The Path of Stories: Artists and The Thousand Kites Project

I left to go to college. I had come back for spring break and I was driving down the road with my mom. I saw what I thought was a strip mine in a place I couldn’t believe they were stripping. I said, “What’re they doing there?” and my mom said, “That’s not a mine, that’s a prison.” What!?! It was that moment of transition: In the space of that year, the Westmoreland Coal Company had closed its mines in the county I grew up in, losing something like 700 jobs overnight….

I was overwhelmed and appalled and terrified. I was raised in a real Appalachian consciousness by activists, aware of this as a place of resistance and a place that had been acted upon, and suddenly the prison turned that upside down. It made sense at a certain level, but it was really appalling. How can this place I completely love and am rooted in and it’s my home be torturing people? How did these underground coal miners go from being the bodies that were abused to the bodies that were abusing?”

Amelia Kirby, in conversation with the author

I always make the proposition that we are the storytelling animal and that language and story has been our selective advantage, and that’s why we’re still sitting here having espresso in the afternoon.

There have always been these contested narratives. If story is how we understand ourselves and understand the world, then there’s always going to be these contests of stories. If one just goes to a neutral mode and isn’t active in telling and trying to search for one’s own story individually and then in group, then somebody else will be there with a story and be there ready to tell your story within their story. It’s like a guy in Choteau, Montana — a dry land farmer — told me: “We got so much incoming. We want to send something out.”

Dudley Cocke, in conversation with the author

You can get these heated words that get each other going, and you’re not really hearing the stories where you actually understand what that means and why that person is so angry. That’s what this work can do, I think. It doesn’t even mean they’re not angry anymore, but it just opens something up, some possibility where there wasn’t much possibility before. When we become human beings to each other, then anything is possible.

A lot of bad things happen when we are dehumanized by others or we dehumanize others. One of the things we’ve learned from the work that we do is to work against that tendency in human nature. People think that the great evil in the world is always in these examples of horrible, horrible evil converging at one time, like the Holocaust and Pol Pot and the genocide against the Native Americans. They are so huge and overwhelming that it’s very easy to not understand that the possibilities reside in all of us. That’s what you need to be aware of, what you need to protect in your own self, because I’m just as capable of going down that road as anybody else. You can find yourself after the fact going “Oh my God. What’s happened here? What have I done?” It can happen in a heartbeat.

Donna Porterfield, in conversation with the author

Thousand Kites is a collaborative project aimed at engaging the widest possible public in dialogue about this nation’s burgeoning prison industrial complex. (A “kite” is prison slang for a letter or message; much of the material on which the project is based was offered in the form of letters from current and former prisoners.) At the project’s center are two groups of artists based at Appalshop, a multi-arts and education center in Eastern Kentucky coalmining country; one group is a theater company and the other a team of media producers. The next circle comprises other artists committed to using their gifts for social change, and beyond that, people affected by our criminal-justice system: inmates, guards, their families, those who live near prisons or supply them with goods and services, officials involved in the siting and management of prisons, and activists who hope to reform the American prison system.

A short trailer for the documentary film "Up The Ridge"

The Thousand Kites project comprises a call-in hip-hop radio show, “Holler to the Hood” (H2H), which has become a national communications nexus for prisoners and their loved ones, especially through an annual “Calls from Home” special that is distributed nationally; a documentary film, “Up The Ridge”; a play, “Thousand Kites,” based on stories collected from a wide range of people whose lives have been touched by the prison system; other initiatives that combine these, such as a radio program interweaving documentary and dramatic elements; and an interactive Web site providing a connection point and a toolbox for people who want to work on this issue.

As a writer, speaker and advisor to the community cultural development field, I have been acquainted with Dudley Cocke and Donna Porterfield for most of the 30 years they have invested in the work of Roadside Theater, a venerable community arts institution widely recognized as a leader in the field. Since 1975, Roadside has created (or collaborated with others to create) more than 55 plays, including a substantial body of work based on the history, culture and issues confronting people in their own Appalachian region, and a number of significant collaborations with other cultural communities such as the New Mexico-based Idiwanan An Chawe, the first Zuni language theater; Junebug Productions, a New Orleans-based African-American theater company; and Teatro Pregones from the Bronx, New York.

I met Amelia Kirby and Nick Szuberla, co-creators of Holler to the Hood and “Up The Ridge,” when Dudley invited me to take part in the Thousand Kites project by writing about a question that has long interested me: whether art can surface into public awareness an urgent social issue that has otherwise remained below the radar of general public discourse. I met Carlton and Maurice Turner, Raymond, Mississippi-based brothers and partners in a multifarious music-based community arts practice called M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction) and musical contributors to the project, when I attended a staged reading of “Thousand Kites” they had arranged in Jackson, Mississippi, in November 2006.

I admire each of these artists for their seriousness of purpose, their willingness to reflect on their own work and its place in the world, their dedication and good humor. When I started the project, I very much wanted the answer to my central question — does art carry a special power to awaken awareness? — to be “Yes!” I still do. But for now, whether the ultimate answer to be obtained through Thousand Kites is yes or no, it will have to wait until the project’s public presence is fully developed and response can be gauged. In this first of three planned essays, my aim is therefore preliminary: to explore the artists’ own beliefs and intentions as the project unfolds. What motivates these artists to call attention to injustice or declare an alliance with those most oppressed by it? What change do they believe is possible? How do such artists define efficacy? How do they sustain themselves? I am grateful to each of the participating artists for their generous willingness to join me in this exploration. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations are from individual interviews with project artists.

“That’s Not A Mine, That’s A Prison”

Most of us are comforted by the notion that we are in the driver’s seat of our lives, making well thought-out choices about our future. But if we are honest with ourselves, we see a very different quality in our paths — how, through a drive in the countryside with one’s mother or a nosy meander to the fax room, the future can reach out and hijack our attention, changing the course of our lives. Listen to Amelia tell the story of how she got involved in the prison issue.

I left to go to college. I had come back for spring break and I was driving down the road with my mom. I saw what I thought was a strip mine in a place I couldn’t believe they were stripping. I said, “What’re they doing there?” and my mom said, “That’s not a mine, that’s a prison.” What!?! It was that moment of transition: in the space of that year, the Westmoreland Coal Company had closed its mines in the county I grew up in, losing something like 700 jobs overnight. The miners went to work in the morning and there was a sign on the door, “Mine closed.”

Then the county and the state collaborated on the idea of using prisons to replace those jobs. I was at school when that happened, and I decided to write my senior thesis about that process, especially what was happening in Red Onion State Prison, one of the two that had opened. I used the radio station — WMMT — to solicit letters from inmates who were listening. I sent them research questions and they wrote me back. It was totally surreal being in Massachusetts and every day my mailbox would be full of these letters that were just devastating and completely threw me for a huge loop about what my community was and what was happening.

I was overwhelmed and appalled and terrified. I was raised in a real Appalachian consciousness by activists, aware of this as a place of resistance and a place that had been acted upon, and suddenly the prison turned that upside down. It made sense at a certain level, but it was really appalling. How can this place I completely love and am rooted in and it’s my home be torturing people? How did these underground coal miners go from being the bodies that were abused to the bodies that were abusing?”

About a year after that, I moved home and Nick was interested in pursuing the prison stuff as a film and I said, “Sign me up.”

Listen to Nick’s story:

Amelia as an undergrad wrote her thesis on Red Onion State Prison. So, she’d already laid that story down. I was working at Appalshop in the Community Media Initiative and we were doing constant community media stuff. At that point the radio show had already gotten letters from prisoners at Red Onion. I was just hanging out at Appalshop one day and a fax came — I snoop a lot, I’m a wanderer in the building. That fax was like, “VIP Opening at Wallens Ridge State Prison at 2 p.m. The Governor will be there for the opening of the prison.” I think they did a blast fax, they were so excited, to all the media outlets. I had heard that the Red Onion opening was kind of wild.

I grabbed a camera I’d never used before; I didn’t remember to grab any microphones. On the way I stopped and picked up a staff member’s kid, a high-school kid, to be my assistant. We got there and everyone is in suits and ties. Are they going to let us in? We got in, and then I just kind of shot the whole thing. I didn’t have a mike, so I just got really close, like three feet, so the footage was insane. They were making jokes like, “These are the same fences they have on the West Bank.” They were frying hamburgers. It was just bizarre. There was a lot of shoulder-rubbing. You look at that three hours of footage, you see that and you just have to think: This is a film. You have no excuse to not make a film. It was live action, it was power, just raw, and all of them thinking it was just a big, funny time. That was like the last moment of access. From there, it was just a total pain to get to the story.

If I had shot it like the media had shot it, you would have missed the essence of it. There was a moment when the head of the Department of Corrections — I didn’t know it was him then — walked through the door to do his special tour, and I just walked with them. They didn’t stop me at the door, so I got to do the tour. At one point in the footage, you hear them say to me, “Would you stop?” but no one wanted to confront me once I made it through, so I never stopped rolling.

