Human Powered Season 2, Episode 5 Transcript
"Bead by Bead"
James: So when a string breaks, because a bead has a sharp edge on it and it cuts. And then something that took three hours to put together breaks and you got to, oh my God, this is another three more hours, you know? Um, then you got to go do them whole rows all over again. Everything that I do is one bead at a time from a needle. So if I do a project that requires over 50,000 some beads, one bead at a time.
Adam: When James Price first learned how to bead, his sister’s birthday was right around the corner. At the time, he was incarcerated at the Stanley Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. He noticed a Native American man beading, so he asked if he could buy a pair of earrings. But they weren’t for sale.
James: So the guy was like, um, Hey, just sit down, let me teach you how to do this and as I'm learning how to do the beadwork, I'm getting history lessons on the beads that I'm doing.
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Adam: I’m Adam Carr, public historian and co-host of Human Powered, the podcast from Wisconsin Humanities and Field Noise Soundworks, along with former Milwaukee Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton.
This episode, like every episode this season, we’re looking at the power of humanities within the justice system. How the humanities can restore people’s humanity, change the way we think about the mass incarceration system, and facilitate cross-cultural exchange.
Take James — a Black man from Milwaukee, unaware of any Native American heritage. But the mentorship he found inside Stanley changed the course of his life. I met him in a Native American Studies class through the Education Preparedness Program at Marquette University, EPP. It's basically a prison education program, but it goes in both directions. On-campus students and incarcerated students are in the same classes.
And in the EPP class I visited, James had the opportunity to share what beading meant to him.
James: It was therapeutic. You get mad with beading and no matter how mad you get, the purpose is get it done, you know? And once you get it done, all that happened before doesn't even matter no more because the gratification comes when you finish a project like, oh man, I got it done. Well look at life. Things never go as planned. Right? But stay the course, continue to do what you're doing, and you will get there.
Because when he was teaching me how to do the bead work, he was saying, you know, this beads for this, you, you put a mistake bead in your pile of beads as you bead and whenever you pick it up, that bead goes in there. So it's a bead that offsets the whole thing. And he said, you always wanna put a mistake bead in there because no, one's perfect, but The Creator. That's gonna humble you.
Adam: Dasha, imagine you went to a university course looking for good audio and then that guy started talking.
Dasha
*big breath*
Adam: It wasn't just the power of how he communicated, it was what he was communicating.
A mistake bead?
Dasha: When you think you have a plan on how you're gonna work through all of life's variances, a mistake bead is planning and it's also allowing for your… your fallibility, you're gonna make a mistake. And we work so hard to not make one. So just this one little action in a craft technique to allow for a mistake. We’re missing out.
Adam: And think about where that man was sitting when he learned that
Dasha: Oh, in a building of mistakes.
Adam: learning that there's mistake beads.
Dasha: And you also can hear the joy. In the process, you can hear, it's like listening to people talking about gardening, too. You know, all of the, it's hot and it's, and the bugs are getting at their collars and all of the things that make gardening challenging, but the gratification and that sense of satisfaction more than just, I accomplished this thing.
Yes, that's a level to it, but you can just hear, like working through the mistake and working through that humbling of what these little bitty, uh, beads are gonna do. You can hear that in how he even described it. And you can't replace that with anything. That's that verve of being alive.
Adam: Finding a way to work on a garden where a flower might be least likely to bloom. That's so beautiful. And I think that's a lot what this episode is about.
A good friend of mine, Rob Smith, uh, Dr. Rob Smith, I'll say because we're in front of people, uh, he's a brilliant history professor at Marquette and I knew he was doing this work and this podcast was a chance to actually get to see it and feel it in a real way, along with a great philosophy professor at Marquette, Theresa Tobin.
What is so genius about them is they're not professors who took their spots at universities to, to just hold those for themselves and those that could afford it.
They brought it out into these correctional institutions and they've also brought those institutions onto their campus. It is a diverse population in our carceral spaces around the state, but we know there are far too many black men.
