 Okay, so for the panel everyone is going very short kind of work talk about what you do and your work and then we're going to get into a deeper discussion. And I don't want this to be one of those panels where you watch us talk and then we have a Q&A. This is a small enough and manageable group that we can consider in a dialogue from the outset. So let's just start with the far right and Hassan. Good morning, how's everybody doing? Good. My name is Hassan Davis. I am currently serving as Commissioner of Juvenile Justice for the State of Kentucky. I have operational administrative and fiscal responsibility for more than 30 youth facilities. We serve probably about 2,000 kids in our secure setting out through our community probation and parole and it's a real challenge. Outside of that, I'm a lawyer by training, but more importantly I'm an artist and arts activist. I've been cutting my teeth as an artist in residence, as a writer and an actor for years and then wound up in this work because I realized that there was a need not just to figure out how to engage young people, but maybe further upstream how to get them to a point where we can engage them. So I've been working in Juvenile Justice on the state and national level for about the last 10 years, I guess 15 if I would be honest. And so I'm excited to be here for a number of reasons. I think the work this morning was incredible and the use of history and the continual challenges of how we work through this system. I've got two brothers serving life sentences, I've buried five cousins. I grew up in the gang culture of Atlanta, Georgia, St. Louis, Missouri and making such a dramatic shift was a self-work challenge, but the arts is that piece that really grounded me. Some of you may know Alice Lovelace, at least by name it's not by reputation. And that's my mama and that's my lifeline. So the art really was that being at a pivotal moment in my life that gave me the choice to be something other than what I was clearly intended to be. And so I'm glad to be here and appreciate the opportunity to be with these great folks. I'm Buzz Alexander and I'm the founder of the Prism Creative Arts Project, which is now in its, we're in the, our 23rd year now, it'll be 24 in January. We've done a number of things. We have the, we're about to complete our 600th play here in Michigan. Not all the plays are good, but some of them are absolutely great. And we have something like 240 poetry writing workshops that we've done in the prisons, youth facilities and Detroit high schools. We have done I think about 155 art workshops in the prisons, youth facilities and a few of them in the high schools. We have the largest prison art exhibition in the world. We had 252 artists here in Michigan submitting work last year. We had 370, 397 pieces of art in the show. We also work with incarcerated youth enabling them to create portfolios either of their art or of their writing. And we've worked with I think almost 200 of them now doing that kind of work. And we also have a linkage project where people have come home from prison and have extreme amount of challenges. We're able to support them as people who've learned how to, who cared about writing, doing art and theater inside of prisons. The basic thing that I'd like to say about what we do is that we celebrate the resistance and the power of the men and women and the youth inside of the prisons. We understand isolation and numbness and so on. But what we recognize and support is the fact that these people are stepping up, being creators, figuring out how to work together as families and communities. And that's what we help make happen and it's what they make happen. You know, I used to have a bunch of support. I'm the chair of an organization called Hope Helping Our Prison Elevate, which was started a big year before I came home. And Hope was founded by some comrades of mine that was incarcerated, as well as community folks. And what Hope mission was, we felt that we can challenge the thought process of prisoners, we need to give them a real chance. And I was based upon the samples that we all lived. We began to send books into prisons. Unfortunately in the state of Michigan, we ran into a lot of roadblocks sending books into prisons and helping them be friends and engaging themselves. So we also started... Tell us what those wrote. I bet people don't know how difficult it is to send a book to prison. Even as they're emptying out and closing prison libraries? Yeah, I mean, it makes it so hard in the sense of where you've got to be a proven vendor, all this crap. A proven vendor? A proven vendor is a bookstore or someone that's licensed to Amazon, things like that. Or it's coming straight from the publisher. And then, as we all know, anybody familiar with prison life, it's that discretion of each prison. You go to one prison, everything goes. You go to another prison, everything that you bring with you, you got to send home. You're like, what the hell? So what we began to do was start sponsoring free bus trips for family members, because also we saw that as a need. But you had guys going 10, 20 years without seeing their loved ones, family members. So again, trying to tackle a lot of those issues within the last couple of years, also we've become a member of an organization called All of Us and None, which is a national organization coming out of the Bay Area. And All of Us and None is the one to put on the map, the Band of Box, that's folks that have been doing that across the country. I'm familiar with that Band of Box, is that have you ever been convicted of a felony? We initiated here in Detroit where we had it passed on the city level, where it's no longer in their own application as well as among the vendors. And also we just worked with Congress, Congressman Hanson Clark, to get it on the congressmen, I mean, national level through his office. He wasn't reelected? He wasn't reelected. Because of redistricting? Exactly. So we're still pushing forward. The Band of Box not only in Detroit, Kalamazoo, and I know on the Bay Area and other places, it has taken an impact. So again, and what the whole thing is with Michelle I designed it, she's been introduced to the conversation of New Jim Crow. And for many of us who over stand New Jim Crow, we realize folks are still being discriminated against, permanently being discriminated, openly being discriminated against. So how can we progress in society when folks who are the real criminals are continuing to get free passes when everyday folks who make mistakes can't continue getting no opportunities? So again, when we look at it far as on a human level when guys coming out of prison, we want to respect them to succeed when there's no real opportunities out there. I love Michelle I designed the book, but from an academia standpoint it helps, but far as the actual lives of individuals coming home, that part of that conversation I challenge you all to really get into. And when getting into that, it's getting to the lives of those other family members, of those individuals that has to live, live now. I mean, just think, if you go on 20 years and you come back to your neighborhood, how much it changed, now you gotta relearn the bus route, you gotta relearn your family, you gotta relearn you. I mean, just those dynamics there is a