Theatre in Prisons

Prison is the site of control, discipline and surveillance where every subject is
strictly regulated under the ‘carceral timespace’. Prison theatre acts like the refuge for them
bringing imagination, fantasy and hope into the iron fetters. Theatre and prison are,
therefore, antithetical in the sense of theatre being about self-expression, lively
performance, and creative imagination while prison is the ‘total institution’, a space of
exhaustion of human liberty and agency. Still, the long, rich history of prison theatre
project suggests to the success of art in a disciplinarian setting. Shakespeare Behind Bars
(SBB) is a prison theatre project founded and directed by Curt Tofteland brings the eternal
socio-cultural significance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to the inmates of Luther Luckett
correctional complex and provide them a unique space where they can rethink over their
past events of life, wicked self, trials and so on. However, a regeneration through a drama
performance is almost unattainable as the process signifies rebirth, erasure of past self and
events that constructs an individual. The Shakespearean text undeniably has the potential
to produce much conflict and confrontation especially in such authoritarian space for its
own expository nature. But most studies on Shakespeare prison theatre have been
empirical and descriptive based on this assumption of a priori that the prisoner will be
heavily influenced by the programme. The paper, therefore, would try to investigate how
a theatre performance particularly the SBB project of The Tempest could offer a path of
self-discovery to the inmates. Why Shakespeare as a dramatist is so significant there? If
the production is the adaptation of The Tempest, does it bear a new interpretation of the
original text or simply the urtext is eventually assimilated in the process?

The theatre in prisons and probation (TIPP) Želd has developed in response
to a growing recognition within the criminal justice system that the arts can
play a directly functional role in the ‘primary task of reducing offending, through
education and challenging behaviour, offering new ways of thinking, and redirecting
energies’ {Community Sentences Committee (1994)Probation and the Arts: a brieŽng
paper (WakeŽeld, Association of Chief OfŽcers of Probation)}.In particular, criminal
justice agencies have acknowledged that imaginative and engaging styles of education
are crucial to rehabilitativework with offenders.
In the UK there are currently half a dozen theatre organisationsworking exclusively
with offenders on probation or in prison, and over a 150 artists and/or companies
who work regularly in a criminal justice setting. There is a British Network of Prison
Theatre which exists to inuence and inform Home OfŽce policies and a European
Network which was formed after the 2nd European Conference on Theatre and
Prison, held in Manchester in 1996.Academically, the theory and practice of prison
theatre is being taught in half a dozen UK universities at both undergraduate and
postgraduate level.
The TIPP Želd is both complex and diverse in its approaches to working with
offenders. A precise deŽnition of TIPP practice is difŽcult, partly due to the complex
interaction between drama and educational method, but also because the work is
constantly changing and evolving in response to practical experience. Underlying the
different approaches,whether implicitly or explicitly stated, is a crucial orientation to
a rehabilitativegoal. (The arts organisations currently practising exclusively in prisons
and probation were all founded under very different circumstances. Geese Theatre
Company, for example, was a franchise of an American company, and imported its
methods and ideas from the US, while Clean Break Theatre Companywas established
by two women ex-offenders, and set out a belief that the arts should be used as a
method for empowering and developing skills with offenders. The TIPP Centre was
created after a conference for theatre and probationpractitionersinterested in working
together on projects.)
This article investigates the ways in which a drama-based cognitive–behaviourial
programme for violent offenders can construct and review its theoretical approach
through practice. The TIPP Centre’s Pump Challenging Violence programme serves as
an example of a creative educational project which sought to provide a positive model of practice;
and it is through the analysis of this practical example that the model may be tested and its efŽficacy assessed.

This paper considers performances of belonging in two participatory theatre projects. The Traction Youth Ensemble is an outreach program offered by Queensland Theatre in the city of Logan - recently portrayed in the media as a hub for crime and race “riots”. Traction was established to counteract some of these negative stereotypes, to promote social cohesion, and to fill a gap in high quality theatre opportunities for young people there. Barambah Mission Talk is a theatre performance being developed with women prisoners in Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre (BWCC). The work is based on Ruth Hegarty’s memoir Is That You Ruthie? which describes her time growing up in Barambah Aboriginal Mission (now Cherbourg Community) in the 1930s and 40s. Many of the women in BWCC have strong connections to Barambah, as well as other Aboriginal missions around Australia, where their families were forcibly removed and institutionalised as part of the Stolen Generations. Both of these projects generate performances of belonging in often-fraught political and social contexts. Barambah Mission Talk contains performances of belonging and not belonging in carceral sites, where there exists simultaneously a strong sense of home, and the anguish of separation and displacement. The Traction Youth Ensemble offers 50 young theatre makers in Logan a unique place to belong, developing their voice and identity, and leading ultimately to positive forms of social and civic participation. In both projects, there is a sense of vitality and hope, generated by the performers’ engagement with their own evolving sense of story and culture.

