James Sandoval walked to the front of the room. The library was small with neat rows of hard plastic chairs. Nearly every seat was filled. He broke out into a wide, warm smile and started to chat with the group. In his hand he held a couple of legal-sized sheets of yellow, lined papers covered with his writing.
That day’s writing prompt? To showcase their best work, and explain why this was their strongest piece.
Sandoval stood at about average height, with short cropped black hair, lightly gelled into spikes. He wore a small round necklace, a gold and silver plated watch, and a black band on his left index finger. His neatly groomed mustache and tiny patch of hair under his lip framed a slight smile.
Tattoos covered him from his fingers to his face. There’s spiders, names, and on his neck was a devilish figure. All of it tattooed in a soft black ink.
Sandoval continued his small talk and began to read off the sheet of paper. “A chain of destruction; it strangles our hopes and dreams of a better future,” he read. “It does not define who we are today because we are capable of change.”
He flipped through the sheets and read for about two minutes. The crowd silently listened. After Sandoval finished reading, he spoke a little about his process, received comment and critique, as well as some applause and returned to his seat.
“It does not define who we are today because we are capable of change.”
Sandoval and the others incarcerated at the California Correctional Institute (CCI)—the formal name for Tehachapi—gather together twice a month for creative writing sessions organized by InsideOUT Writers, a Southern California nonprofit organization that specializes in writing circles at juvenile halls and prisons.
Writing groups are just one piece of an entire network of arts programming for people who are incarcerated. In California, programming is funded through Arts in Corrections, a branch under the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Since the program’s relaunch in 2014, funding has continuously increased, even as arts programming in the country faces a threat of being defunded.
In 2017, programming was offered in all 35 state prisons, with a new flood of organizations coming into correctional facilities, despite the lack of research in program efficacy.
Programming runs the gamut from traditional arts like beadwork and cultural music, dance and acting troupes, fine arts, to audio journalism and writing. The men at CCI enrolled in InsideOUT are allowed to sign up for the class, after which at a point a self-selective vetting process typically kicks in. The most dedicated members use the two-week breaks between class sessions to prepare since their continuation in the course is contingent on being an active participant.
Those in solitary confinement or administrative segregation cannot attend programming sessions. This is likely to have an impact on their long-term prospects, since parole boards often look at the entirety of a given sentence to determine whether an incarcerated person can be granted parole. To the board, attending classes and showing good behavior can be seen as a sign of change and a deterrent to recidivism. To some proponents of prison arts programs, artistic practice itself is a form of rehabilitation.
At the end of class, the men all dressed in matching light-blue uniforms, put on their bright orange coats and thick grey gloves and filed out of the door together. Sandoval and the roughly twenty people sitting in the library live in the maximum security wing of the prison in Tehachapi, California.
Located in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains roughly over 110 miles north of Los Angeles, the facility sits at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet. Snow often blankets the area in the winter, making the inside of the prison cold. Its eponymous town is almost 10 miles away, making the facility isolated.
Instead of calling the group a class with a teacher and a group of students, the self-styled “writing facilitator,” Johnny Kovatch used a different term.
“I like to call it a kinship just for the nature of what everyone says,” Kovatch said. “There’s a lesson inside of them.”
While the classroom they are in is not arranged into an actual circle, Kovatch sees the class as a kind of writing circle in which every participant is encouraged to speak. His co-teachers follow the same model.
“We like to set up things up in a circle, kind of like the United Nations where everyone is equal, and everyone has equal representation,” Kovatch said. “I think it brings a sense of unity and equality… and a greater sense of open-mindedness. You can speak openly and not get judged for it.”
Discussion groups and workshops like these are funded as a part of California’s Detention of Corrections and Rehabilitation program. The budget for 2018-2019 total $8 million, an increase from its 2013 founding budget of $2.5 million, according to an email from Corrections Interim Manager Mariana Moscoso.
Under the CDCR, Arts in Corrections (AIC), is a body that focuses on providing arts programming by funding community-based organizations to go into some of the state’s 35 facilities.
