October 23, 2024: Prison Stories: Ian Williams and Teaching in Prisons

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

[N.B. Thispost on my inspiring then-colleague and still-friend Ian Williams’ experiences teaching inprisons originally aired way back in my blog’s first month, inNovember 2010. But it’s all still damn true, other than the sad fact thatwe haven’t been colleagues for far too long.]

If you wanted to feel verydepressed, you could spend some time trying to decide which at-risk Americanpopulation is more elided in our national narratives and perspectives about ourcurrent identity and community: certainly Native Americans, on whom I’vealready focused a good deal in this space and will continue to do so, have agood case (although probably it was better before casinos forced us to admitthat they still exist); the homeless and those living at the very bottom of theeconomic ladder are definitely in the conversation too. But I think a verystrong argument could be made that the population we most consistently forgetto include in our sense of ourselves, until and unless there’s some sort ofscandal that makes us think about them but solely in negative terms (seeHorton, Willie), is the more than 2.3 million Americans—or more than 1 in 100,and that statistic is from 2008 so it’s likely higher today—who are in prison. (Makingus, it’s important to add, the worldwide leader in both the overall number ofcitizens and the percentage of the population behind bars.) It’s ironic but, Ibelieve, entirely accurate to note that much more press and attention was paidto (for example) Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan’s couple of weeks in jail thanis paid to the millions of their fellow Americans who are spending significantportions of their lives in that world.

There are all sorts of issuesassociated with that world and this community, as well as an equally strikingnumber of complicating factors and influences that have helped create andsustain it, and it would be irresponsible of me to pretend to know nearlyenough about any of them to focus on them in a piece here (I’m quite sure thatmany readers will know a good deal more and should, as always, chime in). Andin any case, my focus today, in the first of three Thanksgiving-inspired posts,is instead on an incredibly impressive kind of academic and American (in thebest sense) work being done in this community by a colleague of mine, IanWilliams. Ian is, in his own ways, a model of the type of interdisciplinaryscholar and teacher and person that I consistently aspire to be: he teaches andproduces scholarship about American literature and identity and culture, as doI, but he’s also a published and on-the-rise poet and author of fiction, hastaught dance and performance, and has entirely revamped our department’sliterary magazine and website, to cite only a few of his broad and meaningfulpursuits and accomplishments. But the most impressive of his efforts, to mymind, is also perhaps the least overtly visible: he has over the last coupleyears begun to go into local prisons and develop reading and writingconversations and courses with inmates, dialogues that have continued wellbeyond his individual visits and that have, without question, addedimmeasurably to the world and possibilities of those imprisoned Americans.

I can’t claim to speak for Ian’sexperiences, and he has written a bit recently about them on his own blog [BEN:Now sadly defunct, but trust me, it was great]. And I’m quite sure that hewould dispute my sense that this gig is a thankless one; whether it garners anyvisibility or attention is not, that is, at all connected to whether it’sappreciated or makes a difference, and the thanks, similarly, come not fromoutside perspectives but from those impacted directly by the work. I agree withall of those thoughts (that I’ve imagined into Ian’s perspective!), but wouldalso argue that the absence of visibility is itself a further sign of how muchwe don’t include this world and community nearly enough in our nationalnarratives and consciousness. Every few years (at least) sees a new movie aboutan inspiring teacher doing important work with public school students in theinner city; I can’t agree strongly enough that such individuals are sources ofinspiration, and I don’t think we could make enough movies celebrating teachersin any case (duh, I suppose). But the communities whom Ian is inspiring areeven more desperately in need of that influence—and while their inhabitantscan’t necessarily (or at least often can’t) get to the happy endings andbrighter futures that are often featured in the captions at the end of thosemovies, that doesn’t mean that we should celebrate any less fully the teachersand Americans who are doing what they can to connect with and impact theirworlds and lives.

I’ll stop there,since I can already imagine Ian’s demurrals from much of what I’ve written. Atthe end of the day, again, he isn’t doing this work so it’ll get written up,here or in much more prominent publications or spaces. But that doesn’t mean itshouldn’t be—nor that American Studies shouldn’t include and study the world ofour imprisoned fellow Americans much more fully than it often does. Nextprison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?