If we hadn’t shot that, then the moment would have been lost. To me, that moment was very important. It was all the stuff that got me, it was all there, even the things that motivated me to come to Appalshop and be in this world. These guys were laughing about tasering people, and it’s just a big joke to them: These people are going to be incarcerated here and we’re making money on it. It was all there. I know that’s going to happen. I know there’s raw, pure power and economics. But it shouldn’t be just free-range: They should be running into some resistance somewhere.

Most of us in this country, wherever we live, are no more than one random moment away from the prison industrial complex. The United States has the largest prison population on the planet, and by far the highest rate of incarceration.

Bureau of Justice Statistics figures for 2005 indicate that there were nearly 2.2 million inmates in the nation’s prisons and jails, representing an increase of 2.7% (58,500) over the previous 12 months.

The new figures represent a record 33-year continuous rise in the number of inmates in the U.S. The current incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 residents places the United States first in the world in this regard. Russia had previously rivaled the U.S., but substantial prisoner amnesties in recent years have led to a decline of the prison population, resulting in a current rate of incarceration of 611 per 100,000. Rates of incarceration per 100,000 for other industrialized nations include Australia - 126, Canada - 107, England/Wales - 148, France - 85, and Japan - 62.[1]

The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also reported that by the end of 2005, “over 7 million people were under some form of correctional supervision”[2] including probation, prison, jail and parole. The vast majority are men between the ages of 18 and 64, a segment of the U.S. population the Census Bureau currently estimates at 94 million. Do the math, and you learn that approximately six percent of that population is under the supervision of the criminal-justice system. But that six percent is unevenly distributed: Considering just those in prison, more than eight percent of black men between the ages of 25 and 29 (approximately one in 13) are behind bars, as opposed to 2.6 percent of Latino men and 1.1 percent of white men. These figures tell a stark story. The artists connected with the Thousand Kites project know them well and repeat them with amazement and chagrin.

The sheer numbers have undeniable power but, in fact, the Thousand Kites project began to take shape in 1999 when the prison issue took on human form for Amelia Kirby and Nick Szuberla. Appalshop sits in an economically distressed rural region, which. like so many of its counterparts elsewhere in rural America, has been sold on the idea of building prisons as an economic-development scheme, a way to replace jobs lost in declining extractive industries such as coal-mining. This, too, is a pervasive national phenomenon. In early 2003, a well-documented study by The Sentencing Project reported that:

Since 1980, approximately 350 rural counties have sited prisons. From 1980 to 1991, 213 adult facilities were opened in rural areas, housing more than half of all prisoners residing in newly constructed institutions. This is in contrast to the 38 percent of inmates from older facilities located in nonmetro areas, which represent less than one-quarter of the total United States population. From 1992 to 1994, another 83 prisons were opened in nonmetro counties, constituting 60 percent of new prison construction.[3]

Today, the rural prison boom continues. But its impact extends far beyond the green hills and farmlands from which these new prisons sprout. As is true in Appalachia, the vast majority of inmates in rural prisons across the country are urban men of color from low-income families with limited economic horizons; and the vast majority of guards are their white counterparts, fresh out of the National Guard or forced into prison jobs by the closing of coal mines, steel mills or factories that might have employed them in years past. Behind prison walls, they enact a drama of domination and submission, of boredom and frustration on both sides of the bars, that makes our prisons the bleeding edge of racial conflict and the unofficial apartheid that follows from it.

Across the country, families face terrible new obstacles connecting with loved ones in prison. Often, inmates are transported from overcrowded prisons in populous states to the new “Supermax” rural panopticon prisons, built for maximum distance, maximum isolation and maximum ease of supervision by armed guards. Parents, children and partners who used to visit regularly are now often unable to afford the time and money to traverse the great distance between home and prison. Through lucrative deals with communications corporations, telephone calls to and from prison cost $2.50 or more per minute. (The Center for Constitutional Rights[4] estimates that in New York State alone, in a single year, FY 2002, the state collected $22.4 million in revenue from prisoner telephone calls; and this picture is repeated across the country.) The food inmates need to supplement a poor prison diet is similarly overpriced in canteens now seen as profit centers. Some prisons return huge sums each year to their host states (and increasingly, to private, for-profit operators), money made by importing prisoners and overcharging them for basic goods and services. In some places, inmates must purchase their own soap and toilet paper to supplement a monthly ration inadequate to the hygienic needs of even the most frugal.

More and more, rehabilitation is a thing of the past. In the Supermax facilities, inmates commonly spend 23 hours a day in their cells, with only an hour on the yard to breathe fresh air and stretch their legs. Guards and prisoners commonly report numbers of mentally ill and developmentally disabled men behind bars, some who are a danger to themselves and others, some who are easy prey for those who would exploit them.

In virtually all of my interviews with Thousand Kites artists (and the family and community members whose words will be part of my subsequent essays), people repeated the same point: when you incarcerate the child (the father, the brother), you incarcerate the family. Gazing at the big picture of this prison industrial complex, it is easy to wonder whether in some sense we are also incarcerating the community, and beyond that, the society.

Since Appalshop began in 1969, the filmmakers, theater artists, musicians, writers and other artists associated with the organization have made countless works about the region’s history and culture and the issues affecting people who live there. Appalshop artists and organizers have also devised programs to share their skills in cultural production and development, running media-training sessions for young people and working with community groups to tell their stories to the wider world. Projects have focused on traditional cultural practices such as basket- and furniture-making, on musical and storytelling traditions, on coal companies’ impact on the region and its people, on environmental devastation, the politics of representation, local elections, agriculture, spiritual traditions and much, much more. But until Nick and Amelia turned their attention to the impact of rural prisons, criminal justice had not been a focus.

It makes sense that Nick and Amelia would introduce a new issue into Appalshop’s universe. As part of the organization’s expanding second generation, they bring new eyes to the work. Amelia is the daughter of Rich Kirby, a musician, storyteller and audio producer who for a decade managed WMMT-FM, the community radio station based at Appalshop. Her mother, Beth Bingman, was named Appalshop’s managing director in July, 2007. So, the organization is in Amelia’s blood. Nick came to Appalshop from Ohio a decade ago, determined to find a niche at an organization he saw as embodying the integral relationship he desired between art and activism. Both Nick and Amelia are strongly connected to Appalshop as an institution (not merely as a vehicle for their own projects), contributing many volunteer hours to the group’s worker-managed governance system. To the extent that Appalshop’s essence has been to support and facilitate the interests of its individual artist-members — in contrast to a consensus-driven or top-down group that adopts a single agenda for everyone — the organization was the perfect vehicle for Thousand Kites, a project stimulated and animated by individual awakenings.

These generative moments Amelia and Nick described at the beginning of this section contain a key element that has animated the project ever since, a common belief affirmed by all the Thousand Kites artists: that people are moved to awareness and action when an issue becomes immediate and real to them, either through direct personal experience or the powerful presentation of stories about such experience. Amelia’s shock at the emergence of the prison into her community and Nick’s visceral reaction to officials’ jocular delight in welcoming the prison to their region were just such transformative experiences. A goal of the project has been to create these “galvanizing cultural moments,” in a felicitous phrase Amelia shared with me, for the widest possible public.

“A Building, Increasing, Gathering Wave of Dialogue”

What type of awareness and action is this work capable of galvanizing? When I asked the Thousand Kites artists what they wanted to accomplish, I halfway expected them to tick off specific changes they desired in the criminal-justice system. In a very general sense, they did: They wanted reform; they wanted the system to be more humane; they wanted the profit motive to drop out of the equation. But when I asked for their “wildest dreams,” without constraint, most of the things they said had more to do with sparking a deep public dialogue than promoting a particular policy position:

Carlton Turner: Before any new prisons are built, there would be a community review process, and people would be interested enough in our own communities to look at the whole ecosystem of prisons and what that does to communities. Decisions would be based on communities, not the financial aspects and what the state agencies want.

Donna Porterfield: An end result would be that there would be criminal-justice policy change, and that it wouldn’t just be in our area, but that we would somehow have helped all the other people and organizations who are working on these issues so that things would change in other parts of the country. For that to happen, the conversation about these issues would be deepened and broadened to include people who presently don’t think it even has anything to do with them, or don’t know about it, along with people who are already working with it.

Nick Szuberla: For me, the dream would be a fundamental shift in policy and the development of language that people in the U.S. could actually use — that language of human rights and art that would be informed by the power of story and art and culture. Just like there’s a language that’s emerging around environmentalism or around civil-rights movements — that people have a set of values, so we can look at crime and punishment and criminalization and have a language that’s progressive and unites people, that allows us to have space for problem-solving as opposed to punishment and racism, and that ties in with a broader notion of human rights.

Maurice Turner: Success would be making people think about the prison industrial complex a little differently. It’s about trying to educate people and extend a hand, as opposed to the way the system now sees those they don’t want in humanity and just puts them in prison.