Monte Freeman shares with his group the importance of committing to InsideOUT Writers to newcomers. He also reads his work on examining the feeling of regret. If video does not load, please click here.
Writing programs aren’t the only available option for incarcerated people; there are movement-based arts programming like theater and different forms of dance. At the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), a medium security prison in Norco, California, a new class was introduced.
On a bright Tuesday morning, the gymnasium sat empty for over an hour after the 8:30 a.m. breakdancing class start time. It was the first day of a new dance class, and the residents weren’t alerted of the start time.
Over the next hour, people slowly trickled in until a handful of participants showed up, ready to dance. Joseph Hill was part of the group, and that was his first ever dance lesson.
He shined in the class. Every move he tried with enthusiasm and gusto. His energy was literally bouncy. Every move filled him with excitement as he tried to copy the facilitator.
During the class, he skidded his glasses across the floor to a porter who picked up and pocketed them for him until class was over.
After spending nearly two hours learning moves, Hill sat with his glasses back on and took in the experience. “It made me feel free,” Hill said. As he put it, he felt “back at home, with everybody having fun and just smiling.”
While there was an option for him to get into an InsideOUT Writers class or a theater class, Hill wasn’t interested in the programming at CRC until breakdancing came along. He was a recent transfer to the facility.
Cesar Martinez who facilitates the class, said he sees the importance of bringing all kinds of arts programming to reach as many people as possible, specifically breakdancing. “It got started from getting gang members into some sort of productive way of handling problems and conflicts. It really resonates with them,” he said.
The day did not just end with one class. Martinez is a “freelancer” who is funded through the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, California for arts programming in prisons. The cultural center has set up an eight-week rotational program that cycles through different classes that run for two weeks at a time before switching to a class like public speaking.
During his work in spring of 2019 at CRC, Martinez facilitated two dance sessions a day: breakdancing in the morning, and hip-hop in the afternoon.
Mark Newsome was signed up to take the morning breakdancing class, but not the afternoon hip hop class. “[It] made me feel free, clear-minded and like a drink of cold water,” Newsome said in an interview. “I’m going to stay for the second class… I’m not tired; I can do this all day long.”
Martinez feels like he can see the power of dance on the incarcerated dancers. “They come in here with their traumas… they come in here with their inner child or their past, and everything they’ve been through,” Martinez said. “Let’s let the healing begin… The dance and the music is a vessel or an outlet for people to start healing themselves.”
Suchi Branfman is another dance facilitator who frequently instructs students at CRC, but instead of hip hop and breakdance, she facilitates modern dance. She’s in the middle of a five-year artist’s residency at the facility.
Modern dance typically involves physical contact between participants. These moves can be challenging to demonstrate, so Branfman has brought in outside dancers to assist.
“We have severe limitations on contact,” Branfman said. “And we have been stopped, and the guards have intervened when we have been standing too close.”
Branfman said she has been experimenting with having the incarcerated dancers help each other with physical moves. Several months ago, she worked with the group on a support exercise. The group was to lift each person and carry them around the gym.
“It’s a very intimate thing to put your hands all over someone’s body and lift them, but they did, and it was so beautiful,” Branfman said.
She said she encouraged the men to reach out to one another because of the inherent inequality in the prison system.
“People are divided. Black folks are divided from Latinos and white folks and Indigenous [people]. There’s a real division, and it’s an institutional division.”
CDCR facilities were divided by race upon moving into a new facility for as long as 60 days before being reassigned to a less temporary cell. According to the text in the Johnson v. California case, the CDCR at the time said the practice was necessary to prevent violence caused by racial gangs.
“[It] made me feel free, clear-minded and like a drink of cold water.”
This U.S. Supreme Court case in 2005 ended an official racial segregation practice across the country. In California all areas in state prisons are fully integrated, but people may choose to self-segregate.
California does, however, have a Sensitive Needs Yard (SNY) that functions as a protective custody program, separating out groups like former cops, gang informants and child molesters. As of 2018, the CDCR has been integrating SNY with General Population to mixed results.
