Written by Alia Dietsch and Keely
We are the Philosophy for Humans Learning Community, a group of people who gather for a few hours nearly every other week at the Southeastern Correctional Institute (SCI) near Lancaster, OH. Our community consists of people who are incarcerated at SCI and people who study and/or work at The Ohio State University, including undergraduate and graduate students, staff and faculty.
We open our meetings with an ice breaker and invite everyone to share how they're feeling. We then sit in a large circle to see each other, and openly discuss material (e.g., book chapter, podcast episode) reviewed before our meeting to help us prepare for our conversation. For example, we listened (pre-emptively) to an episode of Ear Hustle, a podcast highlighting the lives of people experiencing incarceration or post-release, and then collectively discussed fatherhood in prison and being a child of someone ‘behind’ literal and metaphorical walls. Our conversation fostered community understanding of the struggles with, hopes for, and triumphs of incarcerated parenthood by blending personal experiences with scholarly insights.
Recently, we have focused on the topic of prison abolition. Our readings draw upon the scholarship of Angela Davis, Mia Mingus, and others, and Critical Resistance's definition of prison industrial complex abolition. We have also explored different philosophies of justice, such as restorative justice, transformative justice, and healing justice. As a community, we are proactively working through the complicated applications and implications of abolitionist practices in our lives. Each meeting adds depth and nuance to our collective imaginations about a better world.
Part of our meetings are spent in one of three smaller working groups, each with a different focus: art and creative works, developing a podcast, and drafting a scholarly paper on abolitionist writings. As an illustration, the creative arts group sought to bring the ideas of abolition out of the dictionaries and essays we read into more tangible creative expressions – art to be passed around, anti-jokes to be shared with friends, a musical playlist to be heard. We have woven in themes of home, hope, humor, and heartache. Through our work, we remember the importance of imagination and creativity.
DeAnza Cook – an OPEEP-trained instructor and P4H member –notes: "Our Creative Arts, Oral History, and Abolitionist Writing Groups provide creative and collaborative outlets for P4H community members to build skills and learn together in exciting, new ways. We work together in our small groups to create a shared vision for our work, then we share out our ideas with the broader learning community to receive feedback from other folks outside of our small groups. It's been wonderful getting to know inside and outside P4Hmembers in a meaningful way and sharing our intellectual and artistic talents with one another."
After sharing about our small-group work with the larger community, that week’s facilitator typically offers a closing statement or question for us to consider, such as how our moods may had changed from the beginning of our meeting to the end. Beyond the meetings, members carry what they learned into other parts of their lives. Recently, Liz Weiss – an OPEEP-trained instructor and P4H member offering her first college-level course at SCI this semester – shared: "The success of the first day [of my class] was massively influenced by the things I have learned participating in the Learning Community." Annually, P4H invites OPEEP-trained instructors to visit or become a member of our learning community.
Though prison itself may never be a site of rest or calm, these meetings provide many of us with a valuable place to have difficult conversations and be heard, and to realize a future that is more just and humane for all.
