Minutes before I walked through the barbed wire security gates at Lancaster's California State Prison - L.A. County (LAC) somebody asked whether I felt scared.
Earlier, while making small talk with the prison's Public Information Officer and other media personnel in the entrance hall, I mentioned I had never been inside before. Had we been standing somewhere else my comment might've been interpreted differently, but at LAC inside has only one connotation, a clear cut marker of privilege. You're either inside - one of the approximately 2.3 million Americans currently incarcerated - or you're not. You're outside, one of the lucky ones. You're free.
In response to this question, I made sure to clarify. I was jittery from all the coffee I drank during the 70-mile drive from Los Angeles that morning, not scared. Fear is not an emotion I typically reserve for theater productions, which is why I was being escorted past the visitation room and into the prison's B-Yard gymnasium in the first place.
I had been invited to watch an all-inmate performance of Strindberg Laboratory's original play Redemption in Our State of Blues, the result of over six months of writing and workshopping with a group of twenty-two LAC inmates. Strindberg's drama class within LAC, as well as other arts workshops facilitated by professional artists in as many as twenty prisons across the state, is part of the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation's efforts to reinstate comprehensive Arts-in-Corrections programming in collaboration with the California Arts Council. The return of Arts-in-Corrections signals the CDCR's recent focus on in-prison rehabilitation as a way to reduce recidivism and the state's colossal prison system.
Twenty prisons across the state are part of California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation's efforts to reinstate comprehensive Arts-in-Corrections programming in collaboration with the California Arts Council. Photo by Adriana Widdoes
Established in 1993, California State Prison - L.A. County is a maximum security men's prison with the majority of its 3,538 total inmates designated as Level IV, the highest possible security level outside of solitary confinement. This includes Strindberg's cast, which is made up of men ranging in age from their early thirties to mid-fifties. They are African American, Latino, Samoan, and Vietnamese, clad in prison blues and tattoos, and all are serving impossibly long sentences, often for violent, gang-related crimes. I interviewed one inmate named Terryance who said he'd been sentenced to 388 years for robbery, his first conviction as an adult. Another inmate I met had been locked up since he was sixteen years old, so long ago that he couldn't tell me exactly how many years he still had left inside. He said ten, maybe thirteen.
Though they tended to speak of their crimes in vague terms during my interviews, most of the inmates I met were eager to have their voices heard by someone on the outside. Their eagerness was palpable and overwhelming. They swarmed around me to have their pictures taken, gradually inviting more and more fellow inmates into the frame until I assured them I had photographed every possible iteration of the cast. They were concerned whether I'd have enough time to interview everyone. I responded optimistically but realized quickly there was not enough of me to go around.
Michael Bierman and Meri Pakarinen (pictured on the right), directors of the Strindberg Laboratory, worked closely with inmates at Lancaster's California State Prison for 6 months to produce an original play. Photo by Adriana Widdoes.
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According to Strindberg's directors Michael Bierman and Meri Pakarinen, this outpouring of camaraderie and enthusiasm was not always the case among the inmates. Both long-time theater actors, Michael and Meri began their drama workshop at the prison in August 2015 after being awarded a CDCR-funded contract by the California Arts Council. They said the transformation they've witnessed since then has been night and day. They work with each other. Their focus is greater. They know what to do creatively more, explained Biernan. They have a voice and they've started to find what they want to say.
What they want to say has been written directly into the play, which dramatizes biographical scenes from many of the inmates' lives before and after they were locked up. The focus is not only where they've been - orphaned, homeless, fighting in Afghanistan and in professional boxing matches - but where they might be going if they can be forgiven of their mistakes.
In one heartbreaking scene, an inmate named Edgar finds his father dead at home as a young boy. He proceeds to bear his father's metaphorical crown, attempting to follow his father's positive example throughout his troubled teenage years living in group homes around L.A. County. The crown is later taken away upon Edgar's arrest by the LAPD - they say he doesn't deserve it. Only when Edgar sees himself as more than just a criminal, as a human being with flaws and a past, is he able to wear the crown again.
When I spoke with Edgar before the performance, we discussed the emotional benefits he'd found through the workshop. Edgar is thirty-one, but this is the first official arts program he's had the opportunity to enroll in since he was locked up ten years ago. He is proud of how far he's come from his angry and drug-addicted adolescence and spoke of his former struggles candidly, allowing them space in the room, airing them out. I look at this like a resource, Edgar said. Instead of having to reach to something negative to escape, I reach to something positive. It's not dipping back into that negativity that just dete
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Minutes before I walked through the barbed wire security gates at Lancaster's California State Prison - L.A. County (LAC) somebody asked whether I felt scared.