Branfman also finds that CRC sometimes embargos information from the men. When it’s time for activities in the facility, she said that some of the men don’t even know beforehand that they are going to attend a dance class.
“Then another guy said ‘I didn’t even know anything about this class, but half an hour ago they called my name and said you’re going to dance, get ready and go.’,” Branfman said.
She found the lack of control over who attends the session complicates her role in the system.
“We become part of the institution,” Branfman said. “It’s been challenging certainly for me as a person who doesn’t see prisons as a way of solving our institutional problems.”
She chose to continue facilitating classes because she said the group wants to dance.
“They’re seriously insistent that we need to dance and that we need to be moving,” Branfman said.
In addition to writing and dance, art classes funded through Arts in Correction include drum circles, songwriting and craft-making.
However, according to a 2014 study done by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, close to 78 percent of all arts programming is writing- or poetry-based.
The study also found that nearly 63 percent of the people surveyed joined these arts programs because they wanted to change their lives. One hundred percent of the respondents said the programs allowed them to express themselves.
“For those who have been incarcerated, which can be an inhumane environment… you have to connect to their humanness in a way that makes them see their authentic selves and see the value in themselves,” said Ernst Fenelon Jr., senior program director at the Prison Education Project.
This community-based organization focuses on bringing educational classes on many subjects to both currently and formerly incarcerated people. Art has always been an integral part of their programming.
Fenelon said that when other prison education programs think about STEM work but not STEAM (the inclusion of the arts in sciences), then these programs are missing out, “because if you don’t include art,” he said, “this is where the humanity, that humanness comes in.”
According to the metrics the Prison Education Program has collected on their alumnus, those who have gone through the programs are interested in higher education, learned soft skills, and worked on forgiving themselves for their actions.
Collecting markers of what constitutes “success” with regard to prison arts programming is complicated, messy and bureaucratic. The most commonly used metric is recidivism.
According to Brandon Martin, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, “normally the gold standard per se or what [the CDCR] looks at is a three-year recidivism window.”
No studies have been done on programming since the reinstatement of Arts in Corrections in 2013. Martin believes this may be due to a myriad of reasons. “Off the top of my head, they can be costly to run,” Martin said.
Another reason could be due to not enough space. Martin believes that issues with overcrowding have been possibly one of the most significant problems the CDCR has been facing, which in turn has made researching programming low on an ever-growing list of priorities.
“[Over] the last five years we’ve increased our rehabilitation budget from about 300 million a year to roughly 460 million a year,” Martin said. “The last few years the legislation has been pushing the CDCR to do more evaluations of their programming, and so I’m sure we’ll see more evaluations and studies coming out.”
The California State Auditor’s office released its closest most relevant study in January 2019.
That multiyear study focused not on arts programming, but cognitive behavioral therapy programming and showed that CBT therapy wasn’t significantly helping with reducing recidivism rates.
In California, those rates have stayed mostly the same since the early noughts. From 2002 to 2013 (the latest data), recidivism has remained at roughly 50 percent since the expansion of CBT program offerings to all 35 state prisons in 2012.
California defines recidivism as a conviction of a new felony or misdemeanor committed within three years of release from custody. While the study did not include arts-based programming, many programming providers are still upset by the findings.
“Literally with that report, it paints all rehabilitative programming as a failure,” Ernst Fenelon Jr. said. “I think it’s important to make the distinction to assess any nuances that might have been missed or identify the scope of the report.”
Activists and community-based arts organizations have issues with the State Auditor’s report using recidivism as a metric.
Kaile Shilling, the executive director of Arts for Incarcerated Youth said in an interview that she thinks the favored metric is unfair. “What you’re really tracking when you’re tracking recidivism is the over-policing of [people].”
While her organization focuses on youth, she said that a lot of views on recidivism with teenagers and young adults could apply to adults who have also gone through the justice system.
“If you’re looking at recidivism, it’s all ‘don’t do this,’ ‘don’t do this,’ ‘don’t do this,’ right? And that’s a horrible way to interact with young people,” Shilling said. “That also shifts how we look at young people. So we’re policing them in our minds, right? We’re looking for them to mess up if we’re using recidivism.”
