The prison separation was where it could be the same. Now gold who
Every Monday for more than a decade of time, I left my house on the island of Peaks, Maine, I boarded a phrase to the city and then drove inward to the reformist Maine to lead the creative writing separation for imprisoned women.
After 30 minutes by car, stop my car, walk to the facility, leave my mobile phone and keys with the reception office guard, and walk through a metal detector and several groups of sliding doors until I got to the unit of women. My semester is a small space and bare bones, with plastic chairs, Cinderblock walls and fluorescent lights.
I am studying a roundabout. Many of the drug -related crimes and leave after a few months. Others, like life, are always present. After all these years, we are more like siblings than co -workers. we Sees Some of us.
My students write about addiction, hope, survival and abuse. They write about their childhood and children. Writing about the foods they miss, and the sex they still want. They write to remember themselves, to restore their identities as human beings instead of rap sheets.
For months, I had a new student, a sexual transgender woman. Ashley was long and accurate with her makeup, and unreasonable flour. On one of the two, I passed the jazzercise category on my way and monitored it through the glass: matrix, cheerful, sweat, dance with the abandonment. A towel retreated on one shoulder, and retreated to the separation directly. After a few weeks in the semester, I gained her confidence, and one day she shared it with me: “I used to look at the mirror and ask,” Who are you? “Now look and say,” there are you. “
She told me that, it is irony that the woman’s prison was the first place she felt herself. Ashley was welcomed as it was by other imprisoned women, with open weapons. She said, “They teach me how to be a woman.”
This is not a procedural transformation that you find in the report of issuing rulings, but it is a deep, internal, transformative, emotional, psychological, even existence. It is a kind of change in healing, in feeling safe, and in the end others see it as who are you really. This type of safety is rare inside the prison walls, and this is exactly what was just seized: in April, the federal government canceled more than $ 1.4 million in financing a grant from the Ministry of Reforms in Main. the reason? The state included a passing woman in a women’s facility, after medical recommendations and the law of disposal of rape in the federal prison.
The woman, Andrea, was walking in constant fear in the men’s prison. She also said that she was in the unity of a woman, she finally felt vision and safety. The Ministry of Justice did not see it in the Trump administration in this way. During the era of the Public Prosecutor, Bam Bondi, Maine announced compliance with the “agency’s priorities”. Punishment: Reducing financing, not just any financing, but the programs that have succeeded. Programs that heal and transformed life.
Gold: The drug use initiative serves more than 300 imprisoned people, which was vital in a country affected by high rates of opioid addiction. Gold: The Re -Entry Program is designed to reduce apartments through community support. He went: The Double Project, through which the professional musicians helped mothers imprisoned in writing songs for their children.
None of these programs was symbolic, and the lifeline was.
Other countries are watching. Some will fall into the queue, but a few of them can risk losing the financing that supports their already hollow systems. But who did not bow, and this matters. When the state refused to transfer Shelli to a men’s facility, the federal government – not against policy makers, but against mothers, restored addicts, reviews, and artists. Those who lose at least, and who continue to lose anyway.
I was also cut from teaching in prison. Most of us were suspended from volunteers: a 23 -year Bible teacher, the elderly coordinator in prison, and the list continues. After more than a decade of volunteer work, I was suspended from facilitating creative writing workshops, my evil was canceled, and my relationships were cut off because I invited my students. I was not suspended due to budget discounts. I was suspended because I talked. Because I asked a lot of questions, pushed for dignity, and treating imprisoned women like their lives.
The semester has now gone. My volunteering badge will not go beyond security anymore. I have no way to reach my students, including Ashley, anymore. Any spiral mail that I send back to me by reading the character: “Return to the sender: not to be allowed inside.”
But I can still write this.
I think the prison should be a place for rehabilitation instead of decline and revenge. I still believe in what we were building in this Cinderblock room. Writing is a form of reform. This dignity does not end at the prison gate. Women like Ashley, Chile and any other woman deserve to see themselves are reflected, not only in mirrors, but in politics, on the possibility.
The last time I saw Ashley, I was walking to the semester. She was finishing jazz, long, happy and glowing with sweat. We saw each other through the glass wall and wave. Then she reached the semester, sat and waited for her to join me on the table.
No address
A poem by Ashley Bushi (with permission to share it)
… we are the grass blades that stand in front of the changing winds with the bending ability full of curvature, however they never explode. We follow the winds that follow the wind, are looking for the perfect observation that we are looking for.
We are ocean waves, which are transferred to new lands whose speed, size and strength are constantly imposed by giving the storm and high tide. Just to be washed on the beach. Not ended. New and new to start again. Just to find that all the lessons are lost, because, as we changed, did that everything else.
We are the bottle with the message. When it is finally opened, there is only an empty page and a pen. Then we realize, of course it is empty. How can we write what Undreamt is? We are the solution. We are anomaly. We become one.