Action Research
http://arj.sagepub.com
Intimate details: Participatory action research in prison
Michelle Fine and Maria Elena Torre
Action Research 2006; 4; 253
DOI: 10.1177/1476750306066801
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://arj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/3/253
Published by:http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for Action Research can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://arj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://arj.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
ARTICLE
KEY WORDS
• feminist methods
• participatory action
research
• prisons
Action Research
Volume 4(3): 253–269
Copyright© 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
DOI: 10.1177/1476750306066801
Intimate details
Participatory action research in prison
Michelle Fine
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Maria Elena Torre
Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York
ABSTRACT
This article enters the ‘intimate details’ of a participatory action
research project nested inside a college-in-prison program for
women in a maximum security prison. Conceived out of a conversation
of prison reform advocates, the piece is deliberately
not co-authored by all of the researchers – prison based and university
based – because this article is an opportunity to reveal
some of the delicate and difficult issues of working inside institutions
of abuse and structural violence. The issues discussed could
not easily be spoken about by women in prison, or even former
prisoners, without jeopardizing their well being. Through the
findings of the PAR project the piece will sample the impact of
college in prison, but more intentionally it will interrogate questions
of epistemology, ethics, method and politics as participatory
action researchers take up projects inside state institutions,
enforcing neo-liberalism through the prison industrial complex.
The critical role of the ‘outsider’ who is ‘privileged’ to speak is
interrogated, as is the responsibility to bear witness as the walls
of prison consume communities of color and poverty.
Soon after the photos landed on our doorsteps we learned that the violence was
neither random nor spontaneous. Seymour Hersch detailed the events in an item
in The New Yorker:
[B]etween October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of ‘sadistic,
blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal
abuse of detainees, . . . was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police
Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (Hersh,
2004)
Shortly thereafter, we were asked to speak on a panel, ‘What does Abu-Ghraib
tell us about the current prison industrial complex?’ We spoke with a sense of
political urgency because none of our co-researchers, who were former or current
prisoners, could speak aloud about the everyday atrocities that constitute prison
life in the US, today, now. And at that moment we realized a limit of participatory
action research behind bars – that the sadistic details of everyday life could
never be collectively voiced by those on parole. We – outside researchers committed
to deep collaboration with these women in prison – would have to speak
aloud about the atrocities we witnessed/negotiated in the midst of our participatory
action research project behind bars.
In 1916 Madeleine Z. Doty wrote a book called Society’s Misfits, a diary
of her prison experience. Miss Doty and a friend, Miss Watson, arranged to be
incarcerated as inmates of the New York State Prison for Women at Auburn, just
before Doty was to accept the post of prison warden. In chilling ethnographic
detail, she tells us:
A convict means dirt, physical, mental, and moral and is treated accordingly . . . I
was a convict; therefore, I was full of vermin. Pleading a headache . . . the next
instant I was told to bend my head and the contents of a dark-green bottle were
poured upon me and rubbed in. The penetrating and biting odor of kerosene
pervaded everything. A hot wave of indignation flooded me. Two days before my
hair had been washed and waved and was soft and sweet-smelling. Surely my head
might be clean, even supposing I had forged a check. (Doty, 1916, p. 14)
I knew there was no good protesting, but I wanted to curse. Prison has a curious way
of dragging to the surface all the profanity one has ever heard. Nothing else seemed
adequately to express one’s hate and indignation . . . . Laughter in prison is a sin
. . . . ‘Be still. Don’t you know where you are? If ye hain’t ever been in prison before,
you’re in one now.’ (Doty, 1916, p. 19)
After asking for a blanket I was told, ‘You shouldn’t ask me for a blanket, you ought
to ask the day matron.’ So I lay and shivered. I was horribly uncomfortable, dirty,
hungry, and thirsty and my bed grew hourly harder. The day had been a horror, but
the night was worse. All my innate ugliness rose to the surface. I wanted to grasp my
bars and shake them and yell. I would gladly join my convict friend in a smashing
orgy if they didn’t let me out soon. I too had the devil in me. Rebellious thoughts
surged in my brain. What right had man so to abuse his fellow man? What right to
degrade him, to stop on him, to ignore him? What right to nag and browbeat until
he can no longer keep silence and self respect flares up? (Doty, 1916, p. 27)
Madeleine Doty could speak. And we would. We decided to publish an article on
participatory action research (PAR) conducted in a women’s prison and write
the intimate details – the pain and abuse built into prison life; the emotions that
circulate through prison projects; and the joys and possibilities of democratic
research in prison. We write this as two ‘outside researchers’ separate from our
prison research collective of eight women in prison and five women on the outside.
We write this because few can speak the truth about prisons without enormous
personal vulnerability. While we may be outsiders to prison, we are all
inside the prison industrial complex as it eats America.
We write because participatory action researchers have an obligation to
reveal, when possible, the intimate details of PAR undertaken in difficult social
institutions. We write this piece committed to participation and committing
ironic betrayal. That is, the voices of women in prison, or now out of prison, will
not be found in this piece, although they speak throughout all of our other publications
and they co-author most (see Fine et al., 2001, 2004). We write here,
explicitly without our collaborators’ names, although with their review, permission
and blessing, because we speak some truths they dare not say.