Amelia Kirby: People impacted by the criminal-justice system at every facet would find common ground with each other, and there would be a building, increasing, gathering wave of dialogue and understanding across a pretty big divide. People would hear each other, talk to each other; and that could really shift how the country thinks about the criminal-justice system, shifting to something that’s more about community health, and not about retribution.

Dudley Cocke: We would actually see some major reform in the system, which is so wrong at the moment. And that reform, in my wildest dream, would spill out internationally so that it would cause some sort of ripple for other people seeking reform in the whole prison phenomenon around the world — to take some hope and some help from the project, so that it would have some sort of ripple effect. Even in my wildest dream, I feel the project can only be a part of a movement. If we can see a way that would cause reform in this country, then that would give hope to others in other parts of the world. I think that would be terrific, because it would be the opposite of our situation right now, where our system encourages perhaps some of the worst behavior in criminal justice in other parts of the world.

The Thousand Kites artists believe in the healing, enlightening, activating power of dialogue: heartfelt speech met by active, heartfelt listening. This is their deepest truth, the spine and foundation of all they do. It incorporates a touching faith in humanity, especially given the suffering and cynicism they encounter so often in their work. They believe people are capable of recognizing the consequences of their own acts and making different choices.

If we really listen to each other, the project artists are saying, we must see each other as fully human, making it much less likely that we will treat each other as objects, as merely useful or dispensable. As Donna Porterfield said in the epigram that begins this essay, “When we become human beings to each other, then anything is possible.” You could call this a political notion, and that would be true. But I think it is also accurate to say that this view is the project’s spiritual center, the underlying faith that animates everything.

“When We Hear Each Other’s Stories, We’re Not As Afraid”

Where did that faith come from? The Thousand Kites artists have a depth of experience in communities that has proven to their satisfaction the curative, catalytic power of stories, whether expressed in words or music. Many of their tales turn on “story circles,” in which participants, sitting in a circle, share stories in a framework of absolute equality, without contradiction and with total attention to the speaker. Others describe meaningful encounters lubricated by cultural expression.

Here’s how Maurice sees it:

People have been craving something real. There’s always been music in every movement; it’s never missing. There’s always been story circles, sitting around the fire. People talked with the tribe before you led them into war. One of the only real ways to understand a person is to hear their stories. This is more in the forefront now, a more civil approach as opposed to just reacting to problems. When we hear each other’s stories, we’re not as afraid.

Listen to this story from Donna about a situation few would see as conducive to empathy:

With “Junebug Jack” [a collaboration with Junebug Productions, an African American company in New Orleans] we did the tour of the Deep South. We were in small communities. We had black and white people of different ages sitting in the story circles. I’ll just give you one example of a white person who was talking about having grown up with a black nanny, and the confusion of that; and how she was so attached to this woman who knew her from when she was a baby, and then the woman was just gone.

In that same circle were adults who would have been children of someone like that nanny, who told their story about what it was like to have a mother who left every morning and sometimes had to stay the night — only maybe had Sunday afternoon or one day a week off. You could see both sides have some empathy for each other, which is really hard to do if you’re the kid that got left and you’re really angry about that. Both of them saw that what they thought had happened really hadn’t. The white person thought something like that went on, but hadn’t really faced it. And the other people had thought, “They had my mother giving them all the things I should have had, and they’re now perfect and I’m damaged.” They saw that maybe the others had it better than they had it, but it wasn’t all that great, because in the end they were more connected to their mothers, whereas these white people’s mothers had abandoned them in a different way.

Or this series of highlights from screenings and discussions of “Up The Ridge,” provided by Nick:

Amelia and I did the Virginia tour. We went out and we interacted with a thousand people, face to face, in 11 different communities. One ah-ha moment was where a former prisoner confronted a corrections officer in the audience, doing it eloquently. He essentially said, “You’re saying something, but my story says that’s a lie.” But then afterwards, they sat at a table and they ate a barbecue sandwich together. In Richmond, it was in an African-American church, a huge organizing event for the local group. One of the best moments was where a white guy stood up and said, “Look, I was incarcerated for 15 years, and let me say this: Segregation ended, but it’s still here. We’ve been taught here in Virginia not to be together, whites and blacks.” In Roanoke, it was a gathering of eight people, but they were all the ministers of eight different African-American churches and the head of the Virginia NAACP, and they were right there with us. They said, “When you’re ready to do the statewide video distribution, we’re on board.”

Or this story from Maurice about the way that music opened a space for two very different people to meet in a way that helped to heal the past:

The first time we were in Putney [Vermont] was two years ago. We did a musical show and concert as an introduction to the community. One audience member, he looked like someone from a logger camp, a big guy in a plaid jacket and cap. He came up after the show, crying, walking straight to me. We had closed with a song called “Greatness”: “Don’t settle for no less than greatness and you’ll be blessed.” He grew up with a father who was a Klan Wizard, a father who disapproved of his life. He went to Vietnam, and he was around black guys there. He was very close with one guy; the way he put it was that this guy had his back. He looked me right in the eye, and this is what he said: “That song brought me back to the day my father almost disowned me. I realized if I don’t treat people with greatness in my heart, it keeps both of us back.”

I work with a lot of kids. I can see the spark in their eyes like I did in this guy’s eyes. Pulling the wool from someone’s eyes. That’s what I live for.

The humanizing effect of first-person stories affects the Thousand Kites artists themselves, of course. As the primary author of the “Thousand Kites” play script, Donna conducted many interviews, including confidential sessions with men who had worked as prison guards, some still on the job. What emerged was a complex human tale, with no easy answers. Listen to a bit of her account:

The guards were afraid they were going to lose their jobs talking to me; and here, a job is really important because there aren’t that many. They can’t just go get another state job that has benefits and insurance for their family, and I understood that perfectly well.

The people who think that all the guards are horrible — I would really hope they get an insight to what that life is like. It’s really a power dynamic they need to understand. It reminds me a lot of the late ‘60s and the antiwar movement. I was really against the Vietnam War at the same time as my brother was in the Tet offensive as a Marine, as a machine-gunner. It used to really infuriate me when people would think they knew who all those soldiers were. It’s the same way with this, I think: There are guards who are really awful people and do terrible things; and there are guards who are trying to make the best of a bad situation, just like every occupation, in every other place.

It reminds me a lot of war, in a way. When you get into a situation where you are locking a person up and giving absolute power over that person to another person, then it’s pretty predictable the range of things that can happen if you take into consideration human nature and what we know about that. It’s just so predictable, so, what are you going to do about that? Particularly now that we have those super-maximum prisons, where they just say flat out, as one guard said to me, “We’re not about rehabilitation, we’re about warehousing; and that’s a whole set of problems when you’ve put the prisoners in this very stressful situation for them, and then that puts us in a very stressful situation.” He said the situation is real hot — particularly intense because they have so many who are, he believes, mentally ill, or are what they used to call mentally retarded. They’re preyed upon, they’re put up to things, they’re like just chattel. He said they have them in an indescribable situation. It’s just more complex than people think: good people/bad people.

When I asked Dudley what he wanted to come out of people’s interaction with the project, what he hoped people would think when they stood up from the conversation to which Thousand Kites is inviting them, he said this:

“I didn’t realize how much this had to do with me and I didn’t realize how it’s something on my community’s mind, on my neighbors’ minds, and how much they know about it and how well they can express it,” and so forth. I would want them to stand up and say, “Yeah, I’m connected to this story, and I care some about this story, and I’ve got to think about this story.” It’s horrible to say, but because the incarceration rate is so high in this country, we’re not seven or nine degrees of separation; we’ve a single degree of separation from the story. It’s just a matter of realizing that degree or two of separation, because it’s there for almost any of us. We can push it away, but if we want to think about it, anyone could say, “Okay, where do I know somebody, somehow, as part of this criminal-justice system?” That may mean I know somebody in prison or jail or who’s working as a probation officer — who’s working as a guard, who’s a legislator who’s dealing with the laws that have to do with this, or who’s working at a particular corporation that’s selling stuff to these prisons, or who is the contractor who built it, and who are the laborers who worked on it.

In the end, all the artists expressed their commitment to staying open to the dialogue wherever it takes you. Listen to the way that Carlton states this value:

One thing we bring to the table is flexibility; a real ability to change as needed, depending on the population. We feel comfortable with any crowd, no matter what the ethnic makeup, age-range or social class. That’s different from activist organizations, because they usually work with the people they advocate for. But we can work with anyone.

“Keeping the Integrity”

Every one of the Thousand Kites artists sees dialogue as therapeutic, to be sure, but not merely so. The entire project is grounded in what Dudley calls its “theory of change”:

The underlying assumption is getting people to connect. There’s an assumption built in there which has to do with the integrity, which is saying that those with the problem have to remain the generative base for the solution; and that really goes to keeping the integrity, to keeping it grounded, to keeping it authentic.