motherfucker. It's hard. And that's a lot about what one of you said's book is about. I remember picking someone up from prison who had just done 15 years and on the way back I stopped at a gas station and I was like, you're the guy, you pumped the gas. I didn't realize that he would be stuck at the gas pump for five minutes not realizing all that had changed in the 15 years that he'd been locked away down to even putting your credit card in. I mean, you know, we don't even think about these things. We're just out here in these streets. I guess I want to start with you, Fuzz. I mean, you've talked about the work that you're doing, but my professor's trying to answer some kind of specific questions. And this could be anecdotal, but I'm wondering what does the work actually look like? I mean, you could tell us about a particular student or prisoner that you worked with, but what does this look like to go into these spaces and do this work, which is art? Like, whether it's beauty or poetry, whichever you like to share, but... Yeah, well, basically, and I'll try to say this fairly quickly, but when we go in as students at the University of Michigan, we take risks and we're as vulnerable as the people inside of our workshops. We're able to connect with our liaison, we're able to get things focused, but after that we are as vulnerable as anybody else in doing the work, and for us that's very important. I guess the other piece of that is that we act in the plays. We write poetry. When you say you act, you mean you perform? We perform together with them. The plays are all original. Our 600th play will also be original. And I think that's incredibly important is that we're part of that. We act, we write poetry, we get up and perform with the prisoners, with the youth, with the high school students we work with here in Detroit. And I guess that's the key thing. One other factor is that it's really important for us is that we believe in who's in the room, whatever the space is. We build a kind of trust, but the main thing is that no matter what people are doing in that particular space, and they're very challenging spaces, they're very hard spaces, people are disruptive and so on, is that we believe that we're going to work it out and we believe in the people who are in the room no matter who they are because they're going to step up and make it happen. And that's the key thing that we do. How do you, and I understand that as a philosophy, how do you communicate that belief? Like, how do you create the space for, I'm assuming, people who oftentimes have never either acted or written poetry. So how do you communicate or facilitate that? Right at the start. When we go in to do a theater workshop, for instance, we are wacky, we're crazy, we run around, and they get it. They understand that that's what we're there for. And that's the same. We begin a poetry workshop, same kind of thing. We have fun exercises, people step up, and they get it very, very quickly. So we communicate it through what we do. We don't come in and say, here's what you need to do. We don't come in with lesson plans. We don't come in with ideas and everything. We just illustrate what we're doing, and they catch on very, very quickly. Does anyone have any other questions for Buzz right now about how he's doing the work that he's doing? Sure. Do you know a little deeper into the anatomy of a project, simply a performance project? Like walk me through one project of life, the thing you did first, and just the arc of it. I think it's pretty amazing, but the more nuts and bolts. I get sort of coming in, dang wacky. You took one project and blocked us from beginning. Sure. I'll tell you about one play, which is the best play I've ever been in. It was in the women's facility. And we were kind of figuring out what we were going to do, and at one point somebody said, we have to talk, and it's related to what we just thought. Somebody said, we have to talk about forgiveness. They said that. They said that. And then forgiveness became very, people were hugging each other, they were crying. It became very, very emotional and powerful because people were telling their own particular stories. And we all told our stories, all of us that were involved. There was one person who had killed her husband, and she talked about, at the end of her story, she talked about having done it with her own hands. And it's a longer story to talk about what happened there. But it became a very powerful play because it was about being able to forgive, or not being able to forgive, which turned out to be true in some cases, or being able to forgive yourself. And at the end of the play, somebody came up to me and said, this will change the yard. I don't think it changed the yard, but basically it was about, when we opened the curtain, everybody was crying. It was very, very emotional because of what we had done in that play. It was the best play I've ever been involved in. So that was the process. It was gradual. We had to explore it. We had to think about it. We had to figure out which scenes we were going to do. It ended up with some dancing going on in the play. Three very powerful people working as dancers and so on. So that was basically the process. It was gradual. We had to think it out. We had to figure out which scenes. We invented it. We moved with it. We eventually got it down to a final performance. Hasan, you talked about... I mean, obviously, you're the man. No, the first time I said that, it pissed me off so bad. I was like, crap! Oh my God, I've been fighting for my whole life. Yeah, yeah. And I'm wondering... I'm wondering what you're doing to connect, you know, one of the questions is connecting people to place, but also how you're connecting your beliefs to the job that you have to do and this belief that art can be transformative and can possibly... I imagine you hope that it will help prevent recidivism and just create real rehabilitation. Well, that's such a challenge. I think that for me, I walked into the system sideways and so kind of, you know, I was there and people didn't know what I was bringing with me until I got in the door and unpacked and they were like, oh crap, he's the man. And the first thing that I did was I called the Arch Council and I said, you know, we need to get artists in these places. And that's a long-drawn process, but actually just last week I had three of my two teachers and two facility superintendents go to an artist training for the Arch Council to train artists and to talk to them about the challenges and the issues that we face in the facility and what we need artists to be able to do in order to come to those systems because for me, there's a big disconnect, you know, as an artist and, you know, my whole family's artists, you know. My father was a reggae singer, my mom's a poet and a player, you know, my sister, everybody. And so I grew up with that sense as a background but then you come into facilities and you don't wear lots of brightly colored clothes and walk around in frilly dress. You know, all that stuff that we kind of take for granted when we gather are things that, you know, when artists come into schools with, you know, my sister has dreads and she's got bells and, you know, everything and so she rattles. And it's like, but you know, but you can't do that