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian
movements conjure up a lying world of consistency . . . (Arendt, 1951: 352)
Cultivated on the spikes of social injustice, participatory action research projects
are designed to amplify demands and critique from the ‘margins’ (hooks, 1984)
and the ‘bottom’ (Matsuda, 1995), and to elaborate alternate possibilities for
justice (Anzaldua, 1987; Bhavnani, 1994; Cahill, 2004; Lykes, 2001; Tolman &
Brydon-Miller, 2001; Torre & Fine, 2004). Legitimating democratic inquiry,
PAR signifies a fundamental right to ask, investigate, dissent and demand what
could be (Torre, 2005). Voices of dissent and radical entitlement shatter what
Hannah Arendt calls the ‘lying world of consistency’.
In communities, schools or prisons, PAR projects document the subterranean
pools of collective dissent by aggregating and making public ‘private’
troubles among very different youth, women and men. Revealing the common,
public roots of these ‘private’ troubles (Mills, 1959), PAR demonstrates the
differentiated consequences of social oppression, distributed unevenly (but not
only) by race, ethnicity and class. PAR shatters the false consensus of neo-liberal
institutional life by challenging the everyday banality and seeming inevitability of
injustice. More specifically, participatory action research lifts the multiple stories
and counter stories dwelling within any complex institution or social arrangement,
privileging in particular those perspectives that age on the bottom of social
arrangements, where the lies, the ghosts, the buried memories, the disposables,
the traitors and the silences gather (see Harris, Carney & Fine, 2001).
In our work, PAR projects have been situated inside institutions where
(in)justice reigns, where human spirits are being mangled, in the name of education
or correction or youth development. Collaborating with those who manage
to survive and some who resist, together we interrogate the very fabric of injustice
in the (mal)distribution of resources, respect, opportunities, shame, failure
and punishment. The work, in the end, even with permissions, approvals and
collaborations at the top, is often quite inflammatory, with vulnerability – no
matter how hard we try to anticipate the problems – unevenly distributed.
Fieldnote, early into the fourth year of our four year research project: Yesterday we
learned that many of the women on the prison research team had their cells
searched, papers thrown out, poetry destroyed. Some are being threatened with
transfer to a prison near the Canadian border, others to Solitary Confinement. Their
writings/their selves ripped from them, futures unclear. Demands that they testify
against each other in another trumped up charge just to send chills through the
institution. Will never quite understand the sadism of prisons . . . and will always
wonder if the research – the laughter, inquiry, easy sense of exchange among friends
so rare in prison – provoked a bit more outrage from the officers/administration
even though we’ve been so explicitly collaborative . . .
Over the past decade, a loose and growing PAR collective has sprung up at The
Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). We have designed
a number of PAR projects:
•
in a women’s prison in New York State, documenting the impact of college
on women in prison, the prison environment and on the women’s post-
release outcomes (see Fine et al., 2001; www.changingminds.ws);
•
in wealthy desegregated schools documenting the segregation within and in
impoverished communities excavating evidence of systematic educational
injustice (see Fine et al., 2004);
•
with mothers in under-resourced communities of the Bronx organizing for
educational justice (Guishard et. al., 2003);
•
with men who lead a street life (Payne, 2001);
•
with young women from the Lower East Side of New York ‘fed up’ with the
stereotypes that spew across their neighborhoods (Cahill, 2004);
•
with youth in Nepal building boys and girls clubs (Hart, 1997); and
•
with an elite university ostensibly working on ‘diversity’ issues (Torre,
2005).
Some of these projects have been designed for geographic and local depth, while
others trace the sprawl of domination and resistance across geography and scale
(Cahill, 2004; Fine, Tuck & Zeller Berkman, forthcoming; Katz, 2004).
In each setting, a series of ‘methods camps’ are launched so that we can
learn, together, the local history of struggle and develop a shared critical language
of social theory, feminist theory, critical race theory and methodology. Depend-
ing on age, immediate struggles and the nature of the research, we immerse ourselves
in the writings and speeches of Patricia Hill Collins (1991), Fannie Lou
Hammer (1964), Paolo Friere (1982), Orlando Fals-Borda (1979), Sandra
Harding (1983), Stuart Hall (1997), Martin-Baro (1996), Nancy Hartsock
(1983), Morton Deutsch (1974), Linda Thuwai Smith (1999) and others; we listen
to hip hop, review magazines and policy representations of youth; and study
civil rights histories and local campaigns.
Together, we craft the research questions, challenge each other to assure
that varied standpoints are represented in the original framing of the question,
and work through the specifics of design, data collection, analysis and products
‘of use’. With the tools of activist inquiry, an array of differences at the table, a
loose-always-fragile democratic spirit holding us, and an eye on action, we raise
up significant challenges to existing structural hierarchies that have been naturalized
as if inevitable, and we imagine how to interrupt and re-create conditions
toward justice. We take you into a PAR project launched in a women’s prison, to
reflect back on details that are typically escorted to the margins, tucked in the
folds, repressed in the unspoken memory or swept off the pages when final
reports are filed. And we remind you that the reason only Michelle and Maria
write this piece, for the research collective, is that women in prisons throughout
the, and those released, cannot speak many of the words spoken here, without
enormous retribution.