There are all kinds of people that made mistakes, but systemically we lock up so many black men in Milwaukee it's almost hard to keep track of the statistics, but one thing we know: we're at the top of a list that is devastating.
Dasha: Absolutely. And as a poet, this of course is gonna be a metaphor and analogy. This is the first thing that comes to my mind: I remember learning about a house, so ther’s a house, basement, main floor, attic bedroom, and in the attic bedroom on the ceiling, there was a crack that was getting in the wall and it wasn't any issue, just more aesthetic.
I've got this line in the ceiling and the people that know about construction explained, yes, there's a beam in your basement that shouldn't have been cut, and it was. So something all the way in the basement. It’s a beam that's holding the whole house up and this beam not being intact and not having integrity affects a ceiling crack, two, three levels up.
And the situation, the experience that we often, I think describe inaccurately in Milwaukee. In any major urban city. We're talking about Milwaukee in particular. You're talking about the crack and what it's doing, how it looks, why is it there? But we're not talking about the integrity of the beam that made the crack happen in the first place.
And my husband found this report, and this language is so appropriate, and it was summarizing that every failed system in America has landed on the north side of Milwaukee. In our day to day, we see that as fathers being taken away from families, in our every day, we see that as mothers having these heart-wrenching lectures and speeches with their pre-teen sons. We see this in our every day as underemployed men. We see this in our conversations. And then it becomes their fault. Then it becomes something of their character, and that plays out in how we address our young people in schools. That plays out in how we respond to the homeless issue. And the list goes on and on and on.
But we don't talk about that beam. We don't talk about that cut in that foundational beam in the building. We instead talk about "how dare these human beings react to the disenfranchisement, the disrespect, that’s been mandated against them."
And that's the conversation that needs to switch around and these discussions and this podcast even, and going into these spaces and honoring these men as human beings who are men.
We can have discussions about how they got there in another fashion, but treating them as humans and that's treating all of the parts of them. And what happens is they begin to see themselves and treat those parts of them themselves. You couldn't have gotten James to do a beading class outside of having this isolation, but what it's gonna carry forward in him, in his chest, this teeny thing that he's able to do this, um, management with his own frustration like you said, that humility that this activity brings, that life brings. Those are the conversations that we need to have.
Adam: So today, we’re talking about the beam and the people working on the beam, like Rob Smith and Teresa Tobin, who developed the Education Preparedness Program (or EPP) at Marquette.
Rob: My personal experiences with folks who are current or formally incarcerated taught me that they were already, that they were intellectuals in those spaces, that there are folks with academic minds in those spaces.
Adam: That’s Rob. He’s a history professor and Director of the Center for Urban Research, Teaching and Outreach, otherwise known as CURTO.
He's a historian who sees academic research and community work as deeply connected. He's as comfortable conversing in community with people like me as he is giving a lecture. And some of those community conversations were about Marquette, a well-regarded private university that operates within one of the most segregated and policed neighborhoods in Milwaukee.
Rob: Marquette was one of those schools that had come up on the potential home of a Bard-like prison initiative.
Adam: So the Bard Prison Initiative is basically the gold standard of prison college education. It's a full-time liberal arts curriculum. Same classes, same requirements as the students on campus. Before programs like this, most models for prison education didn't focus on the humanities.
Rob: Given what we know about the various types of prison education models out there, many of which are, you know, very skills focused. So you can get a vocational degree or you can be a minister. No one was saying, Hey, what about the intellectuals? What about the thinkers? What about a college degree? You know, what about philosophy courses?
Theresa: I'm Theresa Tobin. I'm an associate professor of philosophy at Marquette and director of the education preparedness program, which is housed in CURTO.
I had met Rob when Rob came as the director of CURTO to Marquette. I remember that we had coffee or lunch or something just to connect about CURTO.
Rob: That's when I learned about your class.
Theresa: Yeah.
Adam: At the time, Teresa was teaching a philosophy class that had undergraduate students from Marquette and women from a nearby minimum security prison — the Milwaukee Women's Correctional Institution or MWCC. She developed the class with Marisola Xhelili Ciaccio, a grad student in her department who was interested in working with incarcerated students.