Cellfish (2017) is a dark comedy written by Miriama McDowell (Ngāti Hine), Rob Mokaraka (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tūhoe), and Jason Te Kare (Ngāti Maniapoto, Tainui). The play follows the story of a drama teacher, Miss Lucy, who enters the world of a men’s prison to offer Shakespeare classes. The play offers a critique of intergenerational violence and the legacies of colonialism that impact on the high imprisonment rates of Māori. This article offers an analysis of Cellfish by exploring certain principles of restorative justice that underscore the production. Restorative justice has become an established approach in criminology where it is most commonly understood as involving the victim, the offender, and the community coming together to repair the harm caused by crime. Instead of a narrow focus privleging the encounter between victim and offender, this article explores principles of restrative justice underscoring the Cellfish production including the key notions of Utu (restoring balance) and Whanangatanga (reciprocal family relations). The article begins by introducing the Cellfish production before situating the work in relation to the field of Prison Theatre. The article then offers a brief outline of restorative justice before providing a reading of how these principles can be traced in the play. I argue that Cellfish might be usefully conceived as enacting restorative justice by critiquing the punitive criminal justice system and offering instead alternative visions of justice based on ideas of restoring balance, inter-relationality, and healing.

The use of sexual violence as a means of power and control within the South African prison system has been well documented.  Sexual violence is intimately linked to the gendering of roles, such that rape and coercive sex is used as a brutal means of imposing a feminised identity; a violent enactment of who penetrates and who gets penetrated (Gear & Ngubeni 2002). 
Within this context, this article aims to examine both the performative and performed notions of gender and sexuality in relation to a prison theatre project located in a medium-security male prison in South Africa.  I situate myself as a white feminist working within a black, all-male context, and examine moments from our theatre-making when men assumed feminised or female roles, and gender was actively and deliberately played with in an uncensored, open way.  This article aims to analyse the relationship between the deliberate performance choices within the theatrical frame and the performative notions of gender and sexuality that are played out external to the theatrical moment. I question when and how prescribed gender scripts that dictate an aggressive and often violent masculinity might simultaneously be enacted and violated through theatrical performance.  Drawing on my own reflections and interviews with participants, the article highlights how participants make sense of the gender choices made, and how these choices relate to wider questions of identity which need to be navigated.  The issue of how such gender play might translate to a lived experience beyond the theatre space and outside of prison remains unknown, and further research is needed to understand the dynamics of the identities explored within the theatre event and how they are transferred to the world outside of it.

This introductory essay proposes a focus on some of the arguments in the field – what is ‘arts behind bars’? What are some of the intentions, and why would people do it? It also signals the range of practices that are to be found – from the development of needlework in male prisons through to participatory arts projects with young people in prisons to collaborative stage shows. Artists working in criminal justice have a wide range of intentions. For few, there might be a frisson of the danger and caged energy behind bars that is stimulating to creativity and could add something to their own creative process. Rather than art for prisoners: professional artists staging a show or doing an unplugged music event in a prison, there are a great number of projects that move towards forms of art created with and by prisoners, thereby aligning it with a long history of social and participatory arts. Theoretically, then, the arts behind bars are informed by critical pedagogies as much as the specific disciplinary approaches. This model seeks to build critical consciousness and confidence in mastery as well as induction into the discipline of learning any skill, for the purposes of liberating through knowledge. In arts behind bars, the knowledge base might include literacy outcomes, but the learning is often communal, and about creative self-expression. 

The practitioners of arts behind bars have two driving intentions. Either they seek to engage more people with their art form, and are willing to work in a range of contexts; or they are committed to social justice and hope to use the art form towards additional aims of generating understanding and redressing some of the inequalities experienced by prisoners. It is necessary to consider what new perspectives are offered to the subject of arts in criminal justice by thinking about how wider resources, culture, and artistic paradigms affect perceptions of the value of interventions. This highlights the need for awareness of those artists who choose to work in prisons of the moral and ethical questions raised by bringing art to the system.