PAR behind barbed wires
In 1995, in the U.S., then President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control
and Law Enforcement Act which effectively stopped the flow of all federal dollars
(in the form of Pell Grants) that enabled women and men in prison to attend
college while in prison. As a result, at a maximum facility in New York State for
women, a vibrant 15-year-old college program closed, as did more than 340 other
programs nationwide. The air in the prison thickened, with a heavy sense of disappointment
and despair on the faces and in the bodies of women who had been
participating in the college, pre-college, GED, ESL and ABE courses. Concern
was expressed by some corrections officers who knew that college was foundational
to ‘peace’ in the prison.
Fieldnote: Couldn’t believe it, at a meeting with community people a corrections
officer, one of the sergeants actually said, ‘yeah, it’s [closing of college] a problem.
When there’s college, at night they’re reading. When there’s no college, at night
they’re fighting, and I find them biting each other.’
Within months, a group of prisoners, together with administration, community
volunteers and local universities, organized to resurrect college. Established in
1995, the College Bound program has been in place in the prison for almost 10
years, supported entirely by a private, voluntary consortium of colleges and universities.
A BA in Sociology is offered to the women, with faculty drawn from a
consortium of eight to 10 local colleges and universities. Today more than a third
of the women in the prison are enrolled, with many of the remaining women in
G.E.D. (high school equivalency) and pre-college courses.
The physical space of the Learning Center, the hub of the college, is
equipped with non-networked computers (with no internet), contributed books,
magazines, newspapers, and flags from colleges and universities in the consortium.
Here women will attest, ‘if I need help I can find it – even if that means
someone to kick me in the ass to get back to work and finish my papers’.
College fills every corner of the prison. In the ‘yard’ there are study groups
on Michel Foucault, qualitative research, Alice Walker. One woman told us that
after dusk, in her cell block, she could hear the staccato ticking of typewriter
keys late into the night; or a ‘young inmate may knock softly on [my] wall, at
midnight, asking how to spell or punctuate . . .’
Eighty percent of the women at this prison carry scars of childhood or adult
sexual abuse (Browne, Miller & Maguin, 1999). Most embody biographies of
miseducation, tough family and community backgrounds, long lists of social and
personal betrayals. College – even in prison – was an opportunity to learn to
trust, ask for help, revise the past, give to others and re-imagine the future. For
some, this was the first time such an opportunity was available, out from under
the thumbs of family or partner threats, violence and/or endless responsibilities
(Richie, 1996).
In 1995, Michelle was asked (by the ‘older’ prisoners who knew we could
no longer take the college program for granted) to conduct an evaluation of the
impact of college. It seemed all too obvious that a participatory design behind
bars would be nearly impossible – and essential. We consulted with the Superintendent,
who agreed with the design, after the New York State Department of
Correctional Services provided official approval. Rosemarie Roberts and Melissa
Rivera, then graduate students, taught a graduate seminar in the prison on
research methods in which a broad cross-section of 15 students crafted questions
of personal meaning concerning the impact of college in prison. With creativity
and varied subjectivities, they generated questions drawn at the intersection of
autobiography and the umbrella project question.
Their ideas for questions took varied forms, for example: What is the
impact of college on your religious beliefs? How does college change the lives of
women who have been abused by parents and/or men for most of their lives?
What is the impact of college on mothers? On children? On lesbians? How does
college affect young women from ‘bad’ high schools? What do the officers think
of the college program?
For each question generated by a student, five interviews with women of¨their own choosing were conducted with other prisoners (but they were not tape recorded as this is considered ‘contraband’). At the end of what many considered a rigorous course and others considered an exhilarating semester, we collectively
gathered 75 interviews. Seven of the 15 women opted to join the College in Prison
research collective.
The research team – Kathy Boudin, Iris Bowen, Judith Clark, Aisha Elliot,
Michelle Fine, Donna Hylton, Migdalia Martinez, ‘Missy’ Melissa Rivera,
Rosemarie A. Roberts, Pam Smart, Maria Elena Torre and Debora Upegui – met
every two to four weeks, over the course of four years, with some leaving for
other homes/prisons, all sharing a desire for college to be returned within prison
walls. We hailed from New York, Jamaica, Maine, Puerto Rico and Colombia.
We were convicted and not; immigrant and native; lesbian, straight, bi and all of
the above; victims of violence and accused of murder. Some of us lived on the
‘honors’ floor, some were ‘trackers’ (under constant surveillance), and some of us
could go home. All of us spoke English, and a number spoke Spanish too. We varied
about how much we cared about politics, activist research, nail polish, hair
and clothes, the approval of the warden and the long struggle for
justice. Encumbered by limitations to privacy, freedom, contact and time, we
inched toward a shared desire to climb over the walls that separated us, to carve
a small delicate space of trust and work. We spent our 9–11 am sessions laughing,
discussing, disagreeing, gossiping and writing, negotiating what was important
to study, speak, and to hold quietly among ourselves.
