Mad Blood Stirring

Image: Romeo and Juliet Postcard — “For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring” https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/tillywigginsBookClub

I just read a review of the film Sing Sing which shows prisoners performing Shakespeare within the maximum-security penitentiary. It’s a story about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, which brings dance, theatre, music and writing workshops to prisons.

The program, which currently operates out of eight New York state facilities, began at Sing Sing in 1996, after some of the men there sought help writing and producing a play to perform for their fellow prisoners.

The RTA program has a proven success rate as far as recidivism goes. Only 3% of RTA participants return to prison, a stark contrast to a national average of well past 60%. Which begs the question — why isn’t it a practice that’s more widely adopted by the prison system?

It seems that some prison officials have a problem with rehabilitation:

Erwin James, who famously took up education and rose to become a regular columnist for The Guardian while serving a life sentence in various British prisons, captures this point in this quote from a prison governor:

“Oh, we believe in rehabilitation, but we’re not quite sure just how rehabilitated we want prisoners to be … You see, so long as society demands retribution for offenders, we have to be careful about allowing you too much rehabilitation (James, 2003).”

There are many programmes that use the study and performance of art in rehabilitation programmes, and there are many underlying issues that prevent rehabilitation programmes from being as effective as they could be. The art is effective, the prison service not so much. You can read about the prejudice and class perceptions of prison officials and the “punishment not rehabilitation” culture here: https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/publications/cjm/article/theatre-states-probing-politics-arts-prisons-programmes

I first came across the idea of Shakespeare being performed in a prison in the novel Mad Blood Stirring by Simon Mayo, which is based on a true story of American prisoners of war incarcerated in Dartmoor prison in England at the end of The War of 1812 which was fought by the United States and its allies against the United Kingdom.

The African American and white sailors were used to working and living together on board ship but on arrival in Dartmoor were segregated by the British, creating even more tensions among the thousands of men who knew the war was over but not why they were still prisoners. The African American sailors, segregated in one of seven prison blocks, spend most of their time gambling and listening to sermons and performing plays, including works by Shakespeare, which their powerful and charismatic leader knows by heart. He even declares that Shakespeare was black.

A young white American sailor, Joe Hill, visits his African American friend in the black block and learns about a possible part for him in a forthcoming play. They want to cast him, the only white player, in the role of Juliet in a performance of Romeo and Juliet. The preparation for the performance plays out against the increasing threat of violence against the British prison guards and staff.

It seems that the idea of performing Shakespeare in prisons started a lot earlier than most reform programmes and with a different agenda to rehabilitation!

This is part of a series of posts on Questions about Creativity. The rest of the series can be seen at: https://annhawkins.com/creativity