(2017) “A Critical Introduction to Arts Behind Bars.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture. Edited by Michelle Brown. New York: Oxford University Press.

Il carcere è un luogo molto complesso, caratterizzato dalla costrizione, dalla povertà sociale e culturale della maggior parte delle persone detenute e dalla mancanza pressoché totale delle dimensioni etiche ed estetiche dell'esperienza. La vita è stretta nelle maglie di ritualizzazioni ossessive e senza significato che infantilizzano l'adulto recluso e cercano di contenere la conflittualità sempre presente: nella persona, nelle relazioni, negli scambi violenti tra gruppi di diversa cultura ed etnia. I rapporti tra carcere e territorio sono difficili, e questo limita  la reale possibilità di azioni trattamentali, alimentando i pregiudizi sociali e culturali, non solo nei confronti della persona reclusa, ma anche della sua famiglia.
Il laboratorio di teatro sociale "Legami in spazi aperti" dal 2009 attivo presso la casa di reclusione di Verziano a Brescia, impiega pratiche e arti performative con l'obiettivo prioritario di promuovere legami e connessioni a sostegno della genitorialità nelle famiglie che stanno vivendo esperienze di reclusione, dei processi interculturali e  dell'interazione virtuosa e inclusiva tra il carcere e il suo territorio.

This paper examines and compares the phenomenon of theatre in prison in two Southern-European countries: Italy and Greece. I consider the Greek projects by using my knowledge about the Italian tradition, in order to understand how theatre in prison has developed far away from the Anglo-Saxon area and in an area deeply affected by a serious economic crisis.
After a brief description of the general situation in both countries, some schematic paragraphs are dedicated to the experiences of Greek theatre in prison I have directly come to know through meetings with actors and directors (Stathis Grapsas, Sophia Ioannidou, Yiorgos Dabasis, Irini Tsalera and Yiannis Nikolopoulos). The paper ends with a comparison between Italy and Greece with regards to the set-up of theatrical activities in relation to prison environment and their artistic and aesthetic development.
This latter point is highly significant due to the artistic background of the professionals involved and it has to be approached by considering not only what theatre is giving to prisoners, but also the opposite. This attitude is necessary in order to give the inmates an active role in determining the way they perform and represent themselves and to escape the fixed character of the passive patient.

Despite the ubiquity of theatre projects in prisons there has been little (published) discussion of the application of theatre to the theories of criminology or rehabilitation of offenders, and scant examination of the potential for criminological theories to inform theatre practice in criminal justice settings. This article seeks to address this deficit and argues that positioning prison theatre within the discipline of positive criminology, specifically contemporary theories of desistance from crime, provides a theoretical framework for understanding the contribution that prison theatre might be making in the correctional setting. Through a review of related literature, the article explores how prison theatre may be motivating offenders toward the construction of a more adaptive narrative identity and toward the acquisition of capabilities that might usefully assist them in the process of desisting from crime.

In this chapter, I provide an overview of the Forum Theatre plays that were developed by the incarcerated community at Auckland Prison, Paremoremo in 2017. I begin by providing a context for understanding theatre in prison, before providing a brief outline of the Forum Theatre approach. The chapter will then describe the three short plays that were performed, and explain the significance and the implications of the issues presented. This chapter explores how the Forum Theatre project worked to empower the community to take action and be involved in deliberating the issues of dysfunction presented in performance, in an effort to enhance the health and wellbeing of prisoners. I will then conclude by arguing that theatre in prison offers wider society a useful and pragmatic means to redefine what citizenship can mean by highlighting the importance of cultural rights.

http://liminalities.net/14-3/windows.pdf


Andrew Parker & Eve Sedgwick’s critical examination of performativity (1995) underpins this essay. The primary focus is on the site of prison as constitutive of  the performativity of women’s past narratives along with the performance of prison. It is informed by work as an artist and researcher in prisons in the UK and South Africa for over ten years. I make reference in particular to practice-based project Performing (for) Survival – a PhD project conducted at a women’s prison near Stoke-on-Trent in the UK in 2012. What is of particular interest is the necessity for women to perform transformation; to testify to victimhood and to adopt narratives of heroism despite structural inequalities that remain in tact signals the importance of a performative understanding of institutional life.