in these facilities, right? Everything's a risk, everything's a balance and so for us, the conversation is, you know, we have to have you here but we have to figure out how to make you able to infiltrate this system, you know, like me, you know. I wear a suit now. I hate it but I do it every day because it's what gets me into those conversations where I can go, and by the way, next week I got some people coming to see you and you need to let them in, right? But letting artists understand that, you know, who we are and all that creative stuff can be expressed and taught in a way that doesn't sit off every alarm or every conservative person who wants to command and control because that is, until we get to a better system, that's what folks think this is, right? This is command and control. And so for me, it's about setting the stage so that I don't have to fight all the people who have been doing this 20 years and there's no way in the hell no hippies gonna come in here and talk about, you know, hugging people, you know, because, you know, those are the things, right? That's a good job, baby, you did good. You know, cry some. And these people, my people who I'm trying to change, but they don't like it, you know, are losing their mind because you're getting too close and you might pull one of those bells off or one of those beats might be used next week for something. And so a big part of it for me is being gradual. You know, not coming in saying, okay, we're gonna do a show next week and everybody's gonna have to share something, you know, but saying there's an expectation and it's not even about the art first. What I said first is we have to start doing family engagement because if a child doesn't have a life line outside of here then they don't have nothing to go back to and we have to start doing things like speaking to them like human beings and we have to start, you know, we have to start understanding trauma. I was talking these folks, you know, trauma, before you get to all the other stuff, you know, that's the thread. You know, 90% at least of the folks that come through our system and wind up in the adult system have experienced at least one serious, dramatic, traumatic experience, right? And so if at the core of whatever we do, we understand that because the art is the healing piece. It's the thing that allows us to take that trauma to identify and then to figure out a coping mechanism. But if we don't actually identify that piece of it first, then we don't actually understand the conversation we're at. You know, we start opening people up with theater exercise and expressing emotion and you just took the pin out of a grenade. But for us, and so for my systems, I've been having this conversation about trauma because it is the single threat that runs through all of these systems. And if we can understand trauma and actually start to engage a young person, not just when they locked up, but when they're in a school, when they're in social services, when they're in the court, if everybody looking at a child instead of saying what did you do wrong and saying, you know, what did we do wrong? You know, where did we miss the ball? Then it gives us some space. And so the first piece is I'm trying to get a trauma-informed system. I'm trying to get my folks to understand that hurt people hurt people. But there's another piece of that, right? Touched people touch people, right? And so if we can understand that there's pain there, but we have the ability to mitigate that pain by bringing in the arts, bringing in family, bringing in all those other systems as a bandaid. You know, these are the things that we use to start to rebuild. And so it's crazy because I'm probably the only one in this position in the whole country. We just had a gathering of all the directors of heads of juvenile corrections, and, you know, most of these guys have no idea. Most of these guys don't want any of us anywhere near their system because it messes up a very simple process. Sit down, shut up, do what I told you to do. And what we're saying is it can't be that simple. Can you tell me a bit about this training manual that you've created for artists who are coming into... Well, it's a... Right now it's just a conversation. I've got some... I was telling Buzz, Shakespeare Behind Bars, which I know has a component up here. The other city that is working in is Louisville, Kentucky. And the person who runs that project out of Louisville also comes into my juvenile facility and works in tandem with a group of young people working through a Shakespeare piece every year, too. And so it's really... I've really started to build through Shakespeare Behind Bars. We do a mural project with Emmanuel Martinez, who comes in and he does these great murals and works with process with young people in detention centers. And then we have a couple of other things. You know, Greenhouse poets come in and do some poetry work, but they're spread out. And so what I've done is I've gathered the superintendents and the teachers who work and bring those artists in and have built a relationship and I'm using them to teach one of the other folks in our system that you can have these things happen without losing control. But at the same time, they're going out and talking to artists. The training we deal with the artists on the state arts roster is these are the things that work with high-risk communities, especially youth that come in our systems. These are the things you have to be aware of. As you start to do your artistic process, just understand. It doesn't mean you have to stop, but you may need to understand that you may elicit responses differently, because you may trigger some things or you may have an encounter that you have to process with the counselor because that might have some real significant impact on what happens later on. So it's just a part of understanding place. It's just what we do when we go into schools for residencies or when we have festivals, but the place is very different than most of us traditionally go into. And it's just being able to internalize that. And we've had artists that go in one time and that door locks behind them and they say, I don't know. That occurs to me with us. Art don't work here, right? Yeah. And so you have to kind of prepare yourself for that and understand that it's going to be different, but the possibility and the impact of it is phenomenal. And so for me, that is worth it. It's worth it to push it and to really, really try to make it happen because when it does happen well, and I think Buzz speaks to this incredibly well, it has an impact that is way beyond the scope of that small group that you started with. And I want to get back to that about the evidence of that impact. But what you just said, and if you see me looking at my phones, it's because I have notes here. It's not because I have a boyfriend texting me. What you doing? I'm just sitting on a panel. I wonder how many people, even as Hassan was talking, are willing to kind of modify their own practices to go into a place. Like, I mean, you know, that's... Yeah. I mean, because you come from a training, you know? You come from theater training, sometimes very advanced. You have your MFA's and the PHA's. I would... Okay, MFA's been very controversial, but I would be very suspicious of