Theresa: So one of the unique features of that class, because it was a minimum security prison, the people in the class did have clearance to leave that prison and return. And so we were able to coordinate a rotating schedule. There was something extraordinarily profound about that.
Adam: One week, the class was in MWCC. The next week, it was on Marquette's campus.
Theresa: And when we gathered at the beginning of the class, we set up sort of class guidelines for how discussions were gonna go, right, that we all agreed to. And this student who had been an inside inside for 27 years and was recently returned offered the guideline of pass the mic. When somebody has been talking too much, pass the mic.
Well, then it turned out that this student talked a lot. A whole lot, and there was one class session. We had read some material on solitary confinement, and this student started talking and talked and talked and talked and then caught himself and said, oh, wait, I gotta pass the mic. And a campus based Marquette student in the class said, ‘You know what? No, you don't, you have something really important to share that we all really need to hear. This is not the time to pass the mic if you're not ready to pass the mic.’
So, you know, just those moments of people kind of connecting, but also understanding where there are sources of wisdom that we don't have access to in a traditional, typical way that academic classrooms operate, that aren't in textbooks, you know, coming from people's lives.
Adam: This is, perhaps, obvious, but important: the blended classroom is not just about delivering academic knowledge to folks inside prisons. It’s about making space for incarcerated people in the classroom. Establishing that they, too, have important knowledge to exchange.
So Rob wanted to grow what Theresa was doing. But as you might guess, there are a lot of moving pieces here. The Department of Corrections, various citizens boards, the administration of Marquette.
Rob: We kept getting told no, you know, no school wanted to be formally responsible for something that seemed like the right thing to do. And a lot of that came down to cost and resources and who, you know, who gets the bill.
Adam: But they kept at it.
Rob: And I think what we were able to do is to get all of these parts to be connected in a way to support our program so that, we can name drop here and there. We can say, hey, Theresa already taught a course. So we already know how to do it. And then, of course, this is where Wingspan comes into play. Because we had all these pieces in place. You know. We had curricula support. We've had support for faculty. We've got some community ties, we've got engagement with system and system stakeholders. So it’s all sorta swelling. And then, man it's the Mellon Grant. And as you know, with the writing of a grant, you gotta put your idea on paper. So, all the ideas coalesced as we wrote that grant narrative and I remember us at one point saying, man, we got something here.
Theresa: Yeah, hoped we did.
Rob: We got something here. And then when we start teaching the classes, I mean, those…
Theresa: Hard to describe.
Rob: Yeah…
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Adam: Okay, so like Rob said, this is where Wingspan comes into play. Full disclosure, Rob and I are friends and we are maybe a little too into this very nerdy board game called WingSpan. On Christmas, he brought the game over for the first time when he met my then-baby daughter. And we played the board game while she napped, and we've played many, many times since then.
On this night, I went over to his place after he taught his African American History course at the Department of Corrections
Rob: Big fella. I'm worried about your, your board, your board's hanging off too much.
Adam: No, it's good.
Rob: You sure?
Adam: I feel good about it.
Rob: Okay. Well take some more room. Let’s get you some food. We can put the eggs, we can get eggs from over here.
Adam: If you aren’t familiar with Wingspan, it’s a board game about birds. After that? … it gets pretty complicated. But you end up talking and thinking about birds a lot.
Rob: Look at that.
Adam: We’re good to go.
Rob: What’s our first round? Round one is birds, eggs, and that nest, that nest.
No, I appreciate you doing this cuz man, I tell you, the time that I've been teaching this class is at HOC, it has been a journey. It's been an emotional journey. I've been very emotional on a number of fronts.
Adam: Now, it’s not important that you know that much about Wingspan, except to know that it is a game that requires understanding systems and timelines. Which is essentially how Rob looks at his job and his life. So when Rob and I chat, he seamlessly switches between Wingspan, the educational work he is doing in prisons, his family’s history, and the larger history of Black Americans.
