Entry #6 - Adaptation, Communal Anthropology, and a Defying of Stereotypes - 1.25.06

The day has been quite full. It’s 10:45 PM and despite an earnest desire for rest, I feel the need to communicate. Thursdays are rather intense evenings for me. I “teach” a video series ACE (Adult Continuing Education) class on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Then I take an acting class taught by my friend Chris, who taught college-level acting on the outside.

For me, the two classes complement one another perfectly. Watching Mr. Sagan’s opus is such a spiritual experience for me. In exploring the make-up of ourselves and our universe, I get such a feeling of greater connection to my surroundings. This is deeply furthered by the acting class. I’m so amazed by the experience every time I go. I mean, going into the initial class, I had no idea what to expect. I’d taken an acting class in college and loathed it. Also, being that prison is a place of such committed facades, I didn’t know how open a class of thugs would be to an art that requires such vulnerability. I’d have never predicted the honesty and engagement that has arisen from our group of 8-13 inmates.

Chris always starts us with warm-up exercises. Many could easily seem silly to a spectator. We are taken through odd poses, juvenile make believe, and zen-like explorations of our surrounding and our relation to them. Our class is a mix of all races and backgrounds. We even include many inmates who normally spend more time on the weight pile than in the classroom.

What follows is a series of deeper exercises in which you’d never expect a group of “unrulys” to go. In only a matter of minutes, we often find all of us fully engaged in communal play with a malleable reality. Through such an exchange of energy, imaginary objects become tangible, pressures become evident against the muscles,, and environments are realized.

One of the most telling exercises that we do involves the entire class moving around at random. It is a practice in special awareness, where if one person moves from a given space, someone must fill that vacated space without being told to do so. For our class, this exercise came easily. In fact, when I spoke to Chris about it, he said that we got it much quicker than his college classes usually do. I’d hypothesize that this may stem from our living situation.

Prison life is a constant game of adjusting and compensating for the actions of those around us. Living on top of one another forces you to be aware of the actions of those around us and adjust likewise. With so many alpha males co-existing in a confined space, failure to be flexible may have disastrous consequences. This place is one hell of an anthropological experiment, and though it’s bursting at the seams, the prisoner’s ability to adjust to circumstances is second to none.

I think that, above all, the most profound part of participating in these classes (especially the latter), is realizing how much of a surprise the engagement of my fellow convicts has come to me. It makes me realize just how strong our society’s socialization is against felons. Despite my own status as a felon, I realize that I have failed to grant the full humanity to my fellows, and thus have underestimated them. My prejudices in this situation become evident.

The bottom line is that, given the chance, much of the prison population will transcend the low expectations that society has sown. However, opportunities remain minimal, and felons are fighting an ideology so deeply engrained that it even penetrates the prisoners themselves. If we as a prison population can devalue our peers—it’s daunting to imagine how society at large views us.