Exhausted, overworked, cloudy, on edge, happy, sleepy, blessed, overwhelmed, stressed, optimistic— these were just some of the words we used to describe how we felt as we gathered on a Monday in early November as part of the Philosophy for Humans (P4H) Learning Community at Southeastern Correctional Institute.
Our day’s facilitator, an incarcerated member leading for the first time, also invited us to state two words we would put on a job application to describe ourselves: team player, energized and focused, hopeful and hard worker, qualified and capable, idea person, honest and confident, creative and communicative, dedicated and committed, searching desperately, problem-solver, and much more. Our facilitator chose charismatic and ambitious and then embodied those ideas for the rest of our time together. He had us play a game and unveiled a referee shirt to demonstrate he meant business while also having fun, the rest of us breaking into smiles as we joked around and earnestly engaged.
That blend of charisma and ambition set the tone for the rest of our session, carrying us into a thoughtful discussion of Reiko Hillyer’s book, A Wall is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States. The book describes the role of gubernatorial clemency, furlough, and conjugal visits in allowing incarcerated people to remain linked to ‘outside’ communities. We specifically discussed Chapter 3, which explores the decline of gubernatorial clemency during the era often referred to as the New Jim Crow, a time marked by increasingly punitive policies and racialized mass incarceration. The decline in clemency resulted in ‘hardened’ walls, and those incarcerated lost a major incentive to demonstrate their positive attributes like the ones we spoke of earlier. We discussed the power of hope and recounted the myriad ways in which those who were incarcerated advocated for their freedoms with available mechanisms, such as media, laws, and education. The last 30 minutes of our time together were dedicated to our working groups and related mechanisms of sharing our collective learnings through art, personal narrative, and academic writing.
In closing our time together, we stated how we were feeling now. After several affirming sentiments were shared, we laughed at the idea that prison could be our reprieve. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “reprieve” as delaying a punishment or giving relief for some time, a temporary respite (as from pain or trouble). Given how we began—each carrying our own burdens—and how we ended—united in hope and reflection—the community we’ve built offers a true reprieve from the reality of hardened walls.