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EDITORIAL: Prison Writes program a powerful ministry

Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal - 6/19/2018

June 19--Life can be bleak inside the walls of our prisons.

Time spent in confinement has a dehumanizing effect, days are bland, and communication with the outside world is difficult.

In the midst of those conditions, creative writing can provide a very valuable outlet, and that's what makes programs like the Prison Writes Initiative so valuable.

The nonprofit enhances job-seeking and rehabilitative skills through creative writing, as reported by the Daily Journal'sDillon Mullan. Its classes provide an escape from an oppressive environment and an outlet to process and express the range of emotions that can build up during extended time in confinement.

Since September, Amanda Garvin, an English professor at Northeast Mississippi Community College, has guided a nine-person class at the Alcorn County Regional Correctional Facility through essays, poems and prose. Retired high school English teacher Myra Byrnes helped with the course's final -- two original plays written by students and performed at a graduation ceremony on June 8.

"The teachers make me feel like I am a real person, like I'm not just a person wearing these ugly stripes, like I'm a human being who made a mistake," student Stanley Henderson said. "It's a blessing for them to take time out of their schedule and teach what they know and share experience with us."

The program not only helps prisoners express themselves, it also helps them communicate with loved ones. Letter writing is the cheapest and best way for inmates to stay in touch with the outside world, and the skills from the class help them to better tell their stories.

Those skills also better prepare them for life after prison and help lower a recidivism rate that costs Mississippi millions upon millions of dollars every year.

According to the latest data on recidivism from the Mississippi Department of Corrections, 9,590 inmates were released from prison in 2012. Within three years, 3,439, or 35.9 percent, were incarcerated again. Those 3,439 inmates cost the state more than $62 million per year.

Louis Bourgeois, who founded Prison Writes, teaches three creative writing classes to students in long-term segregation at the state penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. He also teaches a class to students in the elderly and disabled ward.

Too often, we forget about those sitting in Mississippi prisons, serving time for various wrongdoings. We go through our regular lives without much of a thought to their condition.

Yet people like Bourgeois, Garvin and Byrnes and many others involved in various prison ministries are going out of their way to truly help these men and women get their lives back on track.

It's a powerful program that can have a deep impact -- one that can restore humanity and help our prisons with their rehabilitative missions.

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(c)2018 the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (Tupelo, Miss.)

Visit the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (Tupelo, Miss.) at www.djournal.com

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