I sketch out an understanding of a performative spectrum that is ubiquitous in women’s narratives. The model considers positions of ‘victim-survivor-hero’, and the essay offers examples from working with women through a performance-based methodology that sought to understand how women survived the prison system. It proceeds with a reading of how prisons, characterised by citation: criminal records, sentences and files, are important locations for considering how time, memory, guilt or innocence, past, present and future perform. The essay concerns how these elements correlate with gender expectations, and considers a series of examples from fieldwork to exemplify how constructions of women’s painful pasts become narratives to which they must testify repeatedly. These testimonies are required in legal proceedings, and to gain legitimacy institutionally. Such legitimacy is both overt – in the sense of prisoners telling their stories while progressing through sentences; as well as covert – in the manner of stories constituting everyday groupings, dynamics and hierarchies that characterise life inside.

This article explores narrative and role as key elements of an applied theatre project with women in an Australian prison. The research story has arisen out of the first stages of data analysis from the project, where a range of sometimes conflicting narratives and roles emerged as prevalent within the workshop process itself, as well as its surrounds; and where narrative and role helped to articulate the complexity of the applied theatre practice/research experience. The practice and research methodologies for the project were inextricably entwined, furthering James Thompson’s (2003) notion of ‘theatre action research’ and Hughes et al.’s (2011) ‘practised method’. These practitioner/researchers recognize applied theatre as both the process and the object of inquiry, a dynamic relationship that complicates both the research narrative and the roles played within it.

ABSTRACT The Phoenix Players Theatre Group was founded by incarcerated theatre artists located in a maximum-security prison with the aim of creating a space where they can be witnessed in order to initiate a process of personal, cultural, and sociopolitical transformation. This article integrates research from trauma theory with theatre and social justice studies, in addition to the archive of written material by the Phoenix Players themselves, to understand how practicing collaborative prison theatre to cope with traumatic experiences constitutes a pedagogy of self-narrating, self-teaching, and self-humanizing.

A heap of huge polystyrene letters that in a liberating outburst actors and spectators throw into the air, pages of books and paintings reproduced on huge panels, an old typewriter used by Mercutio to re-write his story, a suitcase containing ‘a tear shed for some personal pain’ in the hands of a man who asks to be remembered, a pyramid of skulls and a child’s bed are just a few of the numerous objects imagined by Armando Punzo, director of the Compagnia della Fortezza of Volterra, for his compelling Shakespeare productions. This essay analyses Punzo’s poetics of objects in his "Hamlice – Saggio sulla fine di una civiltà" (2010) and
"Mercuzio non vuole morire – La vera tragedia in Romeo e Giulietta" (2012).

Using real-life stories written by female offenders, Planting Seeds - Life Stories to Awakening Self-Awareness seeks to identify the systematic challenges these females may have faced, that in most cases, are the root-causes of their derailment from the societal norms of conduct. Applying the concepts of community and social justice and equality as a lens, this work will attempt to corroborate, as a universal postulate, that the process of sharing life stories can have transformative effects on the individuals and that theatre techniques, such as theatre games and scripting can help identify those impediments to restoring lives. Key to the transformative component of this work is the exploration of theatre as a mechanism of support and restoration and that the contributions that theatre may offer are the pillars that sustain the well-being of communities, and henceforth society. Using techniques of storytelling and story writing in the process of re-enacting life stories, the participants will be able to possibly recognize issues that may be impeding their growth. In addition, engagement in storytelling, and moreover, story writing can help the participants increase their cognitive skills and the ability to live a communal life. This evidence-based practice can transform lives and society. It has the potential of continuing to other facilities and with other populations, such as incarcerated males, juvenile delinquents, and orphans. It can reach out beyond these institutionalized populations to any community in need of finding itself, and, further its maximum potential. This work seeks to help these females identify impediments for further growth by using theatre techniques such as sharing and scripting their life stories.

The arts offer an alternative lens through which to dissect imprisonment. Integrating a variety of cross-disciplinary theoretical traditions with the highest-quality empirical research conducted on both sides of the Atlantic, this collection probes three main areas: how state authorities may deploy artistic presentations and representations of the world of prisons to solidify domination over subordinates, prisoners or otherwise; the use of the arts, both inside and outside prisons, as a means of challenging or coping with the inherently harsh prison system and the broader project of domination it reflects and serves; and the evaluation research on the implementation and effectiveness of arts-related programmes in prisons. Contributors (in alphabetical order): Michelle Brown, W. B. Carnochan, Eamonn Carrabine, Sarah Colvin, Alexandra Cox, Mary Cohen, Leonidas K. Cheliotis, andré douglas pond cummings, Léon Digard, Thomas Fahy, Stathis Gauntlett, Loraine Gelsthorpe, David Gussak, Yvonne Jewkes, Robert Johnson, Alison Liebling, Mike Nellis, Vincenzo Ruggiero, Aylwyn Walsh, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams.