Rob: I feel like this class was, for me, I think it was the most important class that I've ever taught. Not only because of the carceral component of it, but because I had to come to terms with some of my own stuff with, you know, you know, Adam man, and there was a period in the 1970s where I don't remember there being a black man in my family out of work. And I remember them working overtime and I remember them working and we were having a very good life.
Adam: Rob remembers well-paying municipal and government jobs on top of an abundance of factory employment.
Rob: And by the late eighties, most of those men were almost unemployed or underemployed. You know what I mean? Like that was an intentional strategy.
Adam: Rob says that something changed in the 80s and those jobs began to dry up — and so did the middle class.
Rob: And maybe not, everybody spent a lot of time in jail, but a lot of people ended up cycling into jail now. And by a lot of people in Indianapolis that might have been 12% of the population.
Adam: Rob’s childhood was greatly impacted by that cycle.
Rob: In fact my father was incarcerated. I spent a number of years up to about 12-13 visiting him in prison. And, uh, you know, he was actually the person who kept telling me over and over to be a gentleman and a scholar. That was his whole thing: The gentleman and the scholar over and over and over. And in the time that he was incarcerated, I visited him many times. It was an experience. Other family members were incarcerated as well. So to a point that in my teenage years, my mother said, I can't let you keep going to visit people so that you don't get comfortable with prison. So the the notion that there was an unfair criminal legal system was noted.
Adam: Ultimately, Rob's mom was worried that he would get swept up by that unfair criminal legal system. She wasn't the only one looking out for him.
Rob: But man, them guys who have been locked up, they were also the guys who really taught me a lot. You know, man, guys would say, Hey, Lil Smith don't hang out with them cats - stay away from them. Not that it was him trying to instruct me, but like, that was how it was, you are not going to do that. You know?
And so to be in an opportunity to then have a class taught in a correctional facility, you know, it brings up a lot of that.
Adam: Yeah.
Rob: You know? And so I had to grapple with that. I had to come to some terms about what, honestly, could have been a different trajectory.
Adam: Sure.
Rob: Very easily, you know. Once I got comfortable navigating some of those feelings, then I could get back into really thinking about how to be a good instructor for the class.
Adam: And these students are in for a classroom experience that most of them have never had. In Rob's African American history class, he's not teaching out of a textbook.
Rob: We just want to go to the original artifact as close as we can get to it. And let’s make an assessments based on what other scholars have also argued and then let’s think about what the documents mean, and then come up with a set of arguments and ideas based on other primary documents of the era.
And so when you show any class of students a slave code, there's always shock and disbelief. And then there's also a clear awareness of how the system became what it became. So in the first class, where we're looking at these early documents, on this stuff, both communities of students, they're already making connections to our current system of incarceration. So I didn't have to do any more than present for them the historical record.
Adam: So students are looking at the original slave codes and some of the foundational documents of the United States and they are doing it with the reality of the modern day carceral state literally all around them.
Rob: And then let’s talk about the United States Constitution and its recognition of slavery. Whether the words are mentioned until the 13th amendment or not, which they aren’t, but you know, so we lay the foundation of colonial Virginia so that we can understand the intersections of race, gender, politics, labor, and all their many cousins.
And then we have a better sense of why the United States Constitution does what it does and how a system like slavery could thrive given the phenomenal rhetoric of that document.
Adam: In other words, it’s a mode of teaching that encourages students to draw their own connections and be critical thinkers.
Rob: And as one of the gentlemen in the HOC said, this is the first time I imagined myself being an intellectual, but I always knew that's what it was. I just couldn't name it. I didn't know that this was it. You know. Man! That's week three! Come on.
Adam: Sometimes in this work, Rob has to ask himself hard questions. Like if prison education classes are in some way reinforcing the problem of mass incarceration
Rob: You now Adam, it is fair to ask the question, ‘Is a program like this ameliorating the system.’ It’s a fair critique. I appreciate that critique around engaging with a system that is so woefully vicious in its bias.
Adam: So the idea being it's so messed up that by doing something with it you are in some way complicit. Or you’re adding to the value proposition of these institutions?
Rob: Yeah. See you go to jail and still get a college degree, but you gonna still go to jail, you know, there that, that critique is fair.