We engaged in what Paulo Freire (1982) would call ‘dialogue’ which
‘always submits . . . causality to analysis; what is true today may not be so tomorrow’
(p. 44). Freire sought to create educational spaces, in our case both a
community of learners (college) and a community of researchers (PAR collective),
in which ‘facts’ were submitted to analysis, ‘causes’ reconsidered and, indeed
‘responsibility’ reconceived in critical biographic, political and historical contexts.
The task was not merely to educate us all to ‘what is’, but to provoke
critical analysis of ‘what has been’ and release, as Maxine Greene would invite,
our imagination for ‘what could be’ (1995). We created what bell hooks would
call a ‘space of radical openness . . . a margin – a profound edge. Locating oneself
there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at risk. One
needs a community . . .’ (1995, p. 149).
We were such a community. The most obvious divide among us was free or
imprisoned, but the other tattoos and scars on our souls wove through our work,
worries, writings and our many communities. Despite our shared commitments,
the structures and waterfalls of white supremacy and global capital had washed
over our biographies and marked us quite differently.
Usually our differences enriched us. Sometimes they distinguished us. At
moments they separated us. We understood ourselves to carry knowledge and
consciousness that were, at once, determined by where we come from, and shaped by who we choose to be (Anzaldua, 1987; Collins, 1998; Harding, 1987;Smith, 1987). We had hard conversations about ‘choice’. Those of us from TheGraduate Center were much more likely to speak about structural explanations
of crime and mass incarceration, while the women in the prison were stitching
together a language of personal agency, social responsibility and individual
choice(s) within structural inequities. This was not a simple progressive versus
conservative ideological dance. These conversations and differences had everything
to do with privilege, surviving institutionalization, and waking up (or not)
to the images of bodies/screams in your past. (Please see Fine et al., 2001, 2003 to
hear how the ‘we’ developed, when it unraveled, and how we negotiated significant
differences among us. See these articles also for more detail on methods and
findings.)
We worked together for four years and elaborated a complex multi-method
design of archival research on years of college records and documents; nine focus
groups with current students and drop outs; 20 interviews with women on the
outside; interviews with a number of both sympathetic and hostile corrections
officers; surveys by faculty and university administrators; and a focus group with
adolescent children of prisoners. All of these methods were co-facilitated, to the
extent possible, by Graduate Center and ‘inside’ researchers. At the same time, we
asked the New York State Department of Corrections to undertake an extensive,
quantitative longitudinal analysis of 36-month recidivism rates for thousands of
women released from prison, stratified by those who participated in college and
those who didn’t (see Fine et al., 2001).
We refer you to the website for the full reporting of our methods and findings
(www.changingminds.ws). In brief, the material gathered was a strong confirmation
of the impact of college in prison on women, their children, ‘peace’ in
the prison, post-release outcomes, the leadership women provided in communities
post-release and the tax benefits saved by society not having to subsidize
those who return to incarceration (at $30,000 per year).
The New York State Department of Corrections conducted a longitudinal
study of 274 women prisoners who were enrolled in college prior to release and
compared them to 2031 women not enrolled in college prior to release (trying
to control for crime and level of education when they entered prison). In this
analysis, conducted over a 36-month period, recidivism rates dropped from 29.9
percent (without college) to 7.7 percent (with college). Further, from our focus
groups and surveys we learned that women, children, faculty and a number of
correctional officers spoke of the transformative changes that evolved in the
college culture and the women. Women in prison who have, for the most part,
spent the better (or worst) part of their lives under the thumbs of poverty, racism
and men, could, in college, ‘hear my own voice’ or ‘see my own signature’ or
‘make my own decisions’. The women, and their children, re-viewed themselves
as agents who had made certain choices, and could make other choices to repair
the wounds left behind. College students exhibited a kind of local leadership in
the prison, and post-release, launching projects on topics such as HIV/AIDS, education,
foster care, alternatives to incarceration, mothering from prison and the
teen program. With their research they were designing personal and social futures
not over-determined by the past.
The intimate relationships that knit us together as a research collective
brought a fever to the work. We were, of course, always watched. And we knew
that the futures of the program and our collaboration were always in jeopardy.
Too many tears, or bringing in too much food could provoke an officer to shut us
down. In a research meeting it was common for us to jog between hope/possibility
and despair/fear, as our collective unconscious wouldn’t allow us to settle
on the latter terms for too long. Sometimes, in a research meeting, or the graduate
course, we would pause as a research member detailed the difficulty of registering
new students eager to start the program with one or two courses, as she
silently feared the program might close before the students could graduate; as
another wept because her parents had traveled from Nevada to visit and the
paper work somehow couldn’t be found by a correction officer when her parents
arrived, so the visit had to be canceled; as we listened to details of a botched
kidney transplant; as we held each other because a mother serving 20 to life just
learned her son was selling drugs and she couldn’t stop him; as we discovered that
one of the students was sent to the Solitary Housing Unit because she tried to cut
herself; when we learned that a corrections officer and a civilian engaged in intimate
relations, were caught . . . and a woman prisoner was sent to solitary. Other
times we deliberately stayed clear of such conversations, keeping ‘on task’ as a
way to exert control where little was available. The context and physical environment
of our research was harsh, noisy and without privacy, by design.
