Theatre in an Italian Prison

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I've been interested for years in the Italian prison theatre company featured this week in The New York Times.  Since 1988, Compagnia della Fortezza, the company named after the Medici-era fortress that houses the Volterra jail where the men are imprisoned, has performed a variety of Italian spectacles and tragedies. From Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization to Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio Does Not Want to Die, director Amando Punzo has dedicated himself to art behind bars.

This photo is one of many in the photo essay by Clara Vannuci, an Italian photographer who has documented in amazing pictures the essence of Punzo's vision.

For 21 years, working five hours a day, six days a week, Punzo has embarked on a challenging repertoire for the company, including per the NYTimes in an article they wrote in 2009,  "plays based on works by Brecht, Peter Handke, and even the tale of Pinocchio."  He says that it is not therapy that drives him but creating good theatre.

I too felt that way during the eight plays I directed behind bars. The idea was not to go after building self-esteem –although that happened — but to go after revealing the truth of the play and getting the women to be the best they could be at portraying their roles. Punzo says “It’s not about giving the inmates an outlet or a recreational break. It’s work.”  The side effect of theatre programs behind bars are self-respect, community building and a love for the stage.

The Italians love art so much, the rumor goes, that the prisons would rather risk an arrest than not show their performances to other Italians. Many shows tour and many prisoners work outside during the day. And believe it or not over half the 205 prisons in Italy have acting companies. Compagnia della Fortezza has won some of Italy’s most prestigious theatre awards and houses a gourmet restaurant where prisoners work and serve food to the public.

A 2009 show — Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization  (photo below)— was loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s masterwork, but the text wove in soliloquies from other authors, in this case Shakespeare (predominantly Hamlet) but also Genet, Pinter, Chekhov and Heiner Müller.

While Punzo, who has an acting background, creates a new play every July, his dream is to create a stable repertory company, with a winter season and a permanent theater, which would allow him to pay the actors. Ah Italy!

Photographer Vannuci relayed in this week's article how she asked a prisoner why no one tried to escape. The response reflected how much theatre has the potential to change lives:  “Why should I run? Where would I go? Twenty years I’ve lived in prison. Now I have something to live for. Life has meaning.”

Comics that Tell Stories of Struggle Behind Bars

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Cartoons by artists behind bars give them a way to express themselves without words.  A chance to speak out their conditions, pains and losses as well as use humor to alleviate some of the deepest pains or anger. 

Lois Ahrens at the Real Cost of Prisons Project has comics by many artists behind bars and they tell amazing stories. One of the artists whose work is featured on the home page is Jacob Barrett.  He portrays the brutality of prison with a dark humor in this cartoon titled "Mass Incarceration."

Here he uses color to give us the punch of the "D.O.C." and help us see bodies hauled off in the same kind of vehicle that picks up trees or trash.  The DOC driver looks almost jubilant and the lilting tone contrasts with the awful reality of body after body after body being essentially warehouse.

On Ahrens' website, two complete books are available that tell researched and documented stories of incarceration — all in comics. "As of February 2010, 125,000 copies of the comic books have been printed and more than 115,000 have been sent to families of people who are incarcerated, people who are incarcerated and to organizers and activists throughout the country."  Check out the website if you or your group is interested.

Another place I've found some wonderful comics is on the website Between the Bars.  If you've never visited this site, do.  Many pieces of art some touching writing — all by prisoners across the country. Steve J. Burkett created the piece below around Christmas this past year.

Channeling humor, loss and the feelings of isolation at holidays, Steve puts his shipwrecked, totally surprised-to-be-there-in-spite-of-the-drink Santa on an island. No man is an island?  Go to prison and see if you still feel that way. 

Drug Sniffing Dogs: Wait! You’re only Visiting a Prison.

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Please see my new article at  about the impending new policy coming to Massachusetts — dogs who will sniff visitors for drugs at state prisons.

Here's how it begins:  "By now, everyone has heard about the amazing sense of smell of bomb-sniffing dogs, who we saw on the front lines of the Boston Marathon bombings. But a new policy coming to state prisons that involves dogs trained to sniff out drugs could rattle some cages, and it should cause us to ask: Is Massachusetts turning down the wrong criminal justice path, aiming to fix a problem without getting at its core cause?"

Be sure and watch the video.  Do these digs remind you of other dogs, anywhere else?  One thing that didn't make it in my article is this:

In an interview, Marina Drummer, Director of the Community Future Collectives in California, said Louisiana has a particularly horrendous drug-sniffing policy: “Visitors line up and go inside a little shed, individually. Around the bottom two feet is chicken wire—each person goes in the box and the handlers take the dog and walk around the shed with the dogs sniffing.” She called it “a terrifying experience for children and humiliating for everybody else.

Reading Plato on Death Row

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Years ago, when I first heard about the Clemente Course, pioneered by Earl Shorris, a social critic and author who believed in teaching  the Humanities to the poor and the vulnerable, I was intrigued.  The concept aimed to offer classics such as Kant, Plato, Socrates and Tolstoy to people who traditionally have no access to such work — the homeless.  Since the program began in the 1990's, the Clemente Course has expanded and now prospers world-wide.

In that vein, a fascinating venture is Lisa Guenther's work reading philosophy with prisoners on death row.  Guenther wrote a wonderful op-ed piece about solitary confinement in the NYTimes in 2012 where she said "There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged."

 

Guenther brings a bit of light into the dark hole of solitary.  On a blog called,  "New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science" she says "Last semester, we read Plato’s dialogues on the death of Socrates. The Apology was a great success. 'I want my lawyer to read this!' said one prisoner. 'Socrates is a badass,' another said approvingly. The Crito was another story. Socrates went from bring a principled badass to a spineless bastard, not just for refusing Crito’s offer of escape and exile, but mainly for his defense of fidelity to the law and the state, even when it has clearly committed a grave injustice."

Guenther's students on Death Row are in Tennessee. They are concerned about community and they are concerned about living a meaningful life– however much they have left and even though they live on Death Row. One student, Abu Ali Abdar Rahman, in a newspaper called The Maximum Times, published at the prison itself, wrote an article about the experience with Guenther and her grad students called "Transformative Justice: A Pilgrimage to Community Building and Conflict Resolution."  He says that the group appreciates the opportunity to learn, to think, to discuss and to "nourish our defects." 

Another student, Derrick Quintero in the same paper, said outsiders are often surprised that on Death Row, prisoners get to participate in programs, but Tennessee's Death row allows them such participation for "good behavior." The educational opportunities are transformative, he says, for the participants, both those inside and outside of prison.  He quotes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his article, citing his book A Saint on Death Row, and saying that they all have the potential to be "indispensable agents of change."

Guenther writes that the philosophy course used Plato's Phaedo, "the dialogue that recounts Socrates’ final hours before he is forced to drink the poison that will numb his body and stop his heart."  She recounts how some students "found Socrates’ arguments for the immortality of the soul compelling, and others thought he rejected the knowledge and pleasures of the body too harshly." One prisoner argued that state execution "twists the meaning of life and death."  In many ways, these kinds of insights are no different that students in any other part of the prison, or for that matter, in most classrooms.

Guenther says insightfully that "there are countless prisoners on death row who are working harder than we can imagine to transform themselves and to build a meaningful sense of community. We could learn a lot from these people if we weren’t so determined to kill them."

Another Day, Another Report on Massachusetts’ Botched Prison Policies

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Check out my newest blog post about the new report issued by MassINC and Community Resources for Justice (CRJ) on– guess what — the sagging state of criminal justice health in Massachusetts.

"The report points out well-worn zingers such as “A decade ago, higher education surpassed spending on corrections by 25 percent. Today the higher education budget is 21 percent lower.”

The report, titled Crime, Cost, and Consequences: Is It Time to Get Smart on Crime?, asks a good question, and it provides some good suggestions for change. But it seems like, year after year, another report comes out that recommends significant change to the system. And it seems that, year after year, we look over our policies, brood over how much money we’re spending, shake our heads at how many people keep returning to prison, and then, just like that, wash our hands and choose not to follow the recommendations."  More.