Rising Voices » Prison Diaries

Prison Diaries Show the Reality of Life Behind Bars in Jamaica

David Sasaki — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:15:22 +0000

When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. “Murder capital of the world”, sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life?

Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu

That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries. S.E.T. first began in 1999 when two former prisoners created the organization to provide more educational opportunities within the Jamaican prison system so that inmates would have more job opportunities upon release, and thus lessen the rates of recidivism.

Kevin Wallen, the current director of S.E.T. first became involved in the organization after reading an inspirational book by Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a former American middleweight boxer who was released from prison and pronounced not guilty after spending nearly 20 years behind bars. Wallen, then living in Canada, returned to his native Jamaica and took over the leadership of S.E.T. in June of 2000. Since Wallen's involvement in the program, over 100 prisoners have passed through the S.E.T. program and not a single one has returned to prison. That is a stark contrast to Jamaica's traditionally high rates of recidivism (50% in 1993).

Photo of Tower Street computer lab by Christina Xu

Wallen has also done an impressive job of attracting international involvement to spread awareness about S.E.T. and motivate inmates. During the January 17, 2006 inauguration of a computer laboratory at Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre, Dr. Rubin ‘Hurricane' Carter urged inmates to take advantage of the opportunity and learn computer skills to improve themselves. Wallen has also attracted the support of Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, who established the Jamaica Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 1998. Thanks to Wallen's influence, the Jamaica Project has recently focused heavily on rehabilitation and restorative justice in Jamaica. You can view a video of Wallen and Professor Nesson speaking about restorative justice in Jamaica on the Berkman website. Nesson remains heavily involved in the project. Two weeks ago he was in Jamaica, where he introduced the male prisoners of Tower Street Correctional Facility to Second Life and met with the female prisoners at Fort Augusta.

In the summer of 2007 the S.E.T. project was visited by Christina Xu, a Harvard student and media activist, who documented her experience (and managed to take photographs of the Tower Street computer lab) in two comprehensive posts. Xu has also advocated that S.E.T.'s relationship with the Berkman Center at Harvard University be made more explicit. Also during the summer of 2007 Wayne Marshall, an ethnomusicologist at Brandeis University and music producer with a strong interest in the Caribbean, led three audio production workshops at Tower Street, South Camp, and Fort Augusta correctional facilities. Larisa, an Oakland-based DJ and blogger, and Oliver Day, an internet researcher, also visited the three SET groups to help teach the inmates technical skills such as editing audio files with Audacity.

Today SET remains most active at Tower Street and Fort Augusta. As you can see in the video below, the SET group at Tower Street has been able to establish a stronger online presence because they currently have better computers than than the female participants at Fort Augusta. Every Wednesday the S.E.T group at Tower Street meets to discuss the issues affecting them. They also produce a one hour radio show beginning at 11:00 a.m. EST, which focuses on a particular topic. This week the inmates discussed the origins of anger and how it can be effectively controlled. Here is a two and a half minute excerpt from the program. You can tune into FreeFM radio, the group's 24 hour online radio station produced from within the prison, using iTunes or a similar audio program.

Last week, accompanied by Global Voices managing director, Georgia Popplewell, I was able to see the Prison Diaries project first-hand. My experience was not unlike that of Christina's - entering a maximum security prison can be a daunting process. However, once we reached SET's computer lab and were able to meet the participants first hand, I was immediately overcome by their kindness and dedication. Each of the participants introduced themselves and spoke a little about what SET has done for them. The time then came to go on air for the weekly radio program. During our visit, the group discussed issues of fatherhood. As it turns out, most of the inmates who are members of SET are also fathers. Fascinating insights were made about the expectations they had of their own fathers as children and the expectations they have set for themselves as fathers who are currently incarcerated.

At each Wednesday meeting the secretary of the group takes minutes of the agenda and the items that were discussed. Those minutes will now be posted each week on the Prison Diaries project blog. We will also do our best to post at least one podcast per month featuring excerpts from Free FM Radio.

Unfortunately, as you will see in the video below, we were not able to meet with the women prisoners at Fort Augusta, but you can follow some of the blog posts they have written on the Prison Diaries blog. Coming soon, all of these separate blogs will come together at prisondiaries.org. You can learn more about the Prison Diaries project by exploring around their website and reading through their press coverage.

[Video] Prison Diaries in Jamaica

David Sasaki — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:28:04 +0000

You will need Flash 8 (or higher) and a javascript enabled browser to view our videos.

SET Director Kevin Wallen and volunteer Caleen Deidritch explain the history, process, and objectives of Prison Diaries, a project which teaches inmates at two of Kingston's correctional facilities how to portray the realities of life behind bars using blogs and podcasts.

Inmates take on blogs to start a reform of society

Rezwan — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:37:39 +0000

The concept of prison diaries is not new. Back in 2001 National Public Radio in the U.S. recorded an intimate portrait of five inmates behind bars using audio journals. British best-selling novelist Jeffrey Archer wrote a three volume memoir called Prison Diaries which was later converted into a play. Last year celebrity Paris Hilton also wrote a brief account of her days in prison.

But what we are talking about here is completely different from all of the above.

Rising Voices second round grantee Prison Diaries, based in Jamaica, will use citizen media tools like blogs, video and podcasts to share the daily journals of prison inmates, allowing all Jamaicans to learn about the realities of Jamaica’s overcrowded prison system with the hope that this will help counteract false ideas generated by the mainstream media.

(Image: CrimsonNinjagirl from Flickr -used under creative commons license)

It all started in 1999 with the S.E.T. Foundation, an inmate driven transformative program that has been successfully reducing the rate of recidivism in Jamaica’s prisons through reform of Jamaican society at its most grassroots level. Through S.E.T., the inmate becomes a constructive player who can contribute meaningfully to society, while the community, in turn, gains a new citizen who can contribute to the process of restorative transformation and economic growth.

Its leader Kevin Wallen describing his vision, writes, “I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them I found myself in hell and this is what it looked like, this is what I saw. In order for us to turn this back into the paradise it is is not difficult at all, it’s simply all for one and one for all.”

Kevin Wallen has been doing notable work using motivational workshops within the penal institutions. Jamaica's law and order situation has deteriorated in recent times and it has been branded internationally as the ‘murder capital of the world.’

Kevin points out the goal of the Prison Diaries project:

Much of Jamaica’s culture of crime has been blamed on the popular veneration of gang leaders. The project will attempt to confront this ‘badboy veneration' by training current prison inmates to blog and podcast.

In their introductory post on the Rising Voices project blog for Prison Diaries Kevin writes:

The S.E.T. Prison Diaries project will allow inmates and ex-inmates to tell their stories so that a greater understanding of the experiences, social and economic conditions which compel them to engage in criminal activities can be recorded and utilized as an authoritative source for studying criminology and designing rehabilitative programs regionally and internationally.

The inmates will primarily generate their own content with the training they have received through the S.E.T program. They will record and edit audio and video clips and these will be uploaded to our blog and accessed by the general public.

More ideas are coming up from the Prison Diaries team:

For those persons who have told their stories on paper and may not want to do a audio or video interview, we have decided to do dramatic readings of their stories which the inmates themselves will edit using the skills they have learnt.

You can learn more about the Prison Diaries project from their recently published press release. Already a few stories have been recorded and will be published soon. We are eager to read the diaries of the inmates. Please keep an eye on the Prison Diaries Blog or subscribe to its RSS feed.