someone who modifies their work. And what I mean by that was the thought that I was saying is that people are people are people. I understand that you have to do modifications based on place, but when I was at Wandsworth, which is the largest Mexican security prison in England and Europe last summer, I just walked in and what was successful about the workshop was I treated them like people, you know? And we had a conversation about poetry and we had a conversation about writing and we had a conversation about what's on your mind. And that's what I do with anyone. I do that in a college class. I do that at a regional theater. I do that, you know, whatever. And so I'm concerned. Well, let me piece it. And I do everything. So, I know what I'm... That's not... No, no, no. I was responding to what she was saying. I was responding to the question, to the problem. Just to be provocative, because obviously modification, I mean, we all modify to some extent, but I just want to say as a practicing artist, it's... You walk in with your heart. You walk in with your heart open, you know? And you do that with every room and you assess every room. But to say I'm going to, you know, act in a particular way with young people or I'm going to act in a particular way. I mean, that's, you know... I didn't think the way you act or anything like that. But look ahead, yeah. It's more about, like, if you start with, you know, if you start with a certain kind of exercise that works for you in most circumstances, I think... I worked with Cornerstone Theatre Company and a few years ago, we did a project called For All Time. That was where we... One of the things that we wanted to do was to... We were talking around the... Who is the community that we would work with around ideas of punishment and retribution in terms of justice. And, yeah, we talked to a lot of people who were formerly incarcerated. We talked with people who... We had partnerships with organizations that do, like, re-entry programs and lots of different people. Victims, a filing crime, their families, people who are interested in restorative justice, all these things. But a big missing component was people who are currently incarcerated. So we found a way to do a workshop in a California women's institution, California CIW, Institution for Women. And... Is that right? And in Chino. And we did workshops. But the workshops, like, when you start to go in, the rules were really new to us. Like, the things that you have to watch out for in terms of power dynamics and how people... We were told that some people might not want to make decisions. Like, you can't give them a lot of options right away because they're not used to having a lot of options. So kind of easing into things like that. Now, that, I wouldn't... Now, that I've probably fallen inside of Daniel, but I've been in a real pragmatic way in terms of what Hasan was saying. Like, even Buzz's example of, like, ending in a hug session, like, our hugs are timed when I go to prison 20 seconds, you know, and they break it up. I'm sure you know that, Yusuf. If you get 20 seconds, it's, damn, they're like, sex, right? I mean, you get these five-second hugs, and you're not... So I didn't mean necessarily the content or... Like, I probably would reject that notion that, oh, they haven't had a lot of choices unless I give them a lot, even if I'm sure someone said that to you. I'm sure. But I meant more about that. I'm probably reducing it greatly, but there were certain things that came up in terms of awareness. Don't do these things, but you should be aware that these are things that you might run into along the way. And so I think part of our practice was to... We did a lot of the things that we do, but also one of the things we do is respond to who's in the room and where they're at at the time. And so we maybe didn't... We made choices about what we started with and maybe reexamined where we push at the beginning and push boundaries with people. So I think that there's some modification, but it's just... It's what we do is to respond to people. But I think as artists we do that in any room. Exactly. I think what I was trying to say is that you don't make a special accommodation for a particular group that as hopefully as conscious, aware artists, we scan any room and make assessments based on that room I mean, I've worked with professional... I've worked with Broadway actors who will not make choices on their own because they've come from a tradition of the director telling them what to do. So then in working with that group of people there's a gentle nurturing process of letting them know that this is going to be safe and I'm not going to scream at them for them making the choice the wrong... the quote unquote wrong choice. So I guess what I was just saying is I sometimes hear people talk about this work in quotation marks. And I hear a lot of them and I hear that kind of conversation so maybe I misread your question but what prompted me to speak was this notion of hopefully as artists we are not making accommodations not having a fixed way of work that then we deviate from for this particular population but that actually we walk in and I'm sure most people in this room this is not news but that we walk in flexible we walk in open, we walk in thoughtful we walk in considering people's circumstances and then whatever workshop we're doing we're doing all of that at the same time as bringing our tried and true techniques and whatever so that's just what I wanted to respond to. I meant it in a very practical way I have someone who went into a women's prison and wants to begin how she begins all of her exercises with some yoga poses and the prison was like no yoga you know so just real and this is I guess one of the overarching things like what are we learning about work and working and when and where and how it relates to place and how we modify it. I'm really eager to hear a lot more from you. I'm about to go to Yusuf. But then I'd also like to have Sarri talk about what she's doing she's sitting down a little bit lower than us and I think she wants to open it up for more discussion. Sure. Do you want to do that? I want to talk to you about well they're for everyone I want to know what's the evidence that you said that this can be transformative and what's the evidence that this is working but since we're in your place right now Yusuf and not only in your place physically like in this wonderful bookstore and community space that you've opened up to us today but also in your place as in we're in your hood I want to know like how you are able to to know that your work is working like the evidence like how do you know that what you're trying and when do you know that it's not working and what are the evidence renewal or revitalization? I mean for me the evidence is just you know 11 and a half years I've been on in that space department and the reputation was that's what people knew me as so you know coming home at Yusuf Shakur my greatest enemy was myself that reputation so I mean it was like one fuck that best like dude be back in six months a year etc so each step I've taken has not focused on what I do we do it I go back to school supply at my mom's house we open a bookstore you know when folks see me on news in particular I think it's supposed to be there