The Prisoner and the Pen
Esquire, September 29, 2023: The Prisoner and the Pen
“It was the first weekend in June, and I was sitting on a bench in the yard with Robert Lee Williams, who has long dreadlocks and a face with sharp features, almost too pretty for prison. He used to be a Blood, now he's looking to be a freelance prison journalist like me. He had recently published his first piece, about losing his friend in prison to a drug overdose, in the Prison Journalism Project. He hung his head, gloomy about the news of the new directive: the New York state prison system, with one stroke of a bureaucratic pen, had instituted an approvals process for creative work — paintings, poetry, feature journalism — so laborious that it would deter the most creative minds in New York prisons.
“It had been about a month since, in May 2023, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision surfaced this oddly titled ‘Creative Arts Projects’ directive. When a New York Focus reporter asked me about it, I hadn't seen the directive, hadn't known it existed. But apparently, we were now required to send officials our work for approval before submitting it to editors, and even publications were required to ask permission to publish us. There were restrictions, too: no sexual or gang-related materials; any proceeds had to go to a nonprofit for victims; no negative portrayals of ‘law enforcement officers or DOCCS in a manner which could jeopardize safety or security’ allowed; and no depictions of our crimes.
“Robert was in prison for stabbing his girlfriend. After a night out in Poughkeepsie, he and his girlfriend were arguing. She stabbed him. He stabbed her. He almost died. She did die, and he was convicted of manslaughter. Last year, Robert transferred to Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum security in the Catskills where I live, and he sent a message asking me to come to the yard and meet him. I was by the pull-up bar a few days later when he introduced himself. He’d been in prison about 12 years. He’d read the chapter about me in The Sentences That Create Us, a craft book by PEN America, and it inspired him to want to be a prison writer. I told him I’d work with him if he promised to always be accountable, not only with his commitment to the work but also to account for his crime on the page.”
Additional reading:
PEN America’s The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer's Life in Prison on bookshop.org
The Nation, June 8, 2023: New York’s Prison System Abruptly Halts a Policy Censoring Artists and Writers
