Words Is a Powerful Thing

Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail

Brian Daldorph

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780700632169
• eBook ISBN: 9780700632176
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Social Sciences

A Kansas Notable Book

Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at the jail for the foreseeable future was mid-March 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown; the virus is taking a heavy toll in confined communities like nursing homes and prisons. Words Is a Powerful Thing is Daldorph’s record of teaching at the jail for the two decades between 2001 and 2020, showing how the lives of everyone involved in the class—but especially the inmates who came to class week after week—benefited from what happened every Thursday afternoon in that jail classroom, where for two hours inmates and instructor became a circle of ink and blood, writing together, reciting their poems, telling stories, and having a few good laughs.

Words Is a Powerful Thing brings into the light the works of fifty talented inmate writers whose work deserves attention. Their poetry speaks of “what really matters” to all of us and gives the reader sustained insight into the role that creativity plays in aiding survival and bringing positive change for inmates, and, in turn, for all of us. Daldorph’s account of his teaching experience not only takes the reader inside the daily life at a county jail but also sets the work done in the writing class within the larger context of inmate education in the US corrections system, where education is often one of the few lifelines available to inmates. Words Is a Powerful Thing provides a teaching guide for instructors working with incarcerated writers, offering an extensive examination of both the challenges and benefits.

When Brian Daldorph decided the story of his classroom experiences and the great writing produced by the inmates deserved to be told to wider audiences, he struggled with how to bring it all together. Not long after, an inmate wrote a poem titled “Words Is a Powerful Thing,” offering Daldorph a title, concept, and purpose: to show that the poetry of inmates speaks not just to other inmates but to all of us.

Chapter 1

“Imagination Knows No Cinder Blocks”

Education Inside the Walls

I breach this cell with every thought I think—

imagination knows no cinder blocks.

—Vogue Rogue, “The Asylum of Psyche (or Free Cell),” Douglas County Jail Blues

Writing was water that cleansed the wound and fed the parched root
of my heart.

—Jimmy Santiago Baca, Working in the Dark

Thursday morning, 11:00 a.m., January 2015, at my desk at home, two hours before I teach the writing class at Douglas County Jail in Lawrence, Kansas.

I wonder who has signed up for class this week. Some inmates I’ll know; some might be returning after a long time away, and I’ll be pleased to see them and yet not pleased to see them because meeting someone in jail means, of course, he’s in trouble. One inmate back in class last week told me he’d had big losses.

Will Shane Crady be back in class with his thick folder of jailhouse poetry a little bulkier with new poems after another week’s writing in his cell? Last week in class, he pulled from the folder a new poem, “The Longest Short Walk”: “I’m writing this about a walk I’ve had to make./It’s been the most challenging feat I’ve ever come across.” As always, when he read his poetry like it meant so damn much to him, we were right there with him on his poetic walk.

Will Hobo Rick join us again today, with more tales of hopping trains, riding across the continent in winter, staying warm on the floor of the unheated carriage by curling up in his torn sleeping bag? Last week he told us about working on a chain gang down south. Lean, tattooed, hard-eyed, with skin toughened by mean weather, Hobo Rick claims he’s seen, in his travels, things no one else has ever seen. He tells us about them in his stories and poems.

Will rapper Jesse James blow us away again, punching away like Eminem with his syncopated lines and rhymes, like his poem last week about playing tic-tac-toe against himself, “and/I don’t play fair so I’m always winnen’”?

Will Ishtia Maza be there? He’s a Standing Rock Sioux warrior worn down and weary from hard living on the street. But I know he has the office of fire keeper at the annual Haskell Indian Nations University powwow and that fire glints in his eyes when he reads his poetry in class, like his poem “Love,” starting, “Omaha wakes up at home with a huge/hangover,” or his poem “The Greyhound Trip,” about taking a bus to Wichita to see the “frozen two-hearted river with the big/chief in the middle . . . one of my heroes, the Flame Keeper.” I look forward to imbibing more of his wisdom.