he's on Fox 2 with real Perkins talking intelligent you know he's traveling the country he just left with Steve Harvey but not in a very fastidious way but in a way like that's my own way that's me that's the guy that's coming back to zone 8 so that evidence is in that where they connect to it but in the sense of where I am I carry the weight of who they are every day of my life when my homeboy just died who did 20 years serving a life sentence for leukemia who's fighting every day to get out I carry that with me in the sense of you know this is not about Yusuf Shakur it's about the 2 million that's still in there with a black or white because everybody that want to separate me and put me on a couch I'm not the exception because there's guys in this that's the smarter me or not smart but also going into a Yusuf facility this past week in Pontiac talking to these young folks and you seeing the hope in their eyes I can make it I can overcome it I don't have it I can overcome it I'm not having a father in my life coming out of gang culture you know you've been told for me numerous times at 20 I wouldn't be C-40 I'm going to C-40 next year but again in a very realistic terms you know the struggles are still there though the temptations are still there but what do you do internally you know because after the day like my brothers I start talking about we're not healing ourselves that pain, that hurt that's causing us to go out to do the things that we only realize that we're doing not seeing a beautiful woman seeing a bitch basically because I'm mad at my mama I'm mad at my sister that has configured me to not to see a woman because of that pain so once that pain heals I may not have no money in my pocket I have a rich spirit I don't have a lot of money based upon the mind of probably why I was human being what kind of things have happened on the stage that we're sitting on right now and who was in the audience when those things were happening last year this stage here was normally been a year and we opened it up we celebrated Black August we had Willie Tate Sundiata who was a comrade of George Jackson who was actually there in the town when George Jackson was murdered we had a conversation with him we do a weekly portion series we had Carl Taylor who was a phenomenal guy in the state of Michigan where are we now we're doing game work and we have numerous folks that come through and again you know you're asking whether you such a corps means is based upon those relationships that I've been able to have with my neighbor I imagine that your middle name Bunchy you're taking from Bunchy Carter the infamous L.A. Crip who became a very important panther one of the first people to join the L.A. Panthers and I'm guessing a Shakur but tell us how you chose your name because you were Jojo from Zone 8 Killer really but problem solver you had a reputation I chose my name Yusef is Joseph just pronounced in different names so I kept that name and out of my mother and out of my grandfather Bunchy is in honor of our print Bunchy Carter who was a member not the Crips but the Slawson Slawson guys oh okay I'm sorry and the Slawson guys became yeah the Slawson guys were like the parents of the other Crips and looking at Bunchy I really had his life the guy who was in prison changed his life so here again we all have models so I looked at this person as a model Shakur is in honor of Shakur's out of the style of Matulu but also the name it means itself thankful to God so the whole name is honorable soldier thankful to God so as I changed my name so every day someone called me Yusef it was reinforcing you got to be committed to this chain I remember one of the craziest things my homeboy had came to prison I hadn't seen him in a long time so he was like what's up Joseph what's up I'm like man I ain't my name no more I'm my name Yusef I ain't my name no more I had to do that for myself because again there's a lot of guys who are going to prison, I'm going to change God, Jesus, Allah whatever they gave me one more opportunity I ain't going to do this no more but if you haven't made that commitment to yourself within yourself that God within you none of that don't mean a goddamn thing and that was the beauty of the relationship that me and my father had developed you know I became a Muslim I stopped being a Muslim he didn't box me like you got to be this way he was my friend he was my brother, he was my father but we disagreed on those things but out of that love me to grow to be who I am and that commitment has been based upon that name every time I hear that name it reminds me of the work that I was doing this is kind of out of left field but it occurs to me that in our community and by our community I mean the African American community that is very common to find the name change particularly post 60s so whether you're talking about famous people like you know Malcolm X just changing his last name or someone like Joanne Chesmar going to Masada Shakur use of examples is a common one as we were coming here we talked about neighborhoods names being changed and that being both problematic we talked about midtown right we used to be called Cascord Juanis from New Orleans but I went to CascTech the kind of crime that was known it was a drug den it's a homeless the place where homeless people in Detroit were and gathered and continue to and so that's kind of where the connotation do you have a problem like since you yourself you changed your name to signal this new beginning this new affirmation do you have a problem with neighborhoods names being changed we refer to this as zone 8 in the same way that a lot of words in hip hop are repurposed like you're saying zone 8 is if it's a positive thing but a lot of us in the city still know zone 8 to be murderers so can you talk to me about naming a place and the possibility for transformation in naming I'll put it in a larger context when you talk about community it has to be a fabric a fabric of what the community is but if you're coming in as sellers from a colonial type of situation then it loses its meaning so when you look at midtown in the midtown and its relationship to my neighborhood you would think it would have a great connection there is no growing up I didn't see Wayne State as an opportunity Wayne State is born into this miraculous place that it is now actually if you want to drive through there it feels like the suburbs they should be petitioned to be their own city because they got their own police there is no connection to the community so in that terms of changing the name it loses its value to the community of other people so when you talk about zone 8 the original name for this community was called Northwest Goldberg so again we took our own name so if you say some folks know Northwest Goldberg what the fuck are you talking about because it just never happened in part of our conversation but if it comes from the fabric of the community same like in prison if it comes out of that experience like what Buzz and them does and giving the ownership to the prisoner now they're growing with it now they see themselves as part of it versus again something seller and then you realize it's only benefiting what we're talking about now 1% which has always been a part of American culture and that's what the names has and what it means