We spent much time, as a research collective, discussing what is to be
gained from participatory action research. There are, of course, the instrumental
gains – insiders know more, know better and in more depth how an organization,
community and indeed a prison operates. PAR represents an exquisite and
elegant design for gathering up, legitimating and broadcasting subjugated knowledges
(Anzaldua, 1987; Bhavnani, 1994; Davis, 2003). Outsiders have the freshness
to ask the deliberately naive questions (Kvale, 1996), and have the relative
freedom to speak a kind of truth to power that may provoke new lines of analysis.
But rarely did we operate as two separate and coherent constituencies. Instead
we grew to be, over time, a group of women with very distinct and sometimes
overlapping commitments, questions, worries, rage, and theoretical and political
concerns.
At our rectangular, cramped, uneven wooden table in the Learning Center,
we huddled around smuggled fruits and butter-tastes-like-this-now? cookies, and
our writing. There were long, extended conversations held there, as other women
– students in the college program – completed research papers, studied for the
GED, tutored ‘new women’, and cared for their seeing-eye-dogs in an innovative
training program. Among our research collective, we would each bring in the
writing we had done, focused on our distinct sections and concerns. Two snippets
of conversation come to mind, revealing the complexity of democratic collaboration
in a para-military institution, as the Superintendent liked to remind us.
November 1999. We had just completed the interviews and focus groups, all collaboratively
facilitated by a prisoner researcher and an (outside) graduate student
researcher. The transcriptions were complete and our analyses emerging. Researchers
from The Graduate Center brought the codes into the prison to see if the women
would agree with the coding scheme. It seemed all was going well, when suddenly,
Judy asked, ‘So we get to collect the data, but you do the analysis? What kind of
division of labor is that?’ A delicate question, bathing in insight. In the name of
ethics and confidentiality, we had (unwittingly?) separated data collection from the
political and theoretical work of analysis. And so a[nother] long talk about power,
process and democracy ensued. We struggled to figure out a way to bring the transcribed
interviews into the prison and leave them there (prisoners have no access to
locked cabinets, and confidentiality would be violated if these interviews were
allowed to lay around for public viewing). With prisoner and outside collaborative
wit, figured it out.
March 2000. Later in our research process, we had completed the research and we
were trying to figure out how to write our text – single voiced, or multi-voiced?
Filled with the questions and contradictions of participatory work, or coherent and
authoritative? Stuffed with feminist complexity or social science parsimony? How
should we determine authorship – alphabetize? separate prisoner researchers and
Graduate Center researchers? put Michelle’s name first because of ‘legitimacy’?
don’t put some of the high profile prisoners’ names first because of concerns about
perceptions? Place the most ‘wanted’ of us all up front to demonstrate the power of
our collaboration???
Our primary goal was to convince the New York State legislature to restore funds
for college in prison programs. But we also wanted to produce materials of use
on college campuses, in other prisons, by prison advocacy groups, families of
persons in prison, etc. So we decided to craft multiple products. Our primary
document would be a single voiced, multi-method, rigorous and professionally
graphic designed report, available widely on a website (www.changingminds.ws)
with quotes and endorsements from people on the political Left and Right. The
prisoners wanted Michelle Fine to be the first name, and ‘Missy’ insisted that that
was the name she would use. This report was distributed to every governor in the
US and all the New York State Senators and members of the Assembly. We
would, as well, construct additional essays on feminist methodology (see for
instance, Fine et al., 2003) in which our contradictions would be interrogated,
and we produced 1000 organizing brochures in English and Spanish, which
carried a strong voice of advocacy with demands for justice and action. These
brochures were distributed across a series of community-based organizations,
national advocacy groups and colleges/universities. We created (and have sustained
for four years) a website where activists, organizers, students, faculty,
criminal justice administrators, prisoners and their families can download a full
copy of the report, loaded with photos, letters, charts, graphs, cost-benefit analyses
and the rich words of the women. To date, the website has been ‘hit’ more
than 5000 times, with the California State Department of Corrections ordering
50 copies of the report; feminist and critical education faculty assigning the report
in class; and a father whose daughter committed suicide in prison has decided
to sponsor a college in prison project, and he too ordered enough copies for a
number of administrators in his home state.
As we struggled with the section on who is the ‘we’ of the research collective,
Michelle naively offered, ‘What if we write, something like, “We are all
women concerned with violence against women; some of us have experienced,
most of us have witnessed and all are outraged.’’ To which Donna said, ‘Michelle,
please don’t romanticize us. Your writing is eloquent, but you seemed to have left
out the part that some of us are here for murder’. Another woman extended the
point, ‘And some of us for murder of our children’. The argument was growing
clear, ‘When we’re here and not here, in the college and back in our cells, we have
to think about the people affected by our crimes. We take responsibility and we
need you to represent that as well as our common concerns as women, as feminists,
as political . . .’