Michael Harper might be back in class to recite or even sing a cappella perhaps the best-known poem from my two decades of weekly Douglas County Jail classes: “My name is methamphetamine but you can call me speed/I last so much longer than cocaine and I’m so much better than weed.” It’s the poem all the inmates want to hear when Harper’s in class, the poem they tear out of copies of the class anthology, Douglas County Jail Blues, in the jail library. For too many of them, it hits close to home.

I hope Jim will be in class again today, an inmate I first worked with more than ten years ago and one of the keenest writers. After last week’s class, Jim told me that after his last stint in Douglas County Jail and a long prison sentence, he got out, got married, had a son, and made a good life, but then it all went off the rails again. He used to tell me that he was the best meth cook in the county. Said he cooked meth for his mother to help her ease the awful pain of her arthritis.

Will some young inmate we’ve never seen before come to class and hit us with the power of his poetry, the cool blast of his rap? Maybe this quiet kid will go on to outwrite Baca, American Book Award winner, king of ex-con poets! The kid’s success in class will lift his spirits and the spirits of other inmates, many of them struggling to keep going during more days and weeks of incarceration. The kid’s words might disperse some of the fog of depression at the jail.

I’ve met so many inmates in my decades teaching the class and often wonder where they are now and how many hauled themselves out of trouble. I do know that some of the inmates I’ve worked with are incarcerated in other jails or serving prison sentences. Some are “on the outs” trying to live their lives with wives and girlfriends watching closely in case they screw up again and with kids they’re not sure they can raise any better than they were raised. Some ex-inmates are in other states, trying their fortunes elsewhere. A few of them are dead, and not just the older ones. Their names do not appear on a wall of honor. One inmate I’d gotten to know well, with his frequent appearances in class, was shot and killed in Lawrence, high on meth, after new charges had been filed against him. His murder was on the front page of the Lawrence Journal-World. The last poem he wrote in class was for his young daughter. Ghosts, ghosts, but they did leave words behind.

I look at the clock. It’s almost time to go. I check my bulky orange plastic jail class folder. A few copies of poems from recent classes in case an inmate who missed a day wants to see his work in print. A plastic twelve-inch ruler and bunch of yellow-and-black-striped Staedtler pencils. My University of Kansas (KU) ID for the front desk. Last week’s poems typed up, ready to hand out in today’s class. Ready.

Half an hour later, inside the Douglas County Jail classroom, I watch the last man in the line of inmates in orange jumpsuits shuffle in, a stocky, owl-faced guy with a shaved head: Antonio Sanchez-Day. He has a distinctive tattoo on his neck that says “Delores” and a beige folder under his arm that he brings every time. He’s been coming to class for months now, and he’s become one of the most prolific—and best—writers in the class. He sits quietly and extracts from the folder several sheets of paper with neatly written lines on the top page. He sets them on the desk in front of him and bows his head to read through the poem one more time. No doubt he’s been working during the week on a new piece he wants to share with us. His life was changed when Programs Director Mike Caron introduced him to Baca’s poetry, at a time when Sanchez-Day’s wounds needed cleaning and his heart was thirsty, and he thought poetry was about nothing but puppy dogs and balloons. Baca inspired him to write about what happened to him on the streets and showed him it was possible to find a tough language to describe it.

The twelve or so inmates settle into their desks, organized into a loose circle in the center of the jail classroom. They pass around handouts of last week’s poems and copies of the class rules. I look around at hard-used faces, “tattered and battered” (as one inmate will later write), even the young guys in the circle. A lot of tattoos, most of them homemade, and the sort of jaded look we most often see here—substance abuse is exhausting, as is incarceration.

But there is a sense of excitement, crackling energy in the air. This is going to be a good class.