Adam: Well, how do you deal with it?
Rob: It's hard not to believe in the enterprise of that educational and academic experience in the college classroom, given what each of these classes were like, especially this one tonight, you know.
Adam: So it's it is worth it,
Rob: Adam. Yes, because by the end of the class, what all the justice impacted people have told us, began to happen, which was the incarcerated gentlemen began to instruct. And our students on campus were listening and engaging and critiquing and questioning. Man, that's what it's about.
That’s gotta matter. It has to matter.
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Adam: And as Rob later told me, that experience of that class, the class itself, the power of it — that was the power of the humanities.
Rob: I could not have engaged with this class without the humanities training. I couldn't put the context of the human experience and the relationship to carcerality in the same way without the humanities. I couldn't have believed in the power of history if I hadn't experienced it in the classroom already. I mean, you know, when you see a student's eyes light up, like when you see you get 'em, oh man, like I got you now, you know what I mean? Now? Now I got you fully engaged. Now let's have some fun and, I don't know, it can certainly happen in other classes, but the humanities do something special to help us better understand the human condition. And if we need anything in this conversation around prisons, it is a better understanding of the human condition.
Adam: More after the break.
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Jessica: Hi, I’m Jessica Becker. I”m director of communications at Wisconsin Humanities. Here, we believe that every story matters and we respect the humanity in each individual. We know that mass incarceration and systemic injustice impacts Wisconsinites in every corner of the state. But we believe that the humanities can provide tools for healing, encourage productive conversation, and create pathways for people to thrive. We hope these episode broaden the dialogue around mass incarceration and ignite your thinking about the role of the humanities in prisons. Visit wisconsinhumanities.org to learn more and get involved.
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Adam: After talking to Teresa and Rob, I knew I wanted to see an EPP course for myself. Rob’s African American History course is one of several courses connected to two different prison populations. The classes range from psychology to creative writing to a course on the history of Native America.
That’s where I met James Price, showing off his beadwork.
The final assignment of the class is an un-essay. Instead of writing a paper, you give a presentation about something that's important to you.
Obviously, James talked about beading.
James: So when I did my time in prison, I said when I leave, it's something I'm gonna take with me because it's like my, um, it's my silver lining. Yeah, it's therapeutic, it calms me. To me, it just showed how resilient that Native American culture is and how accepting that they were.
I was a troubled kid. I was very compulsive and I didn't know how to articulate myself. I didn't know how to talk. But we can fight about it, and then we can come to the table and try to talk about it. But, I was always told, like when one of the elders had told me, he said, Man, you just, what's wrong with you?
Why you always mad? Put that energy into something else. I couldn't fathom it then, and I don't know, for some reason, it happened. It got to me. But that same energy and he told me something. It was like a man, you know, he's not measured by, um, what he can do physically. It's how he conducts and how he holds himself.
So, um, with that being said, like I got, like a whole bunch of stuff in here that, I do, I make, earrings, I made medallions, anything that you want, pretty much. If I can put it on a sheet of paper, I can make it. The reason that I chose peyote stitch because it's one of the most difficult stitches of beadwork that you can do.
You gotta have patience. If you don't have patience, and I was told I'll never have patience. So, I do peyote. Some people look at me crazy like, I don't know what the hell you talking about. Good. You know, Google it, you know.
Adam: I reached out to James after the class because I wanted to talk more about his experience, and how he got there. It started when he was still incarcerated, talking with his friend Shar-Ron.
James: We used to talk, we used to have, you know, conversations about like, man, if you could ever go to college, when you get out, man, would you, you know, if the opportunity presents itself, James, would you go? You know, we used to have these talks. I never thought that it would become a reality. So I was like, yeah, I'll go. You know? So, um, the opportunity presented itself, he said, hey we have a Law and Surveillance in Society class coming up and a History and Indigenous studies. Would you be, interested? I mean, that went without question hell yeah. When can I come? You know, where am I going?
Adam: Because of James’s beadwork, and the people who he learned it from, the Native American History spoke to him.