In prison, as in any institution under external surveillance, insiders know
the details of daily life, understand the laser-like penetration of external scrutiny,
and are more likely to refuse to simply romanticize that which happens within.
Indeed, in our collaborations it has been the prison-based researchers who recognized
that our design needed to include dissenting voices, narratives of critique
and perspectives from dropouts; prisoners and former prisoners who insist that
we talk about responsibility, choices and remorse.
Prison researchers were willing to ride the dialectic of structural and personal
explanations, and they were willing to call themselves and each other
on behaviors/comments that outsiders might have overlooked, ignored or been
nervous about challenging. Thus, prison-based researchers would interject in an
interview with another prisoner, ‘Are you kidding, you have changed? You just
got a ticket!’ or insist that we interview a correction officer known to be ambivalent
about or hostile to the college, or arrange an interview with a recently arrived
young woman member of a gang not yet ready for college.
As powerful as PAR has been behind bars, there are cautions. The prisoners
were always more vulnerable than we were as outsiders. Their poetry, books,
journals, favorite seasonings, letters from home and private documents were
searched, ransacked and tossed out when someone in administration decided to
exert power or tried to warn the women, in the sado-masochistic rhythm of prison, about what they were writing. And the critical consciousness that accompanies participatory research comes with anger, outrage, and a recognition of injustice that boils in prison. PAR speaks to an outside world, but often little
inside changes.
Other prisons have been developing college programs, and a number of
other states have relied upon the original model to craft their own. And yet back
at the original site of innovation, where the research took place, the vision has
been radically diminished. The commitments to prisoner participation and loose
sense of democracy have shriveled. There is still college, but the passion and
participatory politics that infused its birth have been stripped away. There is no
‘inmate committee’ to govern the college. While in the past educators or students
could donate used books, we hear about new rules requiring that books come
only from publishers (limiting the number and range of books likely to show up,
and hiking the price of those that do). And, now, although apparently not always
enforced, there is a ‘no hugging policy’.
The question of action/audience for PAR work remains slippery. Some
audiences view the work as more credible because of the diverse author list.
Others listen skeptically because the researchers were prisoners, the data were
qualitative, the story was too painful. At one state legislative hearing, the two of
us (Michelle and Maria) presented the findings and concluded,College in prison is morally important to individuals, families and communities;financially wise for the state, and it builds civic engagement and leadership in urbancommunities.
In fact, college in prison even saves tax payers money. A conservative
Republican, as well as your more progressive colleagues, should support these programs
. . . unless, of course, the point is simply to lock up Black and Brown bodies
at the Canadian border.
To which one of the more progressive state legislators responded, ‘Doctor, I’m
afraid that is the point. You know that in New York, downstate’s crime is
upstate’s industry.’ That is, the social fabric of New York State is divided by a
relatively white and rural ‘upstate’ and then substantial poverty and communities
of color ‘downstate’ in New York City (with pockets of urban poverty distributed
throughout the state). One analysis of prisoners suggested that 80 percent of New
York state prisoners come from eight communities in New York City. Thus, the
crime in the city produces the industry and jobs – hotels, bus, movies, restaurants,
correctional personnel, etc. – for the upstate population.
Prisons and their justifications have infected our national consciousness,
our national and the global economy. In modest response, in the midst of a
global struggle against the mass incarceration of people of color, and women in
particular, PAR offers an electric current through which critique and possibility
travel. PAR provides an interior legacy and power – within the prison and outside
– of respect for insider knowledge, and recognition of prisoner authority, expo-
sure of atrocity, a call for public responsibility. Participatory action research
projects are born in dissent, strengthened by difference, organized through a
bumpy democracy and motivated by a desire for contestation and justice.
Fast forward to 2005: 10 years since Clinton pulled the funds out of college
in prison, a research/policy/advocacy group of prisoners, former prisoners,
activists and researchers has reconvened to undertake a project on Long Term
women incarcerated for violent crimes. Participatory across spaces and times, and
a different women’s prison, we will be designing a project that removes the veil
from women who have committed or been charged with violent crimes, for them
to tell the stories of crime, responsibility and gender as they would tell them. At
the first session a number of long termers ‘within’ have asked that those of us on
the outside collect and disseminate their narratives and also investigate what has
happened to their male co-defendants . . . so many of whom were released while
the women remain in prison; that we investigate how it is that women plead
guilty while men refuse to plead and go to trial, receiving often lighter sentences;
that women ‘hid the gun’, men pulled the trigger and they both got long sentences;
that men ‘knew enough to turn state’s evidence and rat on the others’ and
so got reduced sentences, while women knew little and wandered off to prison;
that men who go to prison have women who raise their children, and women who
go to prison often lose their kids to foster care, with terminated parental rights –
a lifetime sentence.
We have been working with the Long Termers group within, and are creating
a Long Termers group of now-released women, all convicted of violent
crimes, to determine the gender politics of sentencing, long sentences, parole
decisions, and the collateral damage of the prison industrial complex. Another
current of PAR begins, to pierce the national anesthesia surrounding our policies
of mass incarceration.