Douglas County Jail in Lawrence, Kansas, is one of more than 3,000 jails and almost 2,000 state and federal prisons that make up the huge US corrections system. Estimates vary on the number of inmates in US jails and prisons and on the cost of incarcerating them there, but statistics for the year 2016 set the figure at around 2.2 million inmates. This means that out of every 100,000 Americans, 655 were incarcerated that year at an overall cost of $81 billion a year, though that rises to as much as $182 billion per year when policing and court costs and support by families to incarcerated loved ones are included.¹ Additionally, almost 5 million adults in 2013 were on probation or parole, meaning that almost 7 million Americans were under correctional supervision that year (probation, parole, jail, or prison).² Between 1980 and 2010, the number of incarcerated Americans rose from approximately 500,000 to almost 2.5 million, largely because of government-initiated wars on crime and drugs, disproportionately affecting minority communities.³ Though the incarcerated population is under the authority of “departments of correction,” many critics argue that little correcting is done in correctional facilities. As Baca writes in his foreword to Undoing Time: American Prisoners in Their Own Words: “We are all connected to a national madness that absurdly expects prisoners to change for the better as we deep-freeze them in six-by-nine cells and torture them in inhumane environments. We seek to reduce crime while we do everything in our power to create it.”⁴

Baca then argues for the worth of inmate writing programs, which can bring about substantial changes for the better—as happened in his own situation. He says that through the redemptive act of writing, inmate writers “announce to the world beyond the walls and bars that a spark of life still burns in them.”⁵ Through writing, they might become “meaningful human beings in a society that had branded them as nothing more than worthless criminals.”⁶ I have often seen transformations like this in inmates in my writing class at Douglas County Jail. They have the opportunity in the class—a rare opportunity in their lives, as they often say—to tell their stories, to write about and talk about what matters most to them. They often find it hard to believe that anyone, even their classmates, could be interested in what they say; they’re just writing about the bad experiences that have gotten them locked up in jail, with three hots and a cot (three meals a day and a bed in a cell). But these poems from their guts, from their bones, from their blood often make a big impact on other inmates and themselves. I don’t claim that with the magical powers of language and literature the inmates suddenly acquire new lives and lay to rest all their demons. Their demons are persistent, and inmates often return to jail—and to the class—a few months after they’re released. But I do know that many inmates say the class enabled them to get through the hard times of their confinement by giving them something to look forward to every week, two hours of their jail time well spent. In writing, they begin to face up to their troubles rather than succumbing to them. Word by word, word by word, they take steps toward change, glad to be moving in the right direction.

Inmates in the US corrections system, including those I work with at Douglas County Jail, have often struggled in society in general and the education system in particular. Disabilities (particularly mental health disabilities) are common; the number of disabilities in an incarcerated population is considerably higher than in the general population. In her article “Disabled Behind Bars,” Rebecca Vallas argues that the widespread closure of state mental hospitals over the past six decades, without public investment in community-based alternatives, has swept people with disabilities—particularly mental health conditions—into the criminal justice system.⁷ Vallas states that jails and prisons now house three times as many people with mental health conditions as are cared for in state mental hospitals. According to US Bureau of Justice statistics, inmates in jails and prisons are three or four times as likely to have a disability as are nonincarcerated people. These disabilities have often caused them to fall through the cracks of the US education system.⁸ In general, people in US prisons have less education than does the general population. In 2004, 36 percent of inmates in state prisons had less than a high school diploma, compared with 19 percent of the general population. To some extent, incarceration provides opportunities for inmates to catch up on what they have missed in education, one of the main ideas behind inmate instruction.⁹ By improving the skills of inmates, supporters argue, education makes inmates more employable and better able to reenter society after their release. Critics of education for the incarcerated often criticize such programs as being “soft” on crime; they call for reduction in educational opportunities for the incarcerated. Congress eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners in 1994, ending public funding for tertiary education in prisons, a move Patrick Alexander calls the “institutionalization of educational deprivation in the contemporary U.S. prison.”¹⁰