This is one of the ways the artists’ roles differ markedly from the conventional relationship of an expert or skilled practitioner working with members of a community pressed by social conditions. There is remarkable clarity within the team about the fact that while the participating artists have certain gifts and abilities that add great value to the work, their task is to help those most affected by the issue to generate their own responses to it.

With a massive population of African-American men behind bars, the Turner brothers see themselves as part of that base, and that is one of their reasons for joining the team. Here’s how Carlton tells it:

We saw they could use hip-hop and spoken word to give voices to whatever was coming out of the prisons. We scheduled some time at Appalshop and hung out for four or five days. We watched the documentary. It all resonated with us. We volunteered Jackson as one of the sites for the staged readings. We just realized we had a lot in common. We could foresee a long-term relationship with Appalshop. From the perspective of being young black men — being from the group most affected by the prison industrial complex — we saw we could bring the message to communities they may not reach.

And Maurice explains:

I’m part of the demographic that lands in prisons. It’s just an extension of slavery. The power structure leads to that: prison, the military, killing on the streets — it’s all of a piece. It’s hard for those not deemed valuable to have to settle for crumbs of the system. We need to educate people to another way of living, where they’re not always fighting, where we make our own bread instead of fighting over crumbs. It’s a kind of spiritual independence.

Other Thousand Kites artists recount the freedom and satisfaction they derive from working with people in a way that releases control and encourages initiative. Here’s how Nick characterizes the relationship, describing his experience with the Holler to the Hood radio show:

Look at what happens when you do these moments where every week, people are getting on the air; and it’s this real space to tell stories in this kind of non-propaganda way, where people are just talking about their loved ones; and within that, the community people are innovating in the space that we’re providing, looking for change.

They do letter-writing campaigns; one person calls and does a prayer every week; or they say, “Hey, I got a message that this prisoner is being abused, and I want to take this moment today and say that I’m aware of this, I know this is happening.” I think in the same way, the play and the video will play in the community. How are people going to innovate with these tools, how are they going to unfold it? I’ve always, in all of my work, trusted the folks who came to us — who were drawn to the work and who were interested in engaging with us — just trusted them to figure out more of the content, the intellectual side of it, the actual use, the way it played. We’re providing public space and cultural moments, things that cut across audiences and expose their issue to a broader audience than they normally see. We’re always pleasantly surprised, even by past projects that still have legs in the culture, that people are still writing about or still utilizing.

An early experience with “Up The Ridge” provides Nick with one example; an eager participant with another:

As we talk to the November Coalition, they’re moving ahead of us. They’ve already got the film and they’re duplicating it and they’ve created their own discussion guide; so I told them they’re the Beta test. When you talk to them, they’re real grassroots folks: They’re the former incarcerated and their loved ones, and they’re just going with it. You feel the excitement. This is really working: We’re having great dialogues with people we weren’t really connected with. And they say, “Hey, we’ll shop your film to the Documentary Channel for you.” They’re ready to roll with it, and it’s real. It gets you to have a framework — to keep the actual grassroots activity in front. Really, the way you’ll move beyond being just another art project, into the organizing, is to have that kind of shared, “Hey, let’s just do this, and not be worried about control.

I go back to this woman from Michigan the first year we did the national Calls from Home project. She kept emailing me, “What can I do to help?” She got the radio show on like five stations in Michigan, and she didn’t stop. We sent her a six-minute sample of the radio show to do a house party with, and she still said, “What can I do?” I realized she was looking for something wholly interactive; and that is where it comes to storytelling, and she is one of those who will organize the play. She’ll probably rewrite it with a group of people. Others say, “We did a film screening; we want to do something else.” We can say, “We’ve got a play.” The level of complexity in the play, it’s accessible but still complex, you could do it in a day, you could also take two months. We can use these tools to step up to what people are asking for.

Dudley tells it in a slightly different way, at first focusing on the “Thousand Kites” play, then “Up The Ridge”:

It’s very important, the idea of exploration — that people feel free to debate and contest and come from many different places. That’s a very important part of what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to encourage not just a story of prisoners, but the stories of how it affects guards and the families of guards, how it affects the community who have no one in the family working there or incarcerated there. We’re just trying to get as much of the story as possible, and to make it together. How it changes the art-making process is that, rather than proprietorship about the script, we give the script away; and the script is open to endless participation, iteration, rewriting, whatever. At the same time, we have a toolkit available to help communities to enact it.

Likewise, the film: Originally in an hour version, there’s no problem in creating a 20-minute version if that is what is useful to this organizing. So, there’s no ownership of the art in any particular format, except as it can be a means towards this other goal of communication, which relies on participation.

It calls for a kind of partnership which goes beyond the common isolation of the arts to partner with others. For example, with the “Thousand Kites” script, we heard from prison-reform people in the Southwest that they could really benefit from a Spanish-language version. So, in our model, we say, “Okay how can we work together to get you that?” Whereas in another model you might say, “Well, we’ve got this play, and I wonder if there’s a Spanish-speaking audience for it; we’ll translate it into Spanish and try to market it.” It’s a more organic relationship of trying to work with your partners in a continuous way and identify needs.

This sense of deference and collaborative spirit also extend to groups that work on prison issues through the lenses of legislation and lobbying. All of the artists described themselves as standing at arm’s length from the nuts and bolts of the policy arena, as a conscious choice not to limit the project, and in some ways, a personal survival strategy.

Here’s how Nick describes it:

I’d worked on the cusp of the juvenile system for two years before I came to Appalshop, with kids who were wards of the state, who were constantly in and out of the system. I kind of stay distant from the actual thinking about the issue too much. I kind of operate from a broader approach. I’ve read books and I’ve studied it; and if I had to, I could probably talk pretty eloquently about the U.S. criminal-justice system and incarceration rates and sentencing and rural economic development, prison siting and so on. But I’m not actively trying to make that part of my approach. I’ve found it fatiguing. The grassroots folks that we interact with are really deep into the actual issue and the nuances. My approach to doing community media, community artwork has been to focus more on the process or the structure — these engagements and moments and exploration — and to really listen to the story and to think about the deeper complexities. I knew going in it was a complex issue, and now I really know it’s a complex issue. But I’m not trying to be an expert on criminal justice.

“Crack The Nut in a Really Big Way”

Many of Thousand Kites’ current and potential partners come to the task with a very different vocabulary and toolbox: litigation, legislation, lobbying, plus more traditional activist tools such as the leaflet, the demonstration, the picket line. Implicit in the project’s work is a feeling that this type of change has to be made in a more organic way, as part of the fabric of people’s lives rather than something that takes place in the narrow space our society has marked off for political discourse and action.

Here’s how Dudley put it:

Why don’t we just give up on this arts business and go work with hard-core organizers around prison reform, or form a political PAC, or any number of other tacks on this issue? We understand the power of culture just in the same way the conservative right seems to now; and we understand the power of art as a concentrated expression of culture, and we have understood this through a period of three decades plus. We have developed certain methodologies and ways of using that power; we actually have tested and found some ways to use that power towards justice. That’s why we don’t give up on it, because we know that it has the power and it can be used in that way.

Also, like around here, say people were always eating their soup beans, and they’d be saying, “Does it have any meat in it? Could it just have a little bit of meat for flavor?” In the grand scheme of things, we’re saying art is that little bit of meat that can season and can do something, and we don’t want to give it up.

Donna recounted how Roadside has repeatedly seen grassroots community members respond to and demand cultural projects, even when more conventionally oriented organizers, committed to other approaches, fail to perceive their deep value. She starts out speaking about the 2004 Tamejavi Festival in Fresno, California, a starburst of diverse performance and participation. Here’s a bit of the description from Roadside’s Web site:

This October’s Tamejavi Festival was a bountiful harvest of the fruits of the year’s Tamejavi workshops, trainings and round-robin community exchanges. There was classical Khmer dance, Eritrean hip-hop, the miraculous appearance of Elvis (who now speaks Hmong fluently), the indigenous Danza de los Diablitos — these imps come in all shapes and sizes, many sporting cow horns and wool chaps. There were world theatrical premieres including “Cambodia the Beautiful” and “Diary of an Endless Journey, Towards a New Dawn,” which wove together Hmong refugee and Mixtec immigrant stories with a cast of 40 actors and dancers.