James: To be misled as a child about history of Native American culture, history period, to be told the stories and then to be able to go to class in college about it, to get it even from a scholarly level, from a professor level, the truth, it's gonna resonate with you.
Once you get something like that it's gonna stay with you. I think that class should be a mandatory class for every student that comes to Marquette. Whether you want to take it or not, I feel that they need it and I feel that kids need to know the truth.
Adam: But the class also gave James a new sense of himself, and the city where he grew up.
James: I had never even knew, like even the time as a child was Marquette being there, that what all consists of the campus. And I was like, whoa, like all this is Marquette? You know, even as a kid thinking about 30 years ago until now it's like, and to be able to walk on, you know, on that soil, like, I feel good about it.
Adam: Now, James does work in his community to prevent violence.
James: And the thing is we try to catch the gun violence before it even starts. So if an argument ensues, we try to get on it right then and there, because we don't know if that argument can lead to a fight that fight lead to guns being drawn, someone being shot…
Adam: James works with 414Life, connected to the City of Milwaukee’s Blueprint for Peace. It's all about improving conditions in areas of the city most impacted by violence. It’s rooted in a public health approach to violence prevention and requires community residents to be part of the solutions. This concept isn’t new – 414Life in particular is modeled after a Chicago violence interruption operation created in the 90s. It’s built on the simple idea that violence and gun death can be prevented before it starts.
James: And we just try to get out here and promote peace. Our goal is to treat violence as a disease. I don't tell the kids in the neighborhood that, hey, what you're doing is wrong. I just say it's not normal. It's not normal for you to have a disagreement with somebody and it leads to gun violence. You should be able to disagree with someone and walk away from that situation. And I think that, a lot of people in the inner city don't, no one really gives a damn. And, when you got someone that's coming there telling them like, uh, you know, I got a better solution for you. Something that they haven't heard before, you know, for some, it can be empowering.
Adam: So basically James is trying to teach these guys patience…patience within a very tense situation. All those peyote stitches he was assigned when learning how to bead paid off.
Adam: The way that you described beading before and the way you described intervening in the street when there is gun violence is very similar. You were saying, like, the beading made you stop.
James: Yeah.
Adam: And it made you separate and, and put your mind somewhere else. And it seems like that's exactly what you try to do in your interventions.
James: Yeah.
Adam: You try to like, basically say: Hey, go bead!
James: Yeah
Adam: But you have to be, the conversation is the bead!
James: Yeah, it’s almost like… I become better with the people that I've been referred to or the people that no, Hey, I can show you a better way once you do a figure eight and you're trying to do an increase or decrease. I know it sounds like a foreign language, but those who bead know what I'm talking about, but once you do an increase or a decrease, hey, I know a quicker way or a better way, that's even better to even, you know, you pick that up. So same thing in the streets.
Hey, I know a, I got a solution. I know another way that you can go about this. You know, them same tools. It's just, um, you just find a way to give the message, but in a way of saying, um, it's all the same. It all comes back full circle, but it's a way that you can give them the message and in them situations where they can get it.
Adam: Now, I don’t want to say that James is anything less than a stellar student, a stellar person. He’s exemplary. But it also seems like he is an example of a larger thing at work with the humanities: Making connections. Connections between the past and present. Between different kinds of marginalized groups. Between individuals and their neighborhoods. James’s beadwork feels like a way to think about how people can imagine new lives for themselves and their communities.
James: Even with the work that I do I even try to give that to the kids that we mentor in the neighborhoods like, Hey man, um, don't ever let no one tell you that you can't do this or do that man. Um, or always have a goal and a plan and put it together. So when it presents itself, no one says, Hey man, you got lucky.
You know, like I didn't get lucky, you know, as I'm looking at it, I was already prepared if an opportunity came up, whereas I can, uh, be allowed or get into this space that I'm gonna take full advantage of it. So I had a plan. And what I'm saying now is I'm watching my plan manifest itself. Like I say, it's a beautiful thing.
Adam: I want to bring back former Milwaukee Poet Laureate, Dasha Kelly Hamilton.
