Using performance to give voice to children of prisoners

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Abstract

The loss of a parent to incarceration has a tremendous impact in the life of a child. For adolescents who are dealing with other difficult life issues, having a safe way to express their thoughts and feelings can make a tangible difference. At San Francisco's Balboa High School, students told their stories in the form of a play, and this literally meant the difference between dropping out and staying in school. This program was highlighted in an article by Heather Knight in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 23, 2005.

Issue

According to the Family Corrections Network, more than one in forty children in the United States have a parent in prison. This loss creates profound repercussions for children at any age. Providing a way for children to express themselves is an important intervention strategy in averting cycles of incarceration and helping kids live productive and fulfilling lives.

Action

According to the San Francisco Chronicle's article, Balboa High Class Tries to Break Cycle of Incarceration, 17-year-olds from Balboa High created the play Sentences and went to Washington, D.C., to perform it. Although not all the students who participated in the program are children of incarcerated parents, all live in communities that are impacted by the realities of incarceration and violence. Effective practices included:

As part of a three-year grant, the Berkeley nonprofit, Community Works/California (CW), with funding from the National Institute of Corrections, sent two staff members to work with the class at Balboa High. Mike Molina recruited students in the fall of 2004 by going to homerooms and lunch tables and reading poems he had written about his cousin being in jail, looking for teens with similar experiences. Most who signed up had had relatives in jail.
The 14 students and two staff from CW met everyday in a basement room filled with couches and murals.
Former inmates were invited to the school to give accounts of their personal histories.
Molina and another staff person from CW taped the students as they recounted their stories. These testimonials became the basis for their class project: a public performance of their play.
The tape recordings were transformed into a script, and the students began memorizing their lines and putting emotion into their monologues.
Theater director, John Warren, of Unconditional Theater in Berkeley, was enlisted to help.
The program at Balboa High was originally intended to serve as an in-class project with an after-school component. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, the after-school component was cut. Students compensated for this lack of time by practicing with family members at home, with each other at lunch or on the phone in the evening.
The play includes hip-hop dance moves and a performance of the Haka, a Samoan warrior dance (seven of the Balboa students are Samoan, and two are half Samoan). Students also performed their own freestyle raps, read poems, and sang songs.
Initially, the play was to be performed at several venues in San Francisco. However, Ruth Morgan, Director of Community Works, received an invitation from a longtime acquaintance, Arlene Lee, Director of the Child Welfare League's Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners. Lee requested that the Balboa High students come to Washington, D.C. to perform at a conference.
During their springtime trip, students performed the play at Duke Ellington High School in Georgetown and at the conference of the National Child Welfare League at the Wardman Park Marriott (March 6, 2005). Duke Ellington High School is a public performing arts school in the Washington, D.C., area that draws mostly African American students from poor neighborhoods.
In attendance at the National Child Welfare League conference were social workers, probation officers, and wardens — people who work with prisoners all the time but have never listened to what their children had to say.

Context

Balboa High School, in the Excelsior District of San Francisco, draws many students from the housing projects of Bayview-Hunters Point. For many Balboa High students, incarceration of parents, relatives and friends, as well as violence in their neighborhood, is an unfortunate fact of life.

Community Works/California is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using the arts and education as a catalyst for change among underserved populations in the San Francisco Bay Area. CW uses the arts to forge links between diverse cultures and communities, improve educational attainment, increase self-empowerment and social responsibility and foster community development.

CW collaborates with artists from diverse backgrounds, races and disciplines to achieve these goals. CW primarily serves incarcerated populations and at-risk youth, offering arts programming at San Francisco County jails and post-release facilities, as well as schools, after-school programs and juvenile detention sites. Many CW programs culminate in public art exhibits or performances.

Community Works initiated its Youth Arts Education program in 1997, offering arts programming in a variety of disciplines to at-risk youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Youth Arts programming includes both in-school and after-school activities in elementary, middle and high schools throughout the Bay Area, as well as at San Francisco's Youth Guidance Center.

According to national statistics (2004) more than 1.5 million American children have a parent or parents in prison, and 59 percent of these children are under the age of ten. Most of these children grow up without the benefits of the guidance from a reliable adult in their lives. In fact, a U.S. Senate report indicates that without appropriate modeling from a responsible adult, these children are six times more likely than other children to become incarcerated at some point in their lives.

Additionally, sixty percent of inmates who are parents are in prisons more than 100 miles from home. Most police departments have no policy regarding the children of suspects.

Citation

Knight, Heather, Balboa High Class Tries to Break Cycle of Incarceration, San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 2005, sec A, page 1.

Outcome

Students involved in this performance program:

Learn how to express themselves and to speak out
Better understand the prison system
Build self-esteem, primarily from the ongoing, consistent one-on-one mentoring they received from the staff at Community Works

People who work with prisoners have a chance to hear what the children have to say, helping to alter the stereotype that children of prisoners are somehow innately flawed or bad.

Since the program's success was based in large part on the mentoring that occurred between the students and the staff from Community Works, next year's program will have a more intentional focus on one-to-one mentoring.

Community Works is formulating curriculum for an upcoming summer program. This will be for students that have graduated but are unsure of what to do next. The program will consist of creating internships and helping graduates transition into a job or college.

Evidence

According to Ruth Gordon, Director of Community Works, the students who participated in the performance class were students who were "one step from dropping out of school." The greatest testimony to the success of the program is that all these students have stayed in school.

One student said about the class, "It changed the direction my life was heading. I was thinking that I'm just going to walk down the street, and somebody's going to judge me anyway, so why try to be better with my life?...Then I came to this class and I thought, well, maybe something positive can come out of going to college....Maybe I won't always be judged."

Posted On

May 23, 2005

For More Information

Ruth Morgan

Community Works

Director

Website: http://www.communityworkswest.org/

Resources

The Resource Center: Mentoring Children of Prisoners

National Mentoring Center

Source Documents

Related Practices

Keywords:

Students

Public Private Ventures

Human needs