Pens From the Pen |Vassar and Otisville prison program participants collaborate

Lauren Sutherland Editor in Chief

Getting these articles to you has been extremely difficult,” began Marlon Peterson in the foreword to a compilation of writings submitted to The Miscellany News by a group of four men incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, N.Y. The men, who serve as Peer Facilitators in Otisville’s Transitional Services Program, had approached several of the Vassar student interns, with whom they meet weekly, with the idea of putting together a feature for the College’s newspaper.

What followed was a bureaucratic tango between Otisville’s Director of Programming, the Department Superintendent and the Superintendent at the Bureau of Prison’s Albany office, regarding whether to authorize the pieces on behalf of the Otisville program. Ultimately, the request was denied, but that did not deter them from seeing the project through to its completion.

“We are submitting these articles independent from the Transitional Services Center,” wrote Peterson, who cites the prison’s trepidation as one of the many obstacles undermining “the very tenet that the Department of Correctional Services aims to achieve—rehabilitation.”

There are several men at Otisville who, like Peterson, are educators at Transitional Services Center and spend much of their sentences helping their peers develop life skills that they will need when they re-enter society. Daily, they assemble in classrooms on the premises for demonstrations and workshops dealing with topics ranging from hip-hop to giving professional interviews to HIV.

Four years ago, Vassar students began visiting the Otisville Transitional Services Center as part of the Green Haven and Otisville Prisons class offered through the Africana Studies Department. Once a week, the students attend the classroom sessions with the men, participating in the discussions and activities. Originally keeping to the periphery of the gatherings, with each senester the students become increasingly integrated in the Otisville programming, and frequently lead discussions themselves.

Three of the following five views of the prison experience are authored by those who know it most intimately—the incarcerated men themselves. “Incarcerated individuals are usually not given an individual voice,” said Sara Weston ’07, a student in the class that helped to coordinate the men’s submissions to The Miscellany News. “Rather, they are looked at as statistics, or as a homogenous group that society fails to see as human beings with diverse opinions and backgrounds. I think that the eloquence, intelligence and sensitivity of the writers may come as a surprise to some readers, but that surprise is part of the negative assumptions and stereotypes that this society has of incarcerated men and women.”

Professor of Religion and Africana Studies Lawrence Mamiya, the professor and architect of the program, reiterated the didactic value of such exchanges between individuals in prison and the rest of society. “[Incarcerated individuals] are not beasts—many of these individuals are highly intelligent. Yes, they did commit crimes when they were younger, but that is not the person they are now. People can really change in prison, and [these pieces] do raise important questions of what people do with second chances.”

With their writing, the men at Otisville aim to do more than correct widespread assumptions about a threatening, alien contingent of the population. They hope to transcend the very chasms, both institutional and ideological, that have forced them to the margins of society.

“The range of creativity and subject matter we use [minimizes] the socioeconomic difference between two communities—Otisville and Vassar,” wrote Peterson. “When we are able to acknowledge our differences and realize how minimal they are to our many similarities, we gain a sense of community—a common unity.”