The documentary-film screenings included expressions of youth empowerment and the struggle of the P’urhepechas of Michoacan, Mexico, to preserve and perpetuate their language. In one of the galleries, there was a photography exhibit, “Beyond Borders/Transnational Communities,” documenting migrant families who exist simultaneously in the U.S./Mexico and the U.S./Guatemala. The platicas covered subjects from the often uneasy relationship between California’s ethnic and mainstream media to the recent arrival of the last Vietnam War era political refugees from Wat Tham Krabok camp, Thailand.[5]

Donna tells it:

After the first year that they did the Tamejavi festival, the organizers said “That went over well, it was really great.” But they weren’t really thinking of repeating that. It’s a lot of work. But the community insisted that it happen again because a different sort of connection was made — a connection to cultural tradition. That’s what we see over and over in 30 years of this work we’ve been doing, that’s what I’ve learned. It’s important to me, because I didn’t have my own culture validated. It put a huge chip on my shoulder after I was an adult. There would be groups of people I didn’t trust or like so much. Then after I felt my culture had been affirmed or I could tell my story, I’m open, and I don’t even see those people in the same way again. So it’s my personal experience, and I’ve seen it happen to different degrees with other people. I know some people are able to rise above all that, but it’s hard to listen if you feel like you haven’t had your chance to tell or it hasn’t been respected if you had. A lot of people feel like they haven’t had that opportunity.

Thousand Kites artists reported what so many community cultural development practitioners have experienced through their work: that in the arena of culture, when creative expression is the focus, a situation of equality and receptivity can be created that is not possible in more polarizing arenas — the standard meeting, the public hearing, the legislature or court of law. Nick has an apt way of describing this:

What happens with art projects is that sometimes they can crack the nut in a really big way. Art can just crack open a dialogue that’s there, but isn’t being amplified. Sometimes it gives you a moment to reflect and look at your community in a different way, and develop that critical language about what’s happening in your community. Sometimes the artistic process is the way that people become activated in unearthing the issue. There’s lots of people all over the country who are dealing with issues, but they’re not connected. Good community arts projects, good cultural dialogue, begins to bridge people together, kind of like the civil-rights music and dance wings of those movements did, or Gran Fury for gay, lesbian, transgender, queer folks in the ‘80s did. A strong center of artistic support bridges those gaps.

“Realizing Its Multiplicity”

The artists’ keen desire to reach and touch people also expresses itself in an unstinting willingness to cross every artistic boundary, deploying multiple creative technologies, art forms, styles and textures to offer the largest possible number of entry- and connecting-points. In doing this, they are conscious of discovering a new path others may also be inspired to walk, as Amelia explained:

Using theater and media in the ways that we’re using them together, and with the idea of accessibility being at the core of both of those pieces, I want that to become more common — a more standard kind of approach, something that people turn to and say “Yeah, I could do that.” I know theater and media go together in lot of ways now, but I mean in community work.

Also, we used media as a different way to access voices in the earlier part of the project; less on the performance side and more on the creation side. The story-circle process — a one-on-one with people in the same room together — is incredibly powerful. But with Holler to the Hood, there were people who couldn’t be in the room together, people in prison. We had tools through radio to build trust and build storytelling with each other without having to be in the same space.

From the beginning, we were led by people’s needs. Once we started the radio show, we began getting tons and tons of letters both to explain what was going on and to ask, “Who are you people?” and “Where are we?” and “What are you doing playing hip-hop?” From there, doing the film was a long process, and we were feeling this urgency to do stuff that was consumable or receivable right now — stuff with the families and the prisoners that was really connecting. So, the radio was the process through which a lot of that work happened. The holiday call-in show was our initial big experiment, and that was such a tremendous success that it evolved into a lot of other call-in work and then the weekly show that has the same content. Now there are stations all over the country — 100, 150 and maybe more than that — that broadcast the holiday show. There’s growing interest every year.

Nick sees the use of multiple art forms and delivery systems as reflecting a reality that is sometimes overlooked: that people receive and use information in many different ways, that their thoughts and feelings are stimulated in many different ways. As Nick and the other project artists listen to the people who’ve interacted with Thousand Kites’ many elements, they see that it’s impossible for one size to fit all; that instead, every available medium needs to be deployed:

You come to the Web site and you can share your story or listen to someone else’s story. You can download the video right now, video on demand; there’s three cuts you can burn to your DVD. There’s a PDF on how to do a community dialogue; and then after you do it, would you like to do this play? Also, there’s this radio program you can download and take to your community radio station; and here’s some tips on how to get it played on the radio and facilitate a dialogue after that. And if people want to share their stories, here’s a way to plug it into this Web site. There’ll be different thresholds of activity, clearly described and accessible. You’ll be able to sign up for an email, to be part of a database. The real moments of interaction and joy aren’t happening on the Web site; they’re happening in your community, and maybe you’re sharing them back on the Web site. You’re sharing with the community of people over a period of years who’ve done this experience. You can find out: Hey, this group started a human-rights group on their college campus after doing this. They’re not doing the play anymore, but this is what came out of it. Or this group used it to organize around sentencing issues of youth offenders in Mississippi.

What we’re learning is that radio, video, none of those — and video is my absolute love — are completely accessible. So, I think theater — because you can do this with a napkin and a pencil, and you can’t stop it: We can mail the script to prisoners; and if it turns out there are parts that are objectionable, we can mail them a five-page prison cut of the script. Spoken-word kids can do it. We don’t need video projection, we don’t need screens.

The use of diverse approaches and media mirrors the artistic team’s understanding of the process itself as efficacious, rather merely the means to create a final product. The more art forms entailed, the more possible juxtapositions and interactions of different creative modes, the more entry-points for participants, the more opportunities for multitudes to be engaged and take action.

Dudley explains how he sees this value as essential to Thousand Kites’ model:

In the model that we’re used to — the piece of art, whether it’s a play or a film or whatever — it’s made in some way that the moment of its usefulness is its premiere, and then its performance or its exhibition. What we’re much more working on is that the transformation can happen at any point, if the creative process itself is as open as possible to participation, because it’s through participation that transformation can occur. Even if you take the idea of catharsis occurring when you’re in the theater space, catharsis is about participation; it just seems so delayed. Why not have that possibility as an ongoing possibility, particularly given the seriousness of a problem like this? We’re not going into the lab and tinkering and bringing out this experiment and saying, “There it is, and did you experience catharsis from it?” It isn’t about that, but about being available for taking whatever the work is at any stage and changing it — realizing its multiplicity and not getting hung up on it as one thing.

What became clear as we did the radio piece, and we were documenting those first three staged readings, was that the play had two acts, and the second act was the conversation of the audience and the testimony of the audience. As part of that second act, we reserve the last 20 minutes very intentionally for a call for action or next steps, to ask, “What can we do?” If you look at the play script now, it has an act one and two, and act two is this conversation in the audience. Some of that idea came from actually doing the recording: it became so clear that that had to be the script. It wasn’t like we saw some other script done that way and we copied it; the idea came out of doing it.

“My Family Extends Outward”

There is no single source of inspiration, no single formative experience that propelled this diverse group of artists along their shared path. When I asked for influences, among others, Amelia mentioned her parents and the French postmodern philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard; Nick spoke of reading Malcolm X as a teenager and meeting Helen Lewis, a revered popular educator in the region; Carlton listed his own family and many musicians, from Nina Simone to Prince. Dudley evoked his longstanding passion for history, recalling a galvanizing moment when civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was killed, as well as his long conversations with folklorist Alan Lomax and with Myles Horton of the nearby Highlander Folk Center. Maurice cited his reaction to the undermining images generated by the mass-media machine; and Donna described her father’s love of live performance, her exposure to the ‘60s civil-rights movement and her brother’s experiences during the war in Vietnam.

Three elements thread through the formation of these artists’ intentions: a personal comfort with and attraction to creative expression, leading to deepening involvement in the arts; intense experiences that connected their awareness of injustice with their own lives; and following that, an immediate, almost instinctive understanding that their insights connected them with a larger community and by extension, with the billions with whom they share the planet.

“Only connect!” wrote E.M. Forster in “Howard’s End.” As I listened to recordings of my interviews with these artists, Forster’s words kept springing into my awareness. I saw how the remedy the Thousand Kites artists have prescribed to shatter our indifference to the impact of the prison industrial complex is the same one — make the connection! —they have imbibed all their lives, the tonic that set them in motion. Listen to Amelia:

My degree is in no way connected to art. I didn’t see that as a plan. But to me, it’s automatic: My father’s a musician, so cultural movements as social activism, they weren’t separated out. If I was going to do one, I’d do the other.

In 1989, I was 11. There was a United Mine Workers strike against the Pittston Coal Company. At the center was the town I grew up in, St. Paul, Virginia. It was an absolutely phenomenal experience. The strike lasted around a year. When you’re a kid you’re probably not getting half the amazingness. I probably took it for granted: “Okay, I’m going to go hang out on the picket line.” But those rallies every Saturday — music was the totally critical part of that. That deeply rooted in me that culture is sustenance for resistance. Those rallies were what kept people going, and my dad was real involved in the music side of it — whole huge groups of people singing together, old miners singing “We Shall Overcome.” Whether or not I realized it at the time, it instilled in the me the knowledge that you have to have the passion of what art and culture gives you, that spark to get through the hard work of social change.