On action: locating ourselves in longitudes and latitudes of PAR
To situate our PAR projects in the stretchy zone of global political struggles,
we like to think that we work on two planes at once. Our PAR prison work
circulates across meridians, maybe a latitude, of local and global networks, institutions
and social movements tied specifically to the struggle at hand, in this case,
the prison industrial complex and prisoners’ access to education. While every
research project is situated in a specific place or series of places, we work deliberately
to join our projects politically and theoretically with other prison reform,
youth organizing, and social justice projects.
Changing Minds was published on 10 September 2001 (Fine et al., 2001).
The report has been distributed at the Critical Resistance: Education not Prisons
conference, as well as in New Zealand, Wales, Alaska, Denver, California and
Chicago and at activist and scholarly meetings on prisons, schools, higher education,
critical epistemologies and methods. We have published articles as a
research collective on the findings, the methods and the significance of higher
education in the struggle for broadened conceptions of Affirmative Action (see
Torre, 2005). We have also presented on this work to more traditionally administrative
and faith-based organizations dedicated to parole reform, education
reform (in and out of prison), humane treatment, reduced sentencing, etc., meetings
of governors, legislative assistants and even correctional groups presumably
interested in ‘what works’.
Since that time, in the US and in New York State in particular (as well as
California soon thereafter), there have been some sharp and some subtle movements
toward education in prison. In part because states have noticed that their
budgets had been hijacked by the prison industrial complex, there has been a
slight softening of the ‘get tough on crime’ rhetoric. We collaborate and find
energy in the lateral capillaries of social struggle and policy change to which our
projects can attach, be transformed and educate.
Our PAR projects also travel along a second meridian, maybe a longitude
of universities and public media spaces in the US and beyond for democratic,
critical inquiry. These spaces are increasingly under siege. Material resources are
depleting and sites for academic freedom and critical social exchange are drying
up. As students and colleagues work under surveillance most prominently in
Middle Eastern Studies departments, cultural studies and the critical social
sciences, university-based PAR projects squat in a space where we can speak back
to the intellectual shrinkage and privatization of higher education.
As public media bend to the Right, radical newsletters, radio programming,
television and academic departments are under-funded and/or threatened. As the
RAE colonizes the academy in England, the National Association of Scholars
infects universities in the US. As conservative think tanks proliferate, research
funds privatize and militarize. We witness a not-so-slow drip feed that narrows,
under severe threat, that which is studiable, askable and publishable.
A neo-liberal paradigm is sweeping through the academy, publishing industry
and research foundations, conservatizing arguments about what constitutes
knowledge, validity, subjectivity, democracy, teaching, academic freedom and
research for meaning. The grounds of knowledge construction are shifting
seismically from under, as ‘expertise’ whitens, privatizes, and moves far north of
the site of embodied/oppressed knowing (Gaventa, 1993). The further from the
site of experience and the less ‘contaminated’ by critique, the more ‘reliable’ the
knowledge gleaned. Academic journals publish and the politics of textbooks roll
forward.
Common sense is being reconstituted before our eyes, through our schools,
the media, the state and the orchestrated global shifts to the Right. PAR work
nourishes, and is nourished, at the vibrant and exhausting intersection of local
and transnational social movements for democracy, difference and justice.
References
- Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Anzaldua, G. E. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco:Aunt Lute Press.
- Bhavnani, K. K. (1994). Tracing the contours: Feminist research and objectivity. In H.Afshar & M. Maynard (Eds.), The dynamics of ‘race’ and gender: Some feminist interventions (pp. 95–104). London: Taylor & Francis.
- Browne, A., Miller, B., & Maguin, E. (1999). Prevalence and severity of lifetime physical and sexual victimization among incarcerated women. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 22(304), 301–322.
- Cahill, C. (2004). Defying gravity? Raising consciousness through collective research.Children’s Geographies, 2(2), 273–286.
- Collins, P. H. (1998). Fighting words: Black women and the search for justice.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Collins, P.H. (1991). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.
- Davis, A. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.
- Deutsch, M. (1974). Awakening the sense of injustice. In M. Lerner and M. Ross(Eds.) The question for justice: Myth, reality, ideal. Toronto, ON: Holt,Rinehart and Winston.
- Doty, M. Z. (1916). Society’s misfits. New York: The Century Co.
- Fals Borda, O. (1979). Investigating the reality in order to transform it: The Colombian experience. Dialectical Anthropology, 4, 33–55.
- Fine, M., Roberts, R. A., Torre, M. E. with Bloom, J., Burns, A., Chajet, L., Guishard,M., Payne, Y. & Perkins, T. (2004). Echoes of Brown: Youth documenting andperforming the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: Teachers College Press.
- Fine, M., Torre, M. E., Boudin, K., Bowen, I., Clark, J., Hylton, D., Martinez, M.,‘Missy’ Rivera, M., Roberts, R., Smart, P. and Upegui, D. (2001). Changing minds: The impact of college in a women’s maximum security prison. Available at: www.changingminds.ws (accessed 21 July 2006).