Contents

The Arts of Imprisonment: An Introduction
Leonidas K. Cheliotis

Aesthetics and An-aesthetics: The Architecture of Incarceration
Yvonne Jewkes

Telling Prison Stories:The Spectacle of Punishment and the Criminological Imagination
Eamonn Carrabine

Victor Hugo and Octave Mirbeau: A Sociological Analysis of
Imprisonment in Fiction
Vincenzo Ruggiero

Masculinity, Violence, and Art in Tennessee Williams’
'Not About Nightingales'
Thomas Fahy

Social Documentary in Prison: The Art of Catching the State
in the Act of Punishment
Michelle Brown

Thug Life: Hip Hop’s Curious Relationship with Criminal Justice
andré douglas pond cummings

Art, Constraint and Memory: Egon Schiele in Prison
W. B. Carnochan

‘The haircut’s on the house’: Rebetika Songs and Greek prisons
Stathis Gauntlett

Art and Autonomy: Prison Writers under Siege
Robert Johnson

Prose and Cons:Autobiographical Writing by British Prisoners
Mike Nellis

Resistance or Propaganda, Self-Expression or Solipsism? Prison Writing and the Red Army Faction Prisoners in West Germany, 1973-77
Sarah Colvin

‘Safe Havens’: The Formation and Practice of Prison Choirs in the US
Mary L. Cohen

Teaching and Learning: The Pedagogy of Arts Education in Prison Settings
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

Comparing Art Therapy in Prisons to ‘Arts-in-Corrections’: Process to Product and Back Again
David Gussak

Creative Encounters: What ever happened to the arts in prisons?
Alexandra Cox and Loraine Gelsthorpe

Harmony Behind Bars: Evaluating the Therapeutic Potential
of a Prison-based Music Programme
Léon Digard and Alison Liebling

Awaiting Justice in South African Prisons: Performing Human Rights in a State of Exception
Aylwyn Walsh""

This article explores a creative project entitled Performing Liberation which sought to empower communities with direct experience of incarceration to create and share creative work as part of transnational dialogue. One of the aims of the project was to facilitate creative dialogue and exchange between two incarcerated communities: prisoners at Auckland Prison and prisoners at San Quentin Prison in San Francisco. Written using autoethnographic methods, this co-authored article explores our recollections of key moments in a creative workshop at Auckland Prison in an attempt to explain its impact on stimulating the creativity of the participants. We begin by describing the context of incarceration in the US and New Zealand and suggest that these seemingly divergent locations are connected by mass incarceration. We also provide an overview of the creative contexts at San Quentin and Auckland Prison on which the Performing Liberation project developed. After describing key moments in the workshop, the article interrogates the creative space that it produced in relation to the notion of liberation, as a useful concept to interrogate various forms of oppression, and as a practice that is concerned with unshackling the body, mind, and spirit. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution.

It was spring 2002 and our first role-play in the early days of our rehearsals for When Can We Talk?, a collaborative creation by former prisoners and PCAP members under the direction of Gillian Eaton. We stood in a circle in the Frieze Building on the University of Michigan campus, in an acting studio inside the old Carnegie Library, and Gillian told us, “I’ve got bad news. It’s that time again. One of us has to go. We’d better decide soon or they’ll just come and grab one of us. If we can just decide which one of us is willing to be sent to the wilderness we won’t have the usual battles and bloodshed. None of us are without family so I know it’ll be hard, and I hate to draw straws. How can we choose who will go?”

This paper explores the gendered and spatialized dynamics that underpin prisoners' and official discourses of "change" (cambio de actitud) in Nicaragua as these were manifested at two prison facilities during a lengthy period of prison theater training. Teasing out the way in which "change" is resisted, adapted and appropriated by prisoners as they simultaneously embody and contest state discourses of penal reeducation, I argue that while re-educational spaces present opportunities for "doing freedom", temporarily relieving the tightness of prison, they are also fundamentally part of the prison's power structure and political-moral realm. Herein change is often posited as opposed to violence, yet my research points to a dialectical relationship rather than a binary opposition between the two, because within the wider co-governance system of Nicaragua's prisons, violence appears to exist in a parallel rather than past relationship to prisoners' processes of change.