Listen to Carlton:

I didn’t get into this till my junior year of college. I began to write in response to inequality I saw in college. It made me look at my future a little more realistically. I started coming into more of what it means to be black in the South. So, I got into music and poetry, and the bulk of my work was about social issues. Maurice and I thought we could have a good effect on the mainstream with positive music, that we could make our way into the mainstream through music. When we first started to do this work, our intention was to bring messages of good cheer and hope, the world to come. We wanted to tell people that we can change things, it doesn’t have to be this way. But we were disillusioned by our experience with commercial music. Everything began pointing toward expanding our artistic family beyond Mississippi. Meeting people at Alternate ROOTS in New Orleans expanded our idea of what we could do in a multitude of different mediums.

My number one inspiration is my family. I want my two young children to look at my work and see no compromise, to use that as an example of what I want them to be able to take away. My father and mother were from a very value-based family system: They were big on church, they took in foster kids to live at the house on a regular basis. My family extends outward to all those people my life touches, and all the people they touch. There’s a global community, and that’s extremely important to remember.

“A Structure in Which to Figure Out How Not to Be Paralyzed”

One thing I appreciate about the Thousand Kites team is their commitment to competence and forthright communication. I’ve worked with a great many arts organizations and projects, and have seen very few where the individual team members acknowledge and respect each other’s areas of capability to the point of trusting others to get on with their jobs and to ask for help when they need it. Here’s how I would say it: They don’t get in their own way.

This is fortunate, because a project like this faces so many external obstacles that internal ones would probably torpedo it in no time flat. Some of these are implicit in the earlier sections of this essay.

One of the biggest impediments is that the forces that established and nurture the prison industrial complex have generated a powerfully hegemonic, self-justifying story: Our news, entertainments and political rhetoric tell us countless times each day that public safety is threatened by vast numbers of deeply aberrant, evil individuals committing incomprehensible acts of great cruelty and violence. Many people are comforted by the idea that these terrifying hordes are safely behind bars — so comforted (and so reluctant to arouse their anxiety) that they have very little interest in hearing about the policies, conditions and circumstances, the personal and cultural impact, of our system of punishment.

Here’s how Dudley analyzes it:

The dominant story organizes itself spontaneously. You don’t have to go sit for endless hours in a think-tank or whatever to create that story. Once it gets a kind of momentum going, it’ll organize itself spontaneously. To compose a counter-narrative, you’re already in the frame of the master narrative, and you’ve got to take all this time to kind of extract yourself from it and then do the work on the counter-story. In some ways, that’s what we’re trying to do with Thousand Kites. That’s why communication is so much at the center of it. We’re trying to put another story out, a story made with a very broad base by many of us.

It’s like what we sometimes do with our theater when we’re creating a play. If you begin the play-creation process with a community discussion about the concept, you’ve gathered your audience as you’ve gone along. By allowing participation, you get people who are invested in the story, who feel that they have some ownership of it, that it’s part of their own story. So, we’re trying to create that broad base of ownership and exploration of this counter-narrative.

Breaking through the dominant story will not be a simple task. Indeed, when I interviewed the shell-shocked parents of Virginia inmates who’d received long sentences in that no-parole state for minor offenses — such as the possession of two or three tablets of OxyContin without a prescription — I took care to ask them what would have awakened them to the prison reality of their state if their children had never been involved with the system. Here is a typical (and typically honest) response: “I don’t know. I can’t tell you. You know what they say: if you don’t have a dog in the race, you just don’t know what it’s like.”

It is not easy for anyone — not for the inmates, guards, family members, activists, officials, victims of crime nor for the artists working with this project — to face the terrible suffering, stubborn frustrations and intricate complexities of the prison system every day. Immersing one’s own life in these realities can take a toll, as Amelia explains:

There’s a phrase Nick uses sometimes, this idea of “national sacrifice zones.” This region was a sacrifice for energy — nationally, we wrote it off — and now for prisons. There was a moment yesterday: I was in a session in the Appalshop theater with several Appalachian Media Institute students. I showed the half-hour version of “Up The Ridge,” and Natasha Watts showed a film she made about the Scotia Mine Disaster. I had a feeling I always have when I’m watching powerful media about Appalachia: incredible rage and despair. I was so overwhelmed seeing the two back-to-back. I said, “I about guarantee that there’s somebody who lost a father at Scotia who works at Wallens Ridge,” and Natasha said, “Oh, yeah, I know him.” I don’t know what to do with that. I’m so overwhelmed by what that could possibly mean, it’s almost a paralyzing kind of despair; and then you have to go on. One of the many graces of Appalshop is that it gives you a structure in which to figure out how not to be paralyzed.

Financing is a barrier. Appalshop artists are veteran fundraisers, and they have been fortunate in getting key people to contribute services at a reduced rate and securing support from The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Ford Foundation’s Artography/LINC program, the Multi-Arts Production Fund, Creative Capital and others. But there are few funders active in the arena of art and social justice, and most of them give a small number of limited-term grants, year after year receiving far more worthy requests than can be supported with the funds allocated to this work. Obtaining the resources needed to execute the project takes a great deal of time away from making it happen, with the result that team members work many more hours than a full-time job would normally encompass.

Dudley shared his thoughts about possible responses to this situation:

I’m thinking about alternative support systems because, as you know, if we’re relying on private funders for this work, as we predominantly are right now, that’s a limited economy. The best economy you can get to is an economy where the people who have most to benefit, who care the most about the issue, are also supplying the resources for it, rather than a patron. That’s why we like public money over private. But since public money isn’t there right now, we’re looking for ways for people to donate, or to underwrite a new phase, or say, translating the film into Spanish and then getting it marketed there.

In the meantime, overwork and under-compensation are endemic to the community cultural development field, as to other types of activism. Over the years, I have conducted extensive research on the field and its prospects. Some organizations have been coping with a sobering reality: that younger artists who would otherwise be strongly attracted to this work have been reluctant to start down a career path that ends in low wages, long hours and poor working conditions. All of the members of this team are grateful for both generations’ willingness to collaborate. The younger Thousand Kites artists are well aware of the hazards and determined to set a good example for their elders. Here’s how Nick sees it:

A lot of what I learned from looking at people in progressive movements, I saw a lot of burnout, alcoholism and depression, so then I was like: “If you want to do this, you’ve got to figure out a way to do it that’s healthy for you.” I’m enjoying it. The main cautionary thing is pacing: Are you doing too much, can you keep this up, or are you burning yourself out? I exercise and try to get enough sleep. I haven’t taken a vacation in quite a while. Amelia is a good advocate on trying to figure out a healthier work environment.

“It Can All Be Fixed”

For the Thousand Kites team, the issues raised by the project are both timeless and urgent, personal and global. Maurice and Dudley belong to two different generations, but they meet in a place of desire and hope. I’ll let Dudley, the eldest, go first:

It would just be wonderful if sometime before it’s too late to register it in my mind — at 91 years old or whatever — that if I could see the arts rejoined to issues of society, and that the arts would be working with other entities that are working towards justice. It could bring another little light of hope to the future.

And then Maurice: “It can all be fixed if people wake up and look at it. I just want to see some change before I leave this earth.”

These artists haven’t sat down together to craft a manifesto summing up the beliefs and principles driving their work. Yet there is notable unanimity. If they put it on paper, it would read something like this:

• People are moved to awareness and action when an issue becomes immediate and real to them, either through direct personal experience or the powerful presentation of stories about such experience.
• Heartfelt speech met by active, heartfelt listening is healing, enlightening and activating, the dialogic source of social change.
• Stories are curative and catalytic: When we hear each other’s stories, we’re not as afraid.
• Those facing a problem have to remain the generative base for the solution.
• Art can crack open a dialogue that’s inherent in a situation, but isn’t being amplified. It can create a moment of equality and mutuality that makes understanding possible.
• People have different ways of receiving information and connecting to stories. Multiple, interacting art forms and ways of distributing them are needed to engage all who need to connect.
• There are many paths into a life of art and social justice, and no single right way to develop one’s skills and sensibilities. What they all have in common is creativity, connection between awareness of injustice and one’s own life, and by extension, with all life.
• “Only connect!”

“I Want To Be Honest With You”

My own role in this story is as participant-observer, which pretty much sums up my life. I don’t have much use for the normative distinctions and compartments — the “silos,” as people call them now — that draw dividing-lines between our experience and the authority with which we are entitled to comment on it. Rather than be asked to swallow a writer’s always questionable claim to utter objectivity, I would prefer to know that person’s interest in and connection to the subject, to help me interpret what appears on the page. So, here’s mine.