- Fine, M., Torre, M.E., Boudin, K., Bowen, I., Clark, J., Hylton, D., Martinez, M.,‘Missy,’ Rivera, M., Roberts, R., Smart, P. & Upegui, D. (2003). Participatory action research: Within and beyond bars. In P. Camic, J. E. Rhodes & L.Yardley (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design (pp. 173–198). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
- Fine, M., Tuck, E., & Zeller-Berkman, S. (forthcoming). Do you believe in Geneva? In N. Denzin, L. T. Smith & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous knowledge. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
- Freire, P. (1982). Creating alternative research methods. Learning to do it by doing it.In B. Hall, A. Gillette & R. Tandon (Eds.), Creating knowledge: A monopoly (pp. 29–37). New Delhi: Society for Participatory Research in Asia.
- Gaventa, J. (1993). The powerful, the powerless, and the experts: Knowledge struggles in an information age. In P. Park, M. Brydon-Miller, B. Hall & T. Jackson (Eds.), Voices of change: Participatory research in the US and Canada (pp.21–40). Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
- Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Guishard, M., Fine, M., Doyle, C., Jackson, J., Roberts, R., Staten, S., Singleton, S.,& Webb, A. (2003). ‘As long as I got breath, I’ll fight’: Participatory action research for educational justice. The family involvement network of educators.Harvard Family Research Project. Available at: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/hfrp/projects/fine.html
- Hall, S. (1997). Making Diasporic Identities. In W. Lubiana (Ed.), The House that Race built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain. New York: Pantheon.
- Hammer, F.L. (1964). Testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer. In H. Zinn and A. Arnove(Eds.), Voices of a People’s History of the United States. New York: Seven Stories Press.
- Harding, S. (1983). Discovering reality: Feminist perspectives on epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, and philosophy of science. Dordrecht, Holland: D.Reidel.
- Harding, S. (1987). Introduction: Is there a feminist method? In S. Harding (Ed.),Feminism and methodology (pp. 1–14). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Harris, A., Carney, S., & Fine, M. (2001). Counter work: Introduction to ‘Under the covers: Theorizing the politics of counter stories.’ International Journal of Critical Psychology, 4, 6–18.
- Hart, R. (1997). Children’s participation: Theory and practice involving young citizens in community and environmental care. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
- Hartstock, N.C.M. (1983). Money, sex, and power: Toward a feminist historical materialism. New York: Longman.
- Hersh, S. (2004). Torture at Abu Ghraib: American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go? The New Yorker, 10 May. hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory from margin to center. Boston, MA: South End Press.
- Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Kvale, S. (1996). Interviews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing.Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
- Lykes, M. B. (2001). Activist participatory research and the arts with rural Maya women: Interculturality and situated meaning making. In D. L. Tolman & M.Brydon-Miller (Eds.), From Subjects to subjectivities: A handbook of interpretive and participatory methods (pp. 183–199). New York: NYU Press.
- Martin-Baro, I. (1996). Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Matsuda, M. (1995). Looking to the bottom: Critical legal studies and reparations. In. K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, & K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory:The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 63–79). New York: New Press.
- Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. London: Oxford University Press.
- Payne, Y. (2001). Black men and Street life as a site of resiliency. International Journal of Critical Psychology, 4(1), 109–122.
- Richie, B. (1996). Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of battered black women. New York: Routledge.
- Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston,MA: Northeastern University Press.
- Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples.London: Zed Books.
- Tolman, D., & Brydon-Miller, M. (2001). From subjects to subjectivities: A handbook of interpretive and participatory methods. New York: NYU Press.
- Torre, M. E. (2005). The alchemy of integrated spaces: Youth participation in research collectives of difference. In L. Weis & M. Fine (Eds.), Beyond silenced voices (pp. 251–266). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
- Torre, M. E., & Fine, M. (2006). Researching and resisting: Democratic policy research by and for youth. In S. Ginwright, J. Cammarota & P. Noguera (Eds.),Beyond resistance: Youth activism and community change: New democratic possibilities for policy and practice for America’s youth (pp. 269–285). New York: Routlege.
Michelle Fine is Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Urban Education and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Recent publications include Working methods: Social justice and social research (Routledge, 2005, with Lois Weis) and Echoes of Brown: Youth documenting and performing the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education (with Rosemarie A. Roberts, Maria Elena Torre, Janice Bloom, April
Burns, Lori Chajet, Monique Guishard, Yasser Payne and Tiffany Perkins-Munn,Teachers College Press, 2004). Address: The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA. [Email: mfine@gc.cuny.edu]
Maria Elena Torre is the chair of Education Studies at Eugene Lang College of The New School. Co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth documenting and performing the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Changing minds: The impact of college on a maximum security prison; she has been published in volumes such as Urban girls (NYU Press, 2006); Beyond silenced voices (SUNY Press, 2005), and Qualitative
research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design (American Psychological Association, 2003). Address: The Graduate Center, CUNY, Psychology, 6th floor, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA. [Email: metorre@yahoo.com]
