Special Issue: The Beautiful Prison: Volume 64

This essay draws from the personal experience of a man held in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for over 30 years. The author attempts to grasp how and what manner of beauty might be conceived inside an environment that has grown more sterile, less humane, and more violent over the past three decades.

Thirty men from the maximum-security Jessup Correctional Institution (Maryland), and Drew Leder, Professor of Philosophy, through small-group discussion, envision an alternative and authentically constructive institution. Uncomfortable with the notion of a truly “beautiful” prison, the group develops ideas of an “enlightened” prison, designed in counterpoint to the de-habilitating and destructive features of the existing prison. The enlightened prison would embody five core virtues: hope, growth, recognition of merit, individuality, and community. In the absence of these attitudes – all too often a characteristic of current-day institutions – there persists the “endarkened” prison, marked by despair, stasis, recognition of demerits, class-ification, and isolation.

This paper considers a peer education initiative through which incarcerated men provide English as a Second Language instruction to other incarcerated men. Programs such as this are sometimes criticized for objectifying and exploiting their incarcerated participants. I argue that prison programs that support the demonstration of competence and meaningful collective action can bring out the best in their students, transform the climate of the institutions that house them, and promote progressive social change. This study suggests how thoughtfully designed prison programs can create communities committed to personal growth, social responsibility, and engaged citizenship.

This essay documents the experience of teaching a course on the Holocaust to incarcerated men. It asks whether teaching about violence inside an institution that responds to and is rooted in violence can produce something transformative for students and teachers; it also asks what it means to initiate this project as a German raised under communism near the Berlin Wall. Situated in critical discussions of the utopian/rehabilitative role of prison education, the essay insists on grounding in reflective and personal experience. It thus contributes to discussion of the ethics of humanist education and pedagogies of hope in prison and beyond.

Metaphorically, the garden invokes a repertoire of skills, arts, and virtues that run counter to the act of confinement but are embedded in its disciplinary practice: spaces in punitive environments where care, growth, health, and cultivation are emphasized. Gardens and the force of law and labor are foregrounded in Judeo-Christian myths, in slavery, and in prison farms as spaces of expulsion and brutality. Yet as abandoned, fortress-style prisons dilapidate, and vines and weeds break through concrete, we can begin to ask, What might it mean to imagine the prison through the lens of the garden?

This essay takes the cross-bayou, architectural face-off between the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) and Houston’s Harris County Jail (HCJ) as an occasion to imagine the jail reconstructed as a site for restorative social-justice programs – programs that invite the community inside as does the open-enrollment university. The essay exercises a concretely located yet utopian imagination that refigures jail and university as kindred and symbiotic institutions. It envisions, story by story, how HCJ might be repurposed as “Un-UHD”: a center for the social justice activities serving the nation’s fourth largest city.