Carole Robinson - Organizing for Change

When Daughter Productions, the women's theater company that she had founded and directed, first performed before female prisoners, Carole Robinson was thrilled by the response. When she was asked in 1991 to coordinate a visiting artists program for the Pennsylvania Prison Society, she gladly accepted. Robinson turned her skills at organizing and fundraising to the task of building an arts and humanities program, and soon found Jackson versus Hendrick, which has funded the program since.

The results of this program have been deeply rewarding to Robinson. The true value of the arts and humanities program, she says, lies in "knowing one another in a new way"—not in the artifacts produced, but in the shifts it encourages in perception, for both the prisoners and the artists. "What we like about art," she says, "is that it comes from outside. Artists are at the heart of society, but we are not at the center. Artists have to be reminded about this."

Robinson's relationship with the Prison Society has not been easy. Where she and Jackson tend to work fast and let prisoners say what they like, the Prison Society moves slowly, pinches pennies, and is careful not to offend their mainstream, progressive supporters. In the end, it is these philosophical differences that have recently led Robinson to leave her position. "Artists," she says, "reflect society back to itself, and that can be uncomfortable when the artists are prisoners."

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