Apart from a strong interest in art’s impact on life, I am one of those disinterested parties Thousand Kites aims to address. As I write, no one close to me is in prison; no one close to me is currently a corrections officer, prosecutor, defense attorney, prison guard, probation officer or victim of violent crime. I’ve come to know some artists who’ve worked in prisons over the years and read a stack of prison memoirs, studies and polemics. But my direct connections are as follows:

My family story turns on the wish to avoid prison or worse. (I can’t confirm it any longer, because everyone with firsthand knowledge is dead, but I heard it told many times in almost identical words). My maternal grandparents fled Russia not long before the revolution, when my grandfather received a notice to report for service in the Czar’s army, tantamount to a death sentence for Jews. My grandmother always told the story in a rush, to fit the timing of the actual events: They gathered a few rubles, a few belongings, then she stayed up all night talking with the sisters she would never see again. She and my grandfather left before sunrise, stealing across the border, then making the journey to New York in steerage. If Grandpa’s choice hadn’t been death in the army or prison for evading service, would I be a Russian? I expect I would be dead, like everyone they left behind. I expect my prospective parents’ lives would have ended behind barbed wire and under guard, in a concentration camp or labor camp, since, the best of my knowledge, none of my Russian relations was left alive.

Here in America, my family had its shady side: compulsive gamblers, bad checks to cover debts, fancy footwork to cover bad checks. I never seriously considered that my relatives might wind up in jail; but more than one has been arrested, most recently for drugs and spousal abuse, without being sentenced to prison. As a child, I absorbed an instinctive dislike of the police, expressed by avoiding them whenever possible and making any unavoidable encounter brief. When it came time each year to learn in school that “the policeman is your friend,” I thought about other things until the lesson ended.

My family’s social marginality had an effect on me, of course: I am virtuous to a fault. How do I know? Life keeps putting me to the test, even in the smallest ways. For instance, last year, having ordered several items online, I called to complain that one was missing from the box. My aggrieved sincerity was entirely convincing to the customer service representative who obligingly deducted the price of the missing item from my bill. An hour later, discarding the packing material, I found my purchase had merely fallen to the floor. I told myself I could laugh at having gotten something for free, that it was a lucky mistake. I told myself this as I washed the dishes, as I got ready for bed, as I lay in the dark trying to close my eyes. When I called back to say I’d found the item, that it should be restored to my bill, the customer service representative reacted as if I’d proven there really was a Santa Claus. “Thank you so much for calling,” she said, her girlish voice rising with each word, “That was just so great of you — really, I mean it! Just thank you!” I gathered that calls like mine didn’t happen very often.

I’m a “‘60s person,” infused with my generation’s interest in the politics of justice and peace. I married for the first time right out of high school, learning about the Selective Service System by helping my young husband file for classification as a conscientious objector. This authorized him to perform alternative service rather than join the military. That led to my first job in the peace movement, three or four years as a draft counselor, assisting draft-age men in obtaining deferments or C.O. status. Most of my clients were ordinarily thoughtful young men who wanted some way — any feasible way — out of the terrible choice between killing Vietnamese or being killed themselves. But I also developed a small sideline in giving haircuts to military deserters on the run, some of whom wound up in the brig; and I met quite a few overt draft resisters, highly principled young men who protested the legitimacy of the war and the draft by refusing even to register. They thought their trials would bring down the system, and in a sense, they did: By 1973, with the federal government unable to fill quotas for induction at most of the major military centers and swamped with protests, lawsuits and prosecutions, Congress ended the draft. But the price for those individuals was prison — voluntary, one might say, but prison nonetheless.

In the early ’70s, I worked with a young woman whose brother was in San Quentin for his part in an armed robbery. When he was released, she asked me to have lunch with him. He seemed shy and sweet, overwhelmed and distracted by the busy bustle of the restaurant, regarding everything with the wide eyes of a visitor from another planet. He insisted on paying. As he walked out, I told him I’d forgotten something at the table. I returned to give the waitress the tip he hadn’t thought to leave, performing the custom his incarceration had driven from memory.

For over four years, I’ve lived in Richmond, California, a town on San Francisco Bay that had its heyday during World War II, when people from all over the country emigrated here for jobs in the Kaiser shipyards, building the Liberty Ships. There’s a Rosie the Riveter memorial a short walk from my house and a wide strip of native plants along the bayside pathway installed by the developer who remediated this land for homes to replace the old shipyards. When Richmond makes the news these days, it is almost always for drive-by shootings and other gang-related murders, giving this town its claim to fame as the murder capital of the Bay Area. In 2005, Richmond went to bat in a big way for former gang member Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a San Quentin inmate who’d renounced his old ways, dedicating himself to inspiring young people to eschew gangs. I spoke with local people who organized in Tookie’s support, but I never marched myself. The San Quentin vigils, letter-writing campaigns and lobbying efforts supported by Tookie’s admirers in Richmond and large numbers of death-penalty opponents around the country failed to persuade Governor Schwarzenegger to commute his sentence, and Williams was executed on December 13, 2005.

The people behind Thousand Kites say over and over again that they put their hope in the stories told in their film and play, through their radio show and Web site, that these first-voice narratives will make the issue real and immediate for the rest of us. Their hope is that through these stories, we will realize the prison industrial complex touches so many lives, no more than one or two degrees of separation stands between any of us and that world.

When I read and listen to stories of prison life, my heart sinks with the effort of imagining an existence so constrained, so separate from all the things that seem to make life worth living, so subject to other’s whims. If society chooses incarceration as its response to criminal activity, then I believe some people belong in prison, but that prison must be a place of reflection, healing, education, rehabilitation, restitution and not the living hell we have made it. I am not sorry when I read about serial killers behind bars, or white-collar criminals whose ill-gotten gains robbed thousands of their pensions. But when I see the pain in the eyes of parents of young men imprisoned for decades on minor drug offenses, as I have lately, or listen to loved ones tell me how their husbands or brothers have been transferred from prison to prison, subjected to isolation and other cruel punishments on top of their incarceration, my heart fills with the bitter cocktail of compassion and outrage they must drink every single day. I can’t see how the unbearable pain that now consumes their lives serves any valid social purpose. Even imagining myself shouldering that pain every day takes an effort I can’t always muster.

So, yes: these stories reached me. By now, whole sections of the “Thousand Kites” script reside somewhere in my head, reverberating with each new scrap of information about prisons and communities I encounter. Images from “Up The Ridge” come easily to mind when I close my eyes and remember. But I want to be honest with you. It isn’t my horror at barbaric prison conditions nor the unfairness of the criminal-justice system nor my compassion for prisoners’ families nor the faces of victims of crime and victims of the system that drive my deep interest in this project. It is my fear for the soul of this country.

I can’t be certain what will ultimately happen to our humanity and our belief in redemption if we continue our self-transformation into a prison nation: If we go on locking up larger and larger numbers of our citizens for longer and longer sentences, with multiplying effects on their families and communities; if we use an ever-growing portion of our commonwealth to build and maintain punishment complexes; if we embrace the way of thinking that looks on prisons as a viable economic-development strategy for economically depressed communities. I can’t say for sure what will become of us. But on the evidence so far, I see that it has made us less kind and more angry, that it has diminished our sense of human possibility and distanced us from truly encountering the consequences of our national policies.

I don’t think we can make meting out punishment this large a part of our culture without becoming a nation of punishers. And I don’t think we can become a nation of punishers without blowback that will ultimately be felt by everyone, even those who now stop up their ears and turn their eyes away. My friend Judith Tannenbaum, a wonderful writer about the arts and prison, has written, “What I see when I walk into our schools these days looks like this: Some of our children are being prepared to assume power and others are being prepared for prison.”[6] When this is what we sow, I am fearful of what we will reap.

When you think about what you’ve read in the rest of this essay, I ask you to keep that in mind. I’m worried about you and about myself, about the children who will never see the inside of a jail and those who will live there. The complacency or arrogance that says what we do to others will not touch us: Can you really believe in it any longer? I can’t.

Coda: How Does Power Mesh With That?

As I wrote the body of this essay, a question nagged at me. The Thousand Kites project engages artists in raising key questions about prison. The ideas that animate the project are intensely meaningful and alive to those artists, who want to help stimulate a conversation that can affect the future of the criminal-justice system. But how would those ideas sound to veteran artists who work in prisons? I decided to ask two of them to read what I had written, then share their comments about the project and its implications. I chose Judith Tannenbaum, who taught poetry in San Quentin, an experience richly detailed in her memoir “Disguised As A Poem,”[7] and who is now training coordinator for the San Francisco-based WritersCorps; and Grady Hillman,[8] an Austin, Texas-based poet who began working in the Texas prison system 26 years ago and now consults on and designs arts-in-corrections programs throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Judging from our conversations, this much is true: The more direct experience an artist has with the prison system, the more he or she is likely to feel the weight of obstacles to change. Both Grady and Judith spoke at length of the many ways the prison industry has hardened in the years since they first encountered it, and how adept it has become at self-replicating. Before responding to questions from me about how they think the system might at last be changed, both sighed long and hard.

They didn’t doubt Thousand Kites’ underlying principles. Both felt strongly that the Thousand Kites’ artists’ belief in the power of stories and dialogue was warranted. Both had seen it for themselves. Judith told me:

Making room for everybody — inviting a wide range of voices and experiences and points of view — is a great way to encourage deep conversation about any shared community or social issue. Of all the worlds I’ve walked into, prison is the one that’s most constructed to be Us and Them. In my years at Quentin, I made a commitment — partly unconscious — to look bigger, to look for the whole. When I wrote “Disguised,” hunger for the whole was a driving intention. So, I really respect and appreciate the Thousand Kites project. On the deepest level, there’s no power greater than actually listening to each other.