Colectivo Sustento and Fénix & Ilusiones are two community theatre groups in Santiago, Chile. Inside and outside the Colina 1 men's prison on the outskirts of Santiago, they have developed a continuous 12 year experience that provokes critical reflection, agency and collective process, as resistance to the devastating impact of neoliberalism. Using their recent theatre tour to juvenile detention centres as a starting point, this article journeys through the limitations, freedoms, challenges and successes of this community-based experience. This journey is a never-ending process towards increasing the concrete possibilities of being active agents for social change, even from within a prison; in this case, the voice of experience and the pretext of theatre are harnessed in order to communicate and affect the decisions of young offenders. This article is part of the research process into the elements that sustain the continuous prison and extra prison theatre experience of Colectivo Sustento and Fénix & Ilusiones in Santiago, Chile.


Colectivo Sustento y Fénix e Ilusiones son dos grupos de teatro comunitario en Santiago de Chile. Desde dentro y fuera de la cárcel de hombres de Colina 1 en la periferia de Santiago, han desarrollado una experiencia continua de 12 años que provoca la reflexión crítica, el protagonismo social y el proceso colectivo, como forma de resistencia al impacto devastador del neo-liberalismo. Tomando como punto de partida su reciente gira a centros de detención juvenil, este artículo viaja por las limitaciones, libertades, desafíos y éxitos de esta experiencia de comunidad. Este viaje es un proceso sin fin hacia las posibilidades concretas de ser agentes activos en un cambio social, aún desde dentro de una cárcel; en este caso, la voz de la experiencia y el pretexto del teatro se emplean para poder comunicar y afectar a las decisiones de los jóvenes infractores. Este artículo es parte de un proceso de investigación sobre los elementos que sustentan la continua experiencia intra y extra carcelaria de Colectivo Sustento y Fénix & Ilusiones en Santiago de Chile.

This paper explores the gendered and spatialized dynamics that underpin prisoners' and official discourses of "change" (cambio de actitud) in Nicaragua as these were manifested at two prison facilities during a lengthy period of prison theater training. Teasing out the way in which "change" is resisted, adapted and appropriated by prisoners as they simultaneously embody and contest state discourses of penal reeducation, I argue that while re-educational spaces present opportunities for "doing freedom", temporarily relieving the tightness of prison, they are also fundamentally part of the prison's power structure and political-moral realm. Herein change is often posited as opposed to violence, yet my research points to a dialectical relationship rather than a binary opposition between the two, because within the wider co-governance system of Nicaragua's prisons, violence appears to exist in a parallel rather than past relationship to prisoner...

A call-for-papers for a Special Session panel at the 2021 Modern Language Association convention in Toronto, January 7-10.

This panel will examine modern literary production emerging from US prisons since the post-Attica prison-building boom and the growth of mass incarceration.  It will center incarcerated voices, their ideologies, and pedagogical possibilities for college and university teachers.  There is special interest in discussion of censorship and conditions of production.  Scope includes single or multiple authors, ex-prisoners and currently incarcerated, and all genres – poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, autobiography, drama, erotica, and more.  Send 250-300 word abstracts and a short bio to Joe.Lockard@asu.edu before February 25, 2020.

It’s not everyone that gets to experience the inside of a prison van – or sweatbox. Hard seats, unforgiving heat (or cold), no windows, and no way out. Most of those that have been transported in one have been arrested and are being moved between holding cells and courts or from sentencing to prisons. Otherwise, they are officers responsible for ensuring the safe transportation of people between various sites associated with the criminal justice system. Very few would find the experience one they would like to repeat. Yvonne Jewkes characterises the transportation of prisoners in sweatboxes as hell-holes.  Each prisoner being transported, she says,
is locked inside a tiny coffin-like cubicle, approximately five feet high and measuring about 34in by 24in, with a 10in square clear plastic window and a small hard metal seat on which they must remain seated. 

In Clean Break Theatre Company’s recent production Sweatbox, written by Chloë Moss, first produced for the festival circuit in 2015 and directed by Imogen Ashby, the general public is invited to get into a sweatbox and immerse themselves in the dramas playing out when people are transported up and down the country.