Of course, there are substantial barriers to prison education. Classes often contain inmates with large variances in age, educational level, and interest—all problems my teaching colleagues and I have encountered in the Douglas County Jail writing class. Because of security issues, jail and prison administrators are often reluctant to mingle different-security-level inmates in the same class. (In February 2019, after almost twenty years of my class combining medium- and minimum-security-level inmates, the administration at Douglas County Jail decided that the two security levels could no longer be combined in one class.) Inmates often get transferred between correctional facilities and therefore can no longer attend. Often there’s limited space in jails and prisons for classes and lack of educational facilities in prison libraries. Yet despite these difficulties, those of us who teach classes for inmates find a level of interest and commitment among our students that outweighs what we find in other places of education. I remember one inmate telling me that after he’d decided to turn his life around, he’d taken every class he could get into in jail and prison, with the hope that he might learn something in each class that he could use for self-improvement. He said he was hungry to learn.

There’s considerable evidence that education programs in correctional facilities—such as the writing class at Douglas County Jail, for example—reduce the recidivism rate of former inmates. According to the largest-ever meta-analysis of correctional education studies, sponsored by the US Departments of Education and Justice: “Prison inmates who receive general education and vocational training are significantly less likely to return to prison after release and are more likely to find employment than peers who do not receive such opportunities.”¹¹ Researchers found that inmates who participate in education programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison than those who do not, though there is not yet enough evidence to determine which educational programs perform the best with regard to reduction of recidivism. Reduction of this rate is important because recidivism remains high in the United States; four out of ten inmates return to prison within three years of release.

My involvement with inmate education at Douglas County Jail began in December 2001, when I covered a class for my two colleagues at KU, Kirk Branch and Anna Neill, both young assistant professors at the time. They had started teaching a GED completion class soon after the jail opened in 1999, but by the time I took over in spring 2002, it had morphed into a creative writing class. Neill, who would later become chair of the English Department at KU, said that right from the start, the jail class had a very different energy than did her university students:

What was really striking and unexpected, perhaps, just because I didn’t know what to expect, was how immediate the rewards of teaching were compared to the college environment where often you don’t even know what impact you’ve had. Maybe you’ll get a letter from a student ten years later, but probably you won’t. The sense of just the visible exci...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “Imagination Knows No Cinder Blocks”: Education Inside the Walls
• 2 “What Truly Matters”: Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail, Lawrence, Kansas
• 3 “Sing Soft, Sing Loud”: The Literature of US Jails and Prisons
• 4 No “Snitches,” No “N-Word”: Rules of the Class
• 5 “Self-Expression, Self-Destruction”: Creative Writing Class, May 18, 2017
• 6 “In This Circle of Ink and Blood/We Are for Awhile, Brothers”: A Poem a Year—Inmate Poetry 2001–2017
• 7 “My Name Is Methamphetamine”: Douglas County Jail Blues, Volumes 1 and 2
• 8 “[The] Automatic Connection Between Inmates in Class and Mr. Cash”: Johnny Cash’s Hurt
• 9 Maine Man: Mike Caron, Programs Director, Douglas County Jail (2001–2015)
• 10 “It Don’t Get More Real Than That”: The Poetry of Antonio Sanchez-Day
• 11 “Mainly I Just Want to Help People Because No One Helped Me”: Sherry Gill, Programs Director, Douglas County Jail (2015–)
• 12 “I Done Good and I Done Bad”: Topeka’s Bad Man from the Badlands, Gary Holmes
• 13 “It Really Is a Form of Counseling, in a Sense”: Mike Hartnett
• 14 “It’s Just So Much More Than a Poetry Class”: Visitors
• 15 “Don’t Carry Much with Me No More”: The Songs of Troubadour Joe Parrish
• 16 “The Creativity Faucet Is Still On, and We Are All Drippin’ Wet in Poetry!”: Last Words (for Now)
• Epilogue
• Appendix A. Reflections from Former Writing Class Volunteers, Douglas County Jail
• Appendix B. Permission Form, Douglas County Correctional Facility: Poetry Anthology
• Notes
• Back Cover