Shilling believes that to use recidivism as a measure for program success does not take into consideration the entirety of a person and their circumstances.
Ernst Fenelon Jr., the program director at the Prison Education Project, agrees. “How do you measure success? How do you measure the unmeasurable human spirit?”
According to these and other supporters of prison arts programs, for researchers and others to look at whether a person who participates in arts succeeds or fails after being released from custody does not take into account all of the aspects needed for somebody to truly succeed.
“What you’re really tracking when you’re tracking recidivism is the over-policing of [people].”
“Have we cleared any obstacles to education, employment and housing?” Fenelon Jr. said. “Have we cleared obstacles to give people a ‘second chance’? And if we haven’t that’s the question we need to ask ourselves.”
Brent Blair, the head of theater and social change department at the University of Southern California believes that art programming isn’t enough to change the system.
He believes that society must do more to prevent people from entering into the prison system.
“If you go into the prison with the idea that the prisoner is somehow independently responsible for the behavior they have exhibited,” Blair said. “What you could accidentally be doing is reproducing the very kind of concrete structures that form their identity to begin with.”
Blair said he sees the art education system in California as a way to feel good about helping one person while not changing society.
“At some point, you have to ask, ‘Well is my art placating or pacifying? Is it mollycoddling a system which is aggressively designed specifically and strategically to put men of color in?’” he said.
Instructors like Johnny Kovatch have seen the importance of arts programming in correctional facilities.
“A lot of these guys are guaranteed freedom, so why not be able to set up a platform to give these guys the tools to succeed when they do get out, so they return as positive members of society,” Kovatch said.
This is a map of California + their arts programming through Arts in Corrections. The list only includes providers on official Arts in Corrections website. Markers in yellow show the location of California Correctional Institution and California Rehabilitation Center.
Joseph Osorio, an alum of InsideOUT Writers, felt that the first step in making a change in his life started with explorative writing.
“I didn’t know I wanted to be accepted,” Osorio said in an interview. “But I didn’t understand what was going on inside of me… I was able to discover those things through writing.”
During his 14th year of incarceration, Osorio said he started to attend InsideOUT Writers, self-help classes, and college courses.
“There are no trees, no leaves or anything. So I created a place where I would like to be peaceful.”
Osorio spent the first few months following his release date from prison to living in transitional housing. He said he credits creative writing classes with helping him find out who he is a person.
Even those incarcerated for the rest of their lives may also find solace in artistic expression.
Kevin Cooper, on San Quentin’s State Prison’s death row, found that painting gives him peace in his colorless world.
“Because I am devoid of landscapes… I live in a concrete jungle. There are no trees, no leaves or anything. So I created a place where I would like to be peaceful,” Cooper said in an interview. While many of his paintings focus on revolutionary historical figures like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, others are natural scenes filled with flora and fauna such as palm trees and butterflies.
In 1983, Cooper was convicted and sentenced to death in the murder of the Ryen family in Chino Hills, California. His alleged involvement is at the center of controversy surrounding his culpability. He adamantly maintained his innocence.
According to Cooper, others sentenced to death row are not offered programming of any kind— artistic or educational.
To teach himself how to paint, Cooper often watched public broadcasting channels and learned from shows like The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. Supplies are ordered through a prison-approved art catalog. To save money, he usually gets primary colors and mixes them to fill in the gaps.
He said artwork makes him feel valuable. “It makes me feel really great because I don’t see myself as just a consumer, but as a producer, and I’m producing.”
Through the work in advocating for himself, Cooper turned to writing and speaking. He said his writing is a way to educate people about the prison system.
“When I write a column, I do so because I have something important to say, and I think in my own humble opinion that somebody needs to hear what I got to say,” Cooper said.
Cooper believes that if were released from San Quentin, he would be a different person— and that art changed him.
“Where I am right now in my life, art is not what I do; it’s what I am. Writing is not what I do; it’s what I am. Speaking is not what I do; it’s what I am,” Cooper said. “I am a speaker, I am a writer, and I am an artist.”
