates file past a guard booth. Curt introduces us casually as Karen and Linda, his friends from New York. The men wear their khaki uniforms. Curt explains no costume may ever obscure the khaki. The men are instantly aware of us. Bees to honey. Courtly. By the day’s end, in spite of strict regulations for no physical contact, they will pat us, take our hands until we have been touched sixty times over. The hunger for human contact is palpable. I worry the guards will throw us out. This prison scene is not unlike a Quaker meeting or any 12-step gathering. The effort of merely coming together is something to celebrate in and of itself.
Curt’s Circle of Reconciliation. We are seated in the inmates’ circle. Story Theatre on the classroom rug. Some reflection of each of the many hundreds of children I have taught in mainstream educational settings is present in the faces of these men. There is a sense of dignity, a thirst for learning, a commemoration and evocation of how the arts can deeply and meaningfully inform a life. Curt is a master teacher. These men know it, respect it. Here in Curt’s orbit they listen.
Warm-up: Curt invites his actors to slide in their prison garb from their hard chairs to the floor. He paces his company through a relaxation exercise. He is readying them for another performance.
Incarceration, 5:00 PM. The prisoners, freed in their new roles, express this release in hyper-active caricature. They over-act. We watch the families who watch their sons, lifers in an institution, none of whom has been granted parole. One had thrown a hair dryer into his pregnant wife’s bath, and electrocuted her. Another had stabbed a young friend in a gang fight. Tonight, they play another part. The performance space is the linoleum in the dining hall. There is no stage. Intense industrial fluorescent light shines starkly on this set. The audience is entirely visible to the actors. The guards watch us as we watch the play.
Surveillance. Afterwards, they will routinely strip and search inmates, to ensure nothing more than applause has slipped between the spectators and the “players.” This is their Christmas play. They are not outcasts or criminals. They are children performing for their parents in a humanizing holiday ritual, the transition back to the living.
Forensics. The first class of the school year. I ask students to become detectives. They work in small groups with handouts from a wonderful children's book Crime and Puzzlement by Lawrence Treat. There is great hilarity. I am the Inspector, and they are the Detectives. Together we will conduct crime scene investigations. They will collect information, discover vital clues, make inferences, develop a theory, and a sequence of events. A story.
A body lies on a bathroom floor. A shard of glass. A footprint. Drops of blood. Students examine the crime scene picture, look for forensic clues, develop a theory, and a logically sequenced possible order of events. There is debate about the perpetrator, the evidence, the prosecutors, and defendants. They wrestle with inconclusive evidence and seek a solution.
Yard. When Curt walks in the prison yard, he relies on and is grateful for the protection of his small troop of inmate actors. They surround him as he moves, beret cocked, towards his car. Other inmates shout insults, just as in Shakespeare. In the wings of the prison, the guards constantly tally up minor to major infractions that can combine to create an expulsion from working with SBB and with Curt. Today, one young inmate is weeping. He has violated a rule. Soon he will be transferred to a different prison. No more playing with Shakespeare.
Epiphany. Always in Shakespeare there is the recognition. Self-discovery and self-knowledge.
Recidivism. The recidivism rate of Luther Luckett’s Shakespeare Behind Bars program for those who have achieved parole is 6.5 percent, compared to a national average of approximately 67 percent. Curt says this statistic will likely not be sustainable. Curt characterizes his work as habilitation rather than rehabilitation. (Shakespeare Behind Bars, 2013)
Linda. I carried grief with me into the prison. My mother died shortly after the return home. I read about the bardo states in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She would leave the prison of her body, of her mind. She would be free.
Karen. The story that is this trip began in 2005. My father died in 2009. Sorrow, professional shift, the burdens and joys of the quotidian created an inevitable tension between our intention to write and our responsibilities to teach and to live.
Exile and return. For us, the visit to Luther Luckett was a nomadic stroll, a detour. We wandered briefly away from the comfortable rooms of our lives. In the microcosm that is the prison, the ground zero of being, inmates serve a different kind of time. For them, as in Shakespeare, there is often no homecoming, no return, except to the self. Curt Tofteland teaches new freedoms, those of thought and imagination, so that in timeless moments of art and performance, there is release, and the possibility of a renewed sense of self. “And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.” (The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.425-26)
All’s Well that Ends Well: “Keep thy friend Under thy own life's key.” (1.1.65-66) This was a professional and personal field trip like no other. I did not know Linda Vasu when I invited her to join me. I did not know Curt Tofteland. Now, we three are joined in a circle of amity, friendship, and ongoing conversation that continues to evolve. At first view, we make an unusual trinity: a first grade teacher, a high school literature teacher, a Shakespearean activist. But we are not an unlikely trio. We are all teachers on an unbounded journey that ventures past the walls of all the varying rooms that contain us. The metaphor of prison impels us to search for the nature of freedom and to seek wisdom and renewal through education anywhere in the world.
References
Jeremy Bentham and Miran Božovic, The Panopticon Writings (London: Verso, 1995).
David Bornstein, "The Power of the Playground." The New York Times, April 11, 2011, accessed March 26, 2013: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/the-power-of-the-playground/
Children's Defense Fund, "Marian Wright Edelman to Address City Year Boston at Cradle to Prison Pipeline @ Youth Summit," (press release), March 31, 2011. Accessed March 26, 2013: www.childrensdefense.org
Michel Foucault, "Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish, Panopticism." Foucault, Info. Accessed March 26, 2013: http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House, (New York: Dover Publications, 1992).
Kentucky Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Kentucky Chamber Letter, KACD Journal, November 2009, 1. Accessed March 26, 2013: http://www.kacdl.net/NOVEMBER_2009.html
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).
Laura Miller, "Far from Narnia: Philip Pullman's Secular Fantasy for Children," The New Yorker, December 26, 2005. Accessed March 26, 2013: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/26/051226fa_fact
The PEW Center on the States, Public Safety Performance Project, October 2010 . Accessed April 7, 2013: www.percenteronthesates.org
Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
Tina Lynn Seelig, InGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, (New York: HarperOne, 2012).
William Shakespeare and Phillipa Kelly, King Lear, (Rushcutters Bay, N.S.W.: Halstead, 2002).
William Shakespeare and Robert Dudley French, The Comedy of Errors, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923).
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer's Night Dream, (Clayton, DE: Prestwick House, 2005).
Shakespeare Behind Bars. Accessed April 7th, 2013: http://www.shakespearebehindbars.org /programs/kentucky/llcc/
Patrick Gaffney Sogyal and Andrew Harvey, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, (San Francisco: Harper, 1992).
Hilary Stout, "Effort to Restore Children's Play Gains Momentum." The New York Times, January 5, 2011. Accessed March 26, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/garden/06play.html
Swearer, S.M., Espelage, D.L., Vaillancourt, T., and Hymel, S. (2010). What Can Be Done About School Bullying? Linking Research to Educational Practice. Educational Researcher, 39 (1), 38–47. Accessed April 7, 2013. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/crimeindicators/crimeindicators 2011/ ind_ 11.asp
Henry David Thoreau and John Wawrzonek, Walking, (Berkeley, CA: Nature, 1993).
Lawrence Treat and Leslie Cabarga, Crime and Puzzlement: 24 Solve-them-yourself Picture Mysteries. (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1981).