so even when you use such a court it's involved in my communities Jojo all that is part of my community so they're growing with this and they're seeing the transformation from this person to this person and it's helping transform their lives because they're seeing that I can change from this person that person as well and it's a very important thing does anyone else have any ideas on that concept of renaming either yourself or places there's a way of signaling I was just really thinking about it I want to go back to because a lot of my work is around media communications it really resonates with me because it has a lot to do with who is actually the creator of that framing and I think like in renaming districts renaming neighborhoods who's the audience for that for that future neighborhood and it tends to be not the folks who are there on the ground level and I think the difference is in the renaming of yourself there's a lot of thoughtfulness it's a very personal change it's ultimately to me in those communications practices who is part of the creative process and that having a major impact ultimately gets the benefit things tend to signal all kinds of things if I say Williamsburg very specific things come to mind when I say Detroit very specific things come to mind I'd like to talk to you about and this is for everyone how do you know that your work is working like the work that you're doing with these communities I'd like to turn it over to Ceri for a moment because she's actually the coordinator of our exhibition every year and let her talk a little bit about what she does so just briefly about the exhibition that Buzz has mentioned the exhibition takes about what like eight months planning and organizing we visit every person in the state of Michigan we drive there, physically go in if we're able to meet the men and the women we do talk to them about their process about what it's like to make work inside what the work means to them and then there's this really beautiful thing that happens where as people that go in and select the work there's this moment where we leave holding their artwork and they watch us leave it's very powerful and feeling like their work is not coming to freedom but crossing into this other world that they don't have access to but that their voices and their visions and their stories are able to be placed back into the world and be seen as beautiful and be engaged with the community and to start kind of talking about this idea of impact of course all the anecdotal the letters that come in the testimonies from people saying that the ability to create and share that is literally saving their lives people on the verge of suicide people that have attempted suicide people in mental health units saying this is what gives me hope and this is what keeps me getting up every morning and living another day and so there's that we know that from our work but there are also the little things for me over the years it's things like hearing people laugh and smile inside of a prison that very deep essence what it means to be a human being and what it means to have a heart and to have that kind of an emotional display with such dignity and with such courage in a place that is with everything in its being trying to do the opposite of that and so I think the impact of the work comes out in everyday human interaction when people smile when people hear themselves be called by their first name instead of a last name or a number that sense of I am someone and I'm worth something and I don't always have to be known for that worst moment in my life so in my experience that's where the impact starts to kind of seep out what happens to the artwork or the response back to the creators of the art based on I don't know what happens with the art I don't know what question to ask but do they hear back like my I love how you said part of them sort of transfers over and gets out and so what do they hear back about their children, their creative children that have left so there are a number of things that happen for starters the exhibition is open to the public if the artist chooses the work to be for sale and the proceeds from the sale of that artwork goes directly back to the artists so we often hear that the money is being used to purchase more art supplies to continue to make art or it's being used for things like a new toothbrush or a bar of soap or you know what I mean or like money to buy envelopes to be able to write home the stuff that the state doesn't just give you to be able to live and so the work is for sale and we have a guest book in the gallery that anyone that comes to visit can write in can write personal messages to specific artists and at the end of the exhibition we type up every page of that guest book and every artist that was in the show whether their work sold or not is given a copy of that guest book all the comments from the public and we've heard from people that like they put it inside their pillowcase and they sleep on it at night this packet of the words from people that they will probably never know and never meet in their life praising them for being something other than what society sees them as we're also in constant correspondence with the artists we have a program through the School of Art and Design at U of M where art students come into the gallery and take a tour and then pick pieces of art to write critique letters so a lot of the artists are actually engaging in I don't want to say an academic critique process but that sharing of ideas from people that are studying the visual arts so that's another way that the artists are in communication with the outside world with the people inside the students sometimes they do anything and a lot of times the artists send pieces of artwork back as an expression of gratitude for taking the time to write them and share their thoughts about their work to push them as an artist further into their own process we also have artists who have come home from prison they get up and speak and it's always very emotional because they've been imagining this space and now they're in it and they talk and we also send a videotape of the opening reception and of all of the works the 397 works that are in the show this year will go out and it'll be sent to each one of the prisons so there's a lot of communication back and forth on the video sorry I'm going to stop talking I'm fascinated just to the performance of the theater and dance pieces could those be filmed? can you film the prisoners and the non-prisoner actors working together and then show that elsewhere or show it to other people inside who aren't part of the creative process is it possible to video that or no Deputy Director Dan Golden in 1999 cut off the possibility of videotaping our shows so we've been videotaping them before we've managed to get that back so we've videotaped for the last three or four years and don't think we're able to send those videos in of the performances and of the readings and so on we can explore that we're going to have to get permission again from the new Deputy Director Tom Finco to be able to videotaped again I do want to act real quick the work that you're describing what they're doing is incredible but the reality of it is I don't know exactly how many prisoners that you are able to go into but