Grady also understood the power of dialogue through his own experience, for example:

We were working in Ulster, in Northern Ireland, and did these deep listening exercises where you close your eyes and you listen to somebody tell a story. It was wonderful, really transformational: Empathy and communication is really the way to go. … I really do think it is empathy, it is meeting somebody and understanding who they are and how they are so that you can overcome whatever fear you have of the stereotype. We have to overcome the stereotype and say these are really people.

But both cautioned against believing that such human connections would magically aggregate into change without a larger, more strategic framework. Judith explained:

As an individual person working inside, I seemed to be most effective when I didn’t let myself get too pulled by either side’s narrative. I needed to keep my mind open and to be available to the actual people I was working with. This required recognizing that there was so much I didn’t understand, and accepting — if not embracing — all the paradoxical particulars of sharing poetry in prison. Those years offered the most important experience of spiritual practice I’ve ever had. But since then — for many reasons, including both the macro force of changes in California prisons and the micro fact of becoming friends with former students — I’ve become a lot more partisan.

My bottom-line feeling is that change takes all of us. I’m glad some people are fighting pointed and strategic political battles, and I’m also glad there are people who look at prison more broadly.

With Thousand Kites, is the point to allow conversation among a range of people who have been negatively affected by this huge prison force? Is the point to allow people who might think themselves on opposite poles — prisoners and guards, for example — to see what they have in common? There’s a line in Tracy Huling’s movie (“Yes in My Back Yard”). I don’t remember exactly, but one of the guards, in this very rural white town that embraced prisons as the area’s traditional economy changed, remarked that everybody coming to prison was from the city and was black. He said he realized that in order for his son to be able to stay at home and have a job, somebody else’s son had to be sent to prison. He made that connection. I am jump-up-and-down grateful for whatever allows us to make such connections.

You write, “If we really listen to each other, the project artists are saying, we must see each other as fully human.…” I believe that so much. And I believe in the positive consequence of seeing each other as human. At the same time, how does power mesh with that? Because some people do seem to benefit from prison. Politicians who use the fear of crime to get elected, for example. Does Thousand Kites include in the conversation people — like politicians, like CEOs getting rich off of products targeted to people in prison — who actually are benefiting from the growth of the prison industrial complex?

Certainly real connection, deeper understanding and forceful community action can be built by listening to each other’s stories. But when one “side” has all the power, then I’m less sure. Something changes, but I’m not sure power in the world changes. Real listening is the opposite of strategic, which is one of its beauties. But probably addressing the forces of power requires strategy.

Grady saw the prison industry’s expansion as part of a larger failure of democracy, and thought the issue had to be framed that way to bring about systemic change:

People in the corrections field talk about a pendulum, where it swings from being punitive to more treatment-oriented. What I hear is that it is starting to swing back simply because the expense of incarcerating all these people is so enormous that it’s making cuts in higher education. The bonded indebtedness of the states is just ferocious. There are much, much cheaper ways of handling addiction and other social issues than incarceration. It is the most expensive solution.

The economic argument right now will have some sway because the Bush Administration has been just so incompetent, and there’ve just been so many scandals of cronyism. The economic argument of corrections lobbyists getting really cozy with legislators and getting these big construction contracts and supervision contracts to run facilities privately — I think that could be something that resonates more with the American people now in the wake of Katrina and Iraq and everything else that's going on. There’s a general suspicion about corruption in the federal government. It’s almost like you could talk about the whole prison system being a sterling example of government corruption.

Meanwhile, you’ve got a lot of organizations and groups who’ve been doing prison work for quite a while, who really are maturing. The organizations are maturing and the relationships are maturing with the system and legislators. If you could bring everybody under the same tent, and you had evaluation proving how arts programs could reduce recidivism and you show how a lot of people go to prison who shouldn’t be in prison, who are there just because of substance-abuse problems — if you really work the economic arguments and show the alternatives, then maybe something could happen.

I came away from these encounters feeling that Judith’s and Grady’s experiences as artists in prisons had in a sense made them experts on prison reform, because they had such clear and deep views of what could work. For example, Grady described an action-research project he had directed as a kind of model of a workable juvenile-justice system:

I managed this federal initiative for the Arts Endowment and the Justice Department called Arts Programs for Juvenile Offenders in Detention and Corrections. It was an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Program thing, and we had three practice sites and three pilot sites. We found what you needed in the arts was a prevention-intervention-aftercare type program. When I started, I might have thought from the media that people go to prison out of a sort of hubris or driven ego, saying, “I am above the law.” But it was the exact opposite: It was, “I can't compete, it doesn’t matter what happens to me.” Most of the people that I saw in prison in the early days — not now — but back in ’81, there was just this fatalism about them, which had started at an early age.

So, my own approach was to use the transformational power of the arts to give people expressive tools where they can work with their own issues and emotions. In the juvenile-justice system, it was developing prevention and then intervention within correctional facilities and then community-based arts for kids when they came out. So, that’s what we began to try to build. We found that in the juvenile-justice system, probation doesn’t talk to the schools or the detention center or correctional facility and they don’t talk to parole and nobody talks to community. Each time a kid moves from one venue to another, it’s a totally new set of rules, a totally new philosophy, totally new group of people. So, there is no “system.” We tried to use a lot of the same artists in these different venues, tried to create a sort of familiarity with kids. In our planning phases we brought these people together. Actually, what we were doing was creating a model of a coherent criminal-justice system. That was one thing that the arts had been able to do through our own networks and our own arts community and our connections with universities, community colleges and nonprofits in the community.

Grady and Judith both observed that the scale of the prison industry had generated an unprecedented level of attention — studies, novels, films, organizations — that might shine light on what has been hidden from public oversight. Judith said:

As the world of prison grows, the lives of more people on the outside are touched. And it seems more and more of us in that situation want to share our experiences — as prisoners’ wives, as advocates for children of prisoners, as teachers or artists who have worked inside. Making the point, let’s be honest, that we artist prison activists also gain something from the fact that people are locked up. It’s good that the outside world — citizens — hears about what our tax dollars are funding. Here in California, choices have been made for over 20 or 30 years that are having profound financial consequences. Although I always hoped that issues of fairness, humanity, and justice would mobilize voters on prison issues, probably change only has a chance now that prisons take such a huge enough chunk of our state budget.

I totally believe that it’s important to do good work, even though we don’t know what the exact consequences are going to be. So, maybe questions about the effect of programs like Thousand Kites — questions that seem to me ultimately unanswerable — aren’t the central questions. There’s a beautiful movie — “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana” —about a meditation program in India’s largest prison. One watches in that movie a profound change — in prisoners, in guards, in administrators, in structures. And yet my understanding is that now, many years and administrators later, that program no longer exists. And I know in the world of prison arts, great programs have happened and then — in only a few years — they’ve disappeared from institutional memory.

There’s no question that deep human sharing can lead to change between individuals at a particular time and in a particular place. And when people who appear to be adversaries see how we’re really connected, that has to be good. Whether those specific changes and that deep wisdom actually affect the gross forces of power, I don’t know.

Neither do I, but I’m eager to find out. Years ago, I remember being approached by a couple of newly hatched organizers who wanted to form a coalition with a fairly contentious group of artists. Everyone who knew the players and their intertwined histories told the newcomers it couldn’t be done, but they went ahead anyway, and to our surprise, achieved what we’d seen as impossible. Sometimes people who don’t know how discouraged they should be can accomplish remarkable things. The Thousand Kites artists have given every indication that they see their work in coalition with a wide range of activists and groups who can bring the perspective expressed by Grady and Judith, that “it takes all of us.”

“Maybe,” as Grady put it, “something could happen.”

Arlene Goldbard is a writer and consultant based in Richmond, California, whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her most recent book, “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development,” was published by New Village Press in November 2006. Visit her Web site to read her blog and download talks and writings.

[1] “New Incarceration Figures: Thirty-Three Consecutive Years Of Growth,” The Sentencing Project, December 2006, p. 1.

[2] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/corr2.htm

[3] Ryan S. King, Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling, “Big Prisons, Small Towns:
Prison Economics in Rural America,” The Sentencing Project, 2003, pp. 3-4.

[4] http://www.telephonejustice.org/about/fact_sheet.asp

[5] http://www.roadside.org/tamejavi.05.html

[6] Judith Tannebaum, “Power or Prison,” In Motion Magazine, 2007

[7] Judith Tannebaum, Disguised As A Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin, Northeastern University Press, 2000.

[8] See, for example, Steven Durland, “Maintaining Humanity: An Interview with Grady Hillman about Arts-in-Correction.”

Original CAN/API publication: May 2008