Keywords
Desistance, Emancipation, Empathy, and Poetry
Abstract
The Art of Recovery and Therapy (ART) leisure time activity group at Valley State Prison (VSP) in Chowchilla, California, is a resident-led arts and humanities-based self-help forum that has been available to carceral state residents for more than a decade and is administered in collaboration with full-time, non-custody, civil servant facility staff (CDCR site, n.d.). ART is among the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) longest running and most autonomous creator habitats founded and facilitated entirely by resident practitioners. ART wields a codified state regulatory authority to function and fundraise (Cal. Code Regs. § 3233-3237, 3240) as well as a Warden-authorized mandate to deliver 15-week ongoing cycles of artist resident-taught multidisciplinary workshops in craft work, painting, music, theater, dance, audio technology, creative writing, and film. Since 2019, I have facilitated the Barz Behind Bars (B3) Creative Writing Spoken Word Performance Art Workshop (B3 site, n.d.), a modality I first co-created with my concurrently incarcerated peers Benjamin Frandsen and The Mundo Press, which has since become adapted to incorporate The Pennebaker Protocol (a technique employing expressive writing as a therapeutic approach to processing challenging emotions) and novel breathing and memorization techniques employed by Poet Laureate Austin Alexander to help steer participants through the processing of traumatic subject matter.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25771/zfr4-en31
Included in
Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Education Commons, Public Policy Commons, Sociology Commons