it's close to 50 prisons here in the state of Michigan it's now down to I think 32 or 33 yeah that's really been about how many prisoners you are able to go to and we've actually done workshops in 25 of the Michigan prisons so the reality of the other ones that don't get this and then also even that is still slimming based upon the connection of what you're able to do with that you're talking about oppressive state oppressive situation treating us because I'm still there as child of slavery the ability to have a book certain books you're going to the hope I mean certain days of certain officers who you know bullets coming in you get excited they see that sight and they want to fuck your day if you're ready to write your ticket now you can't even go as you hear your mind is painting this picture of what's going on but there's another picture of your mind to realize we have to fight for the rights of these human beings across the country you're talking about people but hunger strikes are going on for particular reasons California and Ohio and Atlanta you know where guys are being denied the right to be a human being a lot of these individuals have committed crimes have done things but the reality is what about the crime has been committed against them and being invested in allowing them to grow as human beings because the thing that we have to realize there's no rehabilitation that's going on in these correction facilities there's profit this was going on and we have to talk about that we have to address that so when you talk about mass incarceration and Jim Crow this is what's feeding that here in Detroit when Georgia prison is coming out of state of Detroit which is city that's 85% black you're talking about in rural areas that's 85% 95% white and most of these prisons was swamp lands now you're talking about an economic base for that community that's created jobs and prisoners their votes are counted in the camps yeah yeah representation the prisoners are counted back in their home community they're counted in the communities where the prisons are they can't vote so they get counted on the census and then that community benefits from an increased population yeah that's been happening for a long time okay so I mean this also that you answered and I wish you'd been on stage I hate always being the only woman up here I wish you'd been up here the entire time on the panel because you talked about it and I want you to answer how you know on an intuitive level or anecdotally how it's working but do you have ways that you check in besides giving the people that you're working with surveys how do you know that your work is working I don't know that we have a way of determining that right now we get some good feedback especially things like Shakespeare behind bars there's a lot of processing that goes on just like the work that they do with the young people so I actually get a good amount of reflection from them on the process as they go through this theater process there's also this relationship to their real world experience internalize it you mean the teachers or the people the prisoners in our facility and I think that's a big part of it I don't know that there's a I don't know that this system is ready to support a more stronger affirmation and I say that out of safety for the program right because if we start talking about this you get those people who say you can get art and why are we going to give all the kids that we locked up that don't do nothing good at school and give them art and theater and so part of it is being strategic and I'm not going to ring too many bells and blow too many whistles because then I get those folks who show up saying well clearly you got too much money if you're trying to better you know that's the whole idea of rehabilitation fortunately in juvenile you know this is our work right because it's not supposed to be punitive which again is a hard conversation to have because everybody expects us to be you know teaching people less than punishing them but we do have some leeway in there but it's not even about rehabilitation right this is about habilitation we're not trying to get them back to a habit we're trying to create a new habit and a big part of that the system will only allow so much of that you know and you know there are folks in the conversation this week with the hands of our public education system there are folks who get elected on tough on crime right they get elected on I'm going to lock more people up and the data between educational attainment and art engagement the data is really clear that these are transformative and life changing pieces but they don't want that information out there because if you start telling everybody we spend more money on art schools and giving kids more opportunity and reason to be there then they won't be getting locked up at the tune of $150-$300 a day going into somebody else's car that's the conversation that creates a lot of problems and so for me you know I know it works because I see it on the ground and I think that part of it this is a guerrilla movement and I think that in a lot of ways it has to stay at that level because if we draw too much attention to it I think the people that traditionally understand that their power sits in our ignorance of what works will react immediately and pretty definitively to make sure we stop doing this shit and I think that's the real danger and so outside of what I know and we do a lot of treatment planning we do a lot of personal evaluations so we evaluate individuals and we can see based on their experience and based on what they have been doing in our treatment programs that young people who are engaged in theater and mural projects, young people who are engaged in communicating who are given that opportunity to get up and speak and learn how to tell their story are better they don't recidivate they don't come back to us they figure out how to navigate a system and they have these other things that connect them to the world and the culture then they don't come back to us so for us, I'm okay with that right now I mean I'd love to be able to publish a study on it but I'd say the day after that study came out we would all have some problems and so it's just one of those things where you have to be committed to doing the work and understand that it's valuable work whether anybody sees it or not and I think that's the hard part art in these dark places we just have to keep doing what we know we do that's so profound because theater is all about ultimately exhibition right, right you've got to be careful with the audience I mean something you've said connected to Amani's character I mean, you know you told us that you hadn't why you decided to give those short answers but even if it was from a lack of research in a way what you've said about was where to come to the prison and he would act too excited then he would get a ticket there's a constant repression of emotions so like to ask someone a question and get the yes and no answers which I've found often working with prisoners too that's the culture it's the stunted answer because to express too much emotion and particularly emotions being information right, then there are consequences possible I mean also I don't know I'll say universal where we begin to anticipate respect the