Dasha, when you hear James’ story, the beadwork, the violence inturrption, his plans for himself, what do you think?
Dasha: All of that makes me smile. All of that makes me smile. One, with James expanding all the ways that he's able to apply that mental skill of making plans. I'm sure he has made plenty of plans before and expanding that to making a plan that are going to benefit him and his future and all the parts of him, probably hasn't been given that permission in a social way, um, in a practical way, and certainly not, you know, through this crafts.
And, absolutely, we have to remember, and this goes back to this reductive, caricature that we've all been encouraged to consider of people who make a mistake. And the assumption that those folks don't also have the capacity, like you said, to be philosophers, to also, have an idea of scholarship to, be able to discern and debate all of the topics and conversations of life. We are assuming that everyone is, has a third-grade education and has a penchant for crime.
And that's because we've been encouraged to think of people who make mistakes in that fashion. But there are philosophers. There are filmmakers. There are all brands of humans in those buildings the same way there are all brands of humans walking around free. So finding a way to feed and fuel those parts of the people in those places is essential.
You know, they get the vocational class, the AODA programs, the fatherhood. We need that too. But they also need to be able to paint. They also need to be able to write poems. They also need to be able to bead. You know, all the things that make all of us human.
Adam: Let me put that in a slightly different way. That's a strategy to prevent recidivism, what you're describing. Getting people investing in their own humanity when they're back in their community. That person's probably gonna be at home longer than someone who hasn't had the ability to hone that before they got home.
Dasha: And sadly, all the research shows, and we know this, and we don't do it. I didn't make this up. I'm not, I mean, I'm pretty brilliant, but I'm not, I didn't make this up. I didn't stumble into this and discover this. Rob didn't fall into this information, and he's now screaming it from the rooftops. This is information that we've known for a long time.
Adam: Dasha, when you lead a poetry workshop, I know your goal is to get people to create alchemy in front of you and get gold from that session, but probably what you really want is for them to write poems after you're gone, right? To light that fire?
And I think in this program we see that with James. He went through it. Not just the program, his experience, and he found ways to preserve his own humanity, to stay away from institutionalization.
I know I've talked to Rob about what he really cares about this. That's what he's interested in., helping people hold on, fight the power, whatever it is. How you do that within the reality you're in control of, and that is the mind, and that's what James is spreading.
Dasha: Absolutely. Absolutely, he's got this activity that is giving him joy and he's committed to, and he's gonna talk about it.
There's gonna be someone, a relative that he communicates outside that's going to, wow. He's really got this…whether they understand the beading or for my students, whether they understand the poems and the poetry. That small thing, it's a pebble in an ocean, but pebbles that drop in an ocean still make a ripple, right?
It's not gonna be enough to move a whole steam liner, but it's making a ripple in the water of who they are. And that does vibrate out.
And that ripple brings hope, that hope brings intention, that intention brings a plan. That plan brings a power to themselves about how they see themselves.
So the things that happen when you get people in a place, any collection of people, and they get to share parts of themselves, shifts will happen, those ripples will happen, and you leave that space feeling different about you and about the people you were with. And that extends to how you might even see strangers. That's powerful. And it encourages them to keep sharing their story and their words.
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Adam: Human Powered is a podcast from Wisconsin Humanities and Field Noise Soundworks. It is produced by Craig Eley, Jade Iseri-Ramos, and Jen Rubin. Craig also edits and mixes the show. Executive producers are Dena Worttzel and Jessica Becker. Our voice recording engineer is Andrew Jambura at Silver City Studios.
We have some great bonus material on the website for this episode, including parts of the interviews that I recorded with the instructors of Jame’s EPP class.
The outro music is by the band Upheaval. They were a prison band at the Waupan Correctional Institution in the 1970s.
We want to shout out Real Stories MKE, a show from Ex Fabula that airs at 7PM on Sundays at WUWM and then can be heard anytime in your podcast feeds.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Human Powered: Humanity Unlocked. If you like what you heard, please share it with a friend.
I'm your host Adam Carr, with the poetic Dasha Kelly Hamilton.