Justice-In-Education Initiative, Columbia University, New York, NY
I spent this summer interning at the Justice-In-Education Initiative (JIE) at Columbia University. JIE, which is a collaboration between the Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Center for Justice at Columbia, provides educational opportunities to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Although these opportunities happen at facilities across New York State, I primarily helped with workshops that JIE offered at Rikers Island this summer.
Throughout the summer, I supported JIE programming in all sorts of ways, but the thing I most enjoyed doing was helping facilitate twice weekly arts education workshops at Rikers Island with young adult men, young adult women, and adult men. This programming reached over one hundred incarcerated people and gave each person the opportunity to learn about the work of various artists of color as well as do art making.
For the month of June, JIE collaborated with the Studio Museum in Harlem to offer weekly workshops for adult men on Rikers Island. There could not have been a better way to begin my summer than by observing the way the art educator from the Studio Museum facilitated workshops. She was engaging, inclusive, and informative. Following her curriculum, we learned about Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Faith Ringgold and others using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) which invites participation in the classroom without judgment or any parameters of right or wrong. This style of discussion fostered trust amongst participants, and made for lively workshops. After our mini art history lessons, we would make art projects in the style of the artist we had just learned about. We all sat at tables, water-coloring, collaging, or drawing on any given week, chatting and getting to know one another.
Participating in these workshops as an intern taught me so much about the power art can have for therapy, storytelling, and empowerment, and I walked away more impassioned than ever that programming, specifically arts programming, needs to be offered with frequency in every carceral setting. The conversations I had with everyone, volunteers and students alike, were fascinating and formative. And in addition to all of that, I learned what it means to be a good teacher, to listen to a room, and to be flexible with what you’re doing in order to reach folks most effectively. To me, that looked like remembering everyone’s names and making people feel heard. It meant being clear and defining vocabulary, without being condescending. It meant being passionate and open.
With the Studio Museum/JIE workshops in mind, another intern and I worked to develop curriculum for art workshops with young adult men, age 18-21. Modeled off of the Studio Museum/JIE workshops, we introduced an artist of color at the beginning of each session, and then made a project based off of that. According to various reports, up to 95% of young people in New York City jails are people of color. Representation is so important in making possibility come alive, and modeling possibility in the arts is one of the important effects of these workshops. Therefore it was a natural next step to make our curriculums about artists of color. Over the course of these workshops, with the young adult men, we collectively made a quilt based on the work of Faith Ringgold, story-telling collages based on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, watercolor portraits in the style of Chris Ofili, architectural landscapes inspired by Julie Mehretu and more. At the end of the summer, we curated an exhibit of student work at Columbia.
Putting together an art exhibit taught me valuable skills and brought the work of incarcerated people to an outside audience. We intended for the exhibit to bring to the forefront the humanity of the artists, and I think we succeeded. Over the course of curating and hanging the exhibit, I learned how to mat and frame canvas, how to hang works at appropriate heights and places on walls, and how to write texts to frame the exhibit. It was such a unique opportunity to be able to help with that, and I feel grateful to have been part of the project.
I think JIE is an amazing program, along with the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia and the Center for Justice at Columbia more broadly. Especially sitting in on staff meetings at the Center for Justice, I was so inspired to see what an academic institution could potentially do to intervene in and engage with the criminal justice system. Having spent the summer learning about the work that Columbia is doing for New York City, I am ready to return to Williams and set to work making a similar impact in Berkshire County. I am so impressed with how the Center for Justice and JIE work to start dialogues and make positive changes in their community, and I feel ready to work for Williams to do the same.
I feel certain having completed this internship that I am going to dedicate my life to criminal justice reform. There is so much to be done. As I see it, the carceral state functions primarily as an excuse to perpetuate systemic inequity and assure the continuation of generational poverty. I know others in this country disagree with that stance. They argue that the carceral state functions to punish “bad” people. While I understand where these people are coming from, I fundamentally believe that this is a fallacy the state impresses upon its citizens to maintain authority and control. The people I worked with this summer in Rikers were not “bad,” not as I saw them, and certainly not technically. None had yet faced trial, and in our country, does that not mean they are innocent? Isn’t it such that one cannot be guilty until proven so? Following that logic, everyone I worked with at Rikers was innocent, and yet they were being held for weeks, months and even longer before they had access to trial. And whether or not these people committed the crimes they were accused of, being incarcerated in any capacity causes trauma, disrupts careers and destroys communities. As the American criminal justice system exists, there is no real capacity for reform nor is there room for justice. That needs to change.
I am grateful to go to Williams, to be able to spend meaningful time cultivating my mind and my critical thinking abilities. I am grateful to have had the opportunity this summer to acquire new tools for my metaphoric tool box, learning both from experiencing and leading workshops and from having conversations with colleagues about the work happening around me at Columbia. I am grateful that I will get to continue expanding my skills and my reach in my next years of schooling and beyond. I am grateful to have the power of an institution behind me. I am so grateful for the generous support of the Public Service Internship Program Fund for making all of this possible. I feel the urgency of criminal justice reform, and I am ready to take action.