worst and hope for the best it's such a gloomy situation coming from a gloomy household gloomy community why do I deserve it why should I even begin to want to do these things so when you get these real things that come in this space now it touches your humanity but then you figure out how to sabotage as well I was in this prison in Muskegon I was a young guy and I took a lycan toy and I wanted to give him a book and I wanted to give him a coat because my mother bought me a coat every year and she was like what are you trying to sleep with and I was like no, bro I just want to give you a coat and he finally trusted me he gave me a coat, we started working out we started reading books all my life we built a relationship from so many broken promises broken dreams why should I trust these things so again you have a diverse group of folks up here and I think each one of us plays a key role at this component how to educate for me on the grassroots level we keep pushing it because when I walk in the dole I'm not ashamed of it so they know my track record but in reality they begin to see the hope and see the reality all these guys can have the ability to change but no one has spoken up on it since I'm out of my mind in the sense of a bold courageous out there I use the term of X-men where you have you got the X-men but there's more mutants out there than the X-men and they're so ashamed they've been so fucked over that they're afraid to come out because they've been socially rejected so we're looking at Charles Xavier and the little few and we're giving them crumbs while the rest of us it's like rats and shit and we don't know how to behave but in the end that's what arts for me the biggest thing I could trip back to my community was to do a book reading the Star of Shakur book changed my life George Jackson book changed my life and I would say George Jackson even more than Malcolm and George Jackson some of the things that he was punished for he of course went to prison for stealing $28 worth of something at a gas station and what he got in prison catching charges based on the officials there but one of the things that he struggled for in terms of prisoner rights was toilet paper it was a huge struggle libraries one of the reasons there are word libraries up until about four or five years ago in prisons was because of George Jackson and then even as Hassan's talking about an underground theater I'm reminded of say Belarus's you know free theater program people know about the Belarus free theater I have a friend Madeline Slacker who's working with Belarus's Europe's last dictatorship and they have this underground theater company called free theater and you know they perform and do their work at great risk and you talking about you know not wanting this and even though we have people who are here to write a book you talking about not wanting this to necessarily get publicity brings to mind Europe's friggin' last dictatorship it brings to mind the Belarus free theater company I have a question for you Seth have you spoken about your experiences while inside I was wondering if you had access to any artistic programs that were helpful in your journey yeah that's why I brought up like I never this program that they did was never before that the prison I was at in the stadium cold water the closest thing was a book program where out of state they was donating books but also in the process once you begin to understand what life is about now you begin to form that within prison you begin to dream we exchange books we carved our own reality within this harsh reality but as far as actual programs there was none particularly in the 90s when I went to prison John Engler who was the governor at the time he had removed the majority of those programs and all you could do was get a GED that's why you said that Alana has a line in her song Emergence where you've heard last night she talks about parallel universes and obviously prison in some ways is a parallel universe and then you talk about within that place creating a separate parallel places on top of places so we have just a few minutes left so you know to sort of figure it out I'd like to talk about a couple of things really quickly we actually have a speakers bureau and we train people to answer really really tough questions and then we go on and we take those very tough questions so that's one of the things we do another thing we do is that when people leave from our organization and graduate or leave they they're now 244 of them around the country doing social justice work and they continue to do this kind of work because of the kind of training because of the kind of instruction they've got and so on and the third thing very quickly is that we were able to work with four prisoners who'd come home to create a play called when can we talk about the equity rates so they were able to be paid for the work they were doing well I hope this panel has been useful or inspiring in some way I know I'm clearly inspired as you go back and do your work and I hope that we'll have some continue sharing yeah one of the things that I noticed is that in terms of budgeting like the budget for say rehabilitation or reintegration is like but then the budget for researching rehabilitation or reintegration is huge so is there any way that maybe we could work as artists to turn our work into more of something that can be taken as a research base for the forum I think it's a great idea I think that if you look at what's coming out from the Department of Justice now reentry is the single biggest justice movement that we have and it's not because they're altruistic folks they've only got it and said what are we doing like in all these people up they're going oh shit we spent all this money on those people right because I mean it's the truth and finally this is the other side of it it's finally tipping the other way everybody who's going to benefit from prison industrial conflicts got their tax already and now the rest of us are just paying out out for it and so there really is a strong movement everything that I've seen in the last couple years coming out as far as grant money is about reentry I think that looking at the arts as a reclamation tool and that's the word that I use art is a reclamation tool I mean that's really what we're trying to do right we're trying to reclaim and reintegrate folks and if we start to get our head around using that language and start to really focus our work and I don't you know it'll be impossible for any of us as artists to go in and say I want to do a program for justice on art but if you start partnering with the counseling agencies you start partnering with mental health and mental health is a great place to be because trauma is at the core of this art therapy we know it works you start to integrate so we start integrating all the different pieces of what we do into the same conversation as these folks who have the right papers and these are great partnerships because the idea is to just like you see so many prisons being closed down here they're trying to get more of these folks out and what they recognize is they've done a piss poor job of preparing folks to get out right getting them ready to actually come out and be productive citizens and so how do you write that by finding a way to engage them