Helping inmates find their own voices
Before I went into San Quentin State Prison for the first time, officials shared a terse dress code with me.
“Brown, black, beige, purple are okay to wear,” it said. “No denim. No gray, blue, green, yellow, or orange. No cleavage. Skirts must fall below the knees. Shoes must have close heels, close toes, and no heels. All sleeves must be below shoulder — nothing sleeveless, and no tank tops.”
I stared at the list for a long time, and then I stared at my closet for a long time. After much digging, I located a black skirt that could fall below the knees if I tugged it down my waist. Then it was off to my T-shirt drawer for a black T-shirt long enough and shapeless enough to cover everything else.
I looked at myself in the mirror. The result was so sad I needed to give myself a pep talk.
“Let’s embrace this as a look,” I said to myself. “It’s called Sister Wife in Mourning.”
No one appreciated this joke more than the prisoners in my workshop.
Earlier this year, I started volunteering with the Beat Within, a 21-year-old San Francisco organization that staffs writing workshops for incarcerated youth and adults in four states and Washington, D.C.
For years, I’d read the results of these workshops in the Beat’s biweekly magazine. I’d always been struck by the directness and the intense feeling in the stories I’d read, which are selected by Beat staff from hundreds of letters and workshop exercises every month.
When I decided to start volunteering myself, I anticipated an intense security process, a queasy look into the realities of incarceration, and listening to lots and lots of difficult stories about crime and poverty.
There’s been all of that and more.
What I didn’t expect was how funny the prisoners are. I didn’t expect to look forward to joining them in prison every month.
An example: A couple of weeks ago, I asked a regular attendee what he was thinking of telling the board at an upcoming parole hearing.
“I’ll tell them they need to have some sense and let me out,” he told me. “Look at me. I’m in my 60s. How am I going to be robbing banks? I can’t run fast anymore.”
Another example: An older attendee, one who carried himself in the most distinguished manner, stood up to read his exercise before the group. In stentorian tones, he launched into a sermon about the need for God — and then he started choking on a word. He tried it twice before starting to giggle.
“You’re going to have to excuse me,” the speaker said. “I just got new teeth.”
The room erupted with laughter.
Prisons and juvenile halls are tense, racialized, dangerous environments. It’s not easy to create the kind of warm, selfreflective atmosphere that the Beat Within has specialized in creating for the past 21 years.
“We pride ourselves on being as consistent as possible,” said founder David Inocencio. “When we go into a new place, the first thing we have to do is build trust, so that people feel OK sharing their deepest darkest thoughts and experiences.” And they do. The workshop attendees have different motivations for coming. Some of them struggle to express themselves and want the practice of working on their writing regularly. Some are working toward educational goals, like earning a GED. Some just want a short break from their lives in the cells and on the yard.
But all of them realize they’re being asked to help younger people steer clear of the situations that landed them in prison or juvenile hall — and they take that responsibility seriously.
This week, I spoke to two young adults who told me they’d changed their lives after coming into contact with the Beat Within.
Mervin Wool, 34, was a 15year-old in San Francisco’s juvenile hall for “something you saw on the 10 o’clock news” in 1998 when he went to his first workshop.
“I couldn’t write very much at first,” Wool told me. “But the workshop leaders really encouraged me, and there was some healthy competition in my unit to get published in the magazine. So as I read more of the stories, I started to understand I wasn’t the only person in the world going through these emotions and experiences.”
He earned his GED and, upon his release, took college classes. Now he’s an operations manager at a global logistics company.
“It’s been a long, hard road, over 20 years, for me to get where I am,” Wool told me. “But it started in those workshops.”
Monica Carlos, 31, was 14 when she went to her first workshop, also in San Francisco’s juvenile hall. She immediately connected with the idea of using her experience to help other people.
“I wanted to give back to other kids, and I wanted them to learn from my mistakes,” Carlos told me. “They gave me a voice and an opportunity.”
She’s now a case manager at Arriba Juntos, a job and educational training nonprofit in the Mission District.
Most of my workshop attendees won’t have stories like those of Wool and Carlos. Many of them are serving life sentences, for one thing.
But they know they’re helping make the lives of Wool and Carlos possible. That’s what keeps all of us coming back.
Learn more about the Beat Within at: www.thebeat within.org
“It’s been a long, hard road ... to get where I am. But it started in those workshops.” Mervin Wool, 34, former inmate