For three years, the training company RolePlayers, Inc., worked with young male inmates at the Special Classes for Children in Conflict with the Law (SC-CCIL), a unit of the New Bilibid Prison, in two theater productions that were shown to the prison community and the external public. The first production, staged in 2016, was a devised piece called Tumbang Preso (Knock down the Prisoner); the second production, mounted in 2018, was the Pyramus–Tisbe scene from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Filipino translation. The productions’ immediate impact, however, lies beyond the plays. For the young inmates, prison theater served as an opportunity to learn new skills, gain new perspectives, receive emotional support, and increase their chances of getting released. This paper documents the prison–theater project, the challenges the organizers faced, the lessons they have learned, and the paths that can be taken to sustain prison theater.

In 1764 Cesare Beccaria wrote: ‘Liberty is at an end, whenever the laws permit, that [a person] may cease to be a person, and become a thing’ (Beccaria 2017, 79).  Nearly 200 years later, in 1975, penitentiary reform in Italy introduced the concept of social rehabilitation into prisons. Individualised programmes of education, work, sport and recreational activities aim to facilitate the reintegration of prisoners into society on their release by offering them life-skills and contact with the outside world.
Many prisons in Italy run theatre programmes, recognizing the importance of theatre in allowing prisoners to express themselves. This chapter looks at the Theatre Company, the women’s theatre company run by Donatella Massimilla and CETEC, the Centro Europeo Teatro e Carcere Dentro/Fuori San Vittore in San Vittore Prison in Milan and draws on my experience of working with them as costume designer since 2015.

This article proposes a focus on some of the arguments in the field—what is “arts behind bars”? What are some of the intentions, and why would people do it? It also signals the range of practices that are to be found—from the development of needlework in male prisons through to participatory arts projects with young people in prisons to collaborative stage shows. Artists working in criminal justice have a wide range of intentions. For a few, there might be a frisson of the danger and caged energy behind bars that is stimulating to creativity and could add something to their own creative process. The model of art for prisoners—professional artists staging a show or doing an unplugged music event in a prison—can raise the profile of prisons and punishment. However, there are a great number of projects that move towards forms of art created with and by prisoners, thereby aligning them with a long history of social and participatory arts. Theoretically, then, the arts behind bars are informed by critical pedagogies as much as the specific disciplinary approaches. This model seeks to build critical consciousness and confidence in mastery as well as induction into the discipline of learning any skill for the purposes of liberating through knowledge. In arts behind bars, the knowledge base might include literacy outcomes, but the learning is often communal, and about creative self-expression.
The practitioners of arts behind bars have two driving intentions. Either they seek to engage more people with their art form and are willing to work in a range of contexts, or they are committed to social justice and hope to use the art form towards additional aims of generating understanding and redressing some of the inequalities experienced by prisoners. It is necessary to consider what new perspectives are offered to the subject of arts in criminal justice by thinking about how wider resources, culture, and artistic paradigms affect perceptions of the value of interventions. This highlights the need for awareness of those artists who choose to work in prisons of the moral and ethical questions raised by bringing art to the system.

The Phoenix Players Theatre Group (PPTG) is a grassroots transformative theatre collective founded in 2009 by Michael Rhynes and Clifton Williamson, incarcerated men in the Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, New York. The group uses theatre techniques as an artistic and therapeutic process through which a transformative journey is initiated, leading to personal and social redemption. PPTG is a multi-faceted project, for its incarcerated members and civilian facilitator-participants alike. Witnessing is part of the transformative power of the PPTG process—for each member of the group, for other incarcerated people, for others employed by the facility, and for the audiences who are invited to see the performances and presentations. Looking at PPTG’s unique process reveals new potentials for inmate formed and directed theatre groups to help incarcerated people express themselves and gain important insights about their humanity.

The article explores the limitations of the dramaturgies of the cell through a close reading of several key play texts commissioned by the UK’s leading arts in criminal justice organisation working with women, Clean Break.

The apparently humanist positioning of women in prison as just like everyone else erases the specificity of women’s backstories. Conversely, by adhering to the constructions of female prisoners as holding binary positions of either ‘monsters’ or ‘victims’ of the system, plays can re-inscribe morally unitary approaches to women’s deviance and resistance. Many plays about women in prison hold a claim for resisting stereotypes and are in opposition to the injustice of criminal justice processes, and yet, in the realist mode, the monster/ victim position seems to be an inescapable binary.