The Prison Project

“Woman” is the Word is a research project that was borne out of my pedagogical conviction: education and writing one’s life story are the most accessible means to self-development, empowerment, and healing.  In the fall of 1998, I first began working with women prisoners in Illinois, recognizing that the population of women inmates was severely overlooked and underrepresented in our country.  There, I witnessed firsthand the dramatic changes in my maximum-security students as they read other women’s autobiographies and, in turn, began to write their own life stories.  What I learned is that these women had such powerful stories to tell about our culture and about the sociopolitical positions of women:  most of them had been incarcerated for retaliating against domestic violence.  Sentenced to prison long before there were laws (albeit only a few) set up to protect battered women, these individuals had essentially fallen through the cracks of the system--and they are not alone.  This is a pandemic in America, as more and more women are being incarcerated in unprecedented numbers and statistics. And, it is my conviction that their stories are our stories. My own research on the literary genre of Women’s Autobiography--a growing and quite popular sector of literary studies—has since led me to volunteer and work with the women in New Jersey’s maximum-security prisons and into what scholar Kathryn Watterson has metaphorically dubbed “the Concrete Womb.”

Each semester, I invite two college students to work with me on this project (so, for all of you TCNJ students who are reading this, please let me know if you are interested in this sort of project). The students get independent study credit for this project, and together, we co-design and co-teach this memoir-writing workshop to the women. The class lasts ten weeks; we go in once a week for a 2-hour session, and we generally have 15 women who participate (although the waiting list is usually very long—after the first time we offered this,  for example, there were 180 women on the waiting list). The original name of the program, “Woman” is the Word, was created by the very first student who ever worked with me, Christine Peluso. She chose this title to reflect her assertion that “woman” be placed in the center of our study and to connote the power of the written and spoken “word” as women reclaim their voices and stories.

This program is intended to touch the lives of incarcerated women through the power of the written word.  Based on my academic research thus far, I strongly believe that education is surely the means to rehabilitation and self-development, empowerment and healing; the act of writing one’s story is perhaps the most educational and healing experience of all.  My research project is aimed at giving birth to so many more stories--silenced thus far, but waiting to be born from within “the Concrete Womb.”

For more information on the prison program, you can go to my newly designed website (created in spring 2008) which is intended to help people who are interested in offering a similar writing workshop to any and all prisoners. For that reason, I decided not to name it exclusively for women—ie,  “Woman” is the Word—but rather have given the workshop a new title: inkARCERATED.   http://inkarcerated.intrasun.tcnj.edu/