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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2004Women in prison writeI had a pick-me-up as I watched the public television program, POV. It highlighted the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women in New York and the Writing Workshop that has been going on since 1998. I’d heard of it before, but this was the first time I got to see it in action. Every women’s writing program (and men’s) in the U.S. should run that film. This show was one of the rare television blessings and is so great for a women’s prison because they so rarely have any viable programs. What the women in New Bedford did was write about their lives. Then women like Glenn Close and Rosie Perez performed these writings. There was so much honesty by the women, and they expressed candid and emotional thoughts. If more programs in prison around the country were run like that, something could actually be accomplished with them. The most powerful aspect of the program was when the actors performed those writings. It was hard to tell where the actors ended and the women who wrote the pieces began. Powerful images of sadness, love, pain, suffering, and hope. Hope, most of all, even if the women did not realize that. The sad thing was to hear the fools in the hallway of my prison talking about this woman or that, not listening to the message--not listening that every one of those writers, those women, were in prison because of someone just like them who looked at them as things, not people. It’s sad that they can’t bring themselves to be as honest as these women--to talk honestly about who they are. I am proud of being a "brother in the struggle” to those writers--not prisoners, but women writers! --Robert Taliaferro |
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