Books Behind Bars

Behind the stone walls of detention centers and prisons lies a population that most never think about, or one that is often thought of in a negative light. However, the Humanities Prison Initiative Creative Inquiry project, mentored by Dr. Nancy Paxton-Wilson from the Department of English, refuses to let this population’s presence be overlooked. This project explores various topics such as the history and realities of incarceration.

The Creative Inquiry team works closely with the campus organization, Clemson Humanities Prison Initiative. While both possess extensive knowledge on incarceration, the Creative Inquiry students have a research focus. Currently, their research focuses on creating a map that portrays the different areas at Clemson that were built by convict labor, investigating the declining conditions in prisons and the realities of life in prison.

The team collaborates with people at Philips State Prison in Buford, Georgia and Greenville Detention Center. Here, they get first-hand accounts of what the realities and issues are in prisons. They learned that the conditions in prisons are alarming. Issues such as understaffing, food shortages, lack of proper training and absent medical, mental health and addiction services are common occurrences within prisons. The team aims to leverage their research to educate others on the realities of the prison system and advocate for necessary improvements.

Along with their research projects, students in the Creative Inquiry project collaborate with the organizational club to offer an educational course, similar to a first-year composition class, at the Greenville Detention Center. Incarcerated students read novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and collaborate with Clemson students to write reflections and research papers. The team was able to collaborate with faculty at the R.M. Cooper Library for a location to showcase the artwork and literature from the incarcerated students. Great degrees of innovation and creativity went into the artwork for this display.

Being able to work with the incarcerated students has given the Creative Inquiry students a deeper understanding on the realities of prisons and detention centers, along with empathy for those incarcerated. “It humanizes them because a lot of the times they go and get locked away and you don’t really hear about them again and it almost feels like they’re a subsection of the population that you don’t really know anything about or anyone tries to care about,” Averi Brice, a junior political science major, said.

One of the long-term goals for the Creative Inquiry project is to establish a framework for a prison education program at Clemson University. While they progress toward this goal, they want to spread the message that incarcerated people are just like everyone else. “We’d really like people in the general world to think of them in more humanistic terms. So not to think of them solely as a convict, but to kind of broaden out that language a little bit,” Paxton-Wilson said.

Projects such as the Humanities Prison Initiatives can have large-scale impacts which include reducing the rate of people who go back to prison or recommit a crime. This could create a domino effect, leading to the reunion of families as well as lowering the cost of maintaining prisons. As the saying goes, knowledge is power, and this team is committed to ensuring that everyone has access to that knowledge.