Stories from Maximum Security

I attended the event called “Stories from Maximum Security Education with a different” tonight. The beginning of the event began with some basic facts about the prison system and how compared to other countries we have more than one-quarter of the entires world population of prisoners in the US.

In Theodore Roethke’s My Paps’s Waltz the narrator seems to be a young boy possibly looking up to his Father. The narrator talks about the things they do together and how “romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf;”, I can imagine the laughter and how much fun the son and father were having together. The last two lines of the poem made me think of the event I went to tonight. One of the Doctors who participated in the program teaching prisoners read to us a sonnet that one of her students wrote. She began by teaching the men the sonnet in Romeo and Juliet, she described how they were very willing to participate and get up and act out the play. The theme of the sonnet was missing out and not experiencing because of where he was. A line in the sonnet was about how twenty-four years had passed since he was incarcerated and how everyone that knew him was dead.

Edgar Allen Poe theme of revenge in “The Cask of Amontillado” can be related to the feelings that inmates feel towards the prison system and how tricked they feel by it. Prisoners are forced into a cell for the majority of their lives. They may be only serving a few years or possibly a life sentence the first woman who spoke mentioned how the heavily confined prisoners can make their minds fly free. Although the blog post is not focused on the authors Edgar Allan Poe has an incredible and creative mind.

Mitsuye Yamada’s Cincinnati describes the struggle of today and gives support to the prisoners today and in the past who are wrongfully judged because of their appearance. “No one knew me No one Except one” the judgment that people feel coming in front of the judge can sometimes be spot on but other times sadly they are not. The statistic that two-thirds of the people incarcerated in the United States are African-American or Latino. Yamada’s first line “Freedom at last” reminded me of the unknown author of the sonnet written by the man in prison. His last line was that he would like to leave this place “on his feet, not his back”. In prison your schedule becomes your life, prison education is something positive for the incarcerated. Prisoners who are involved in the prison education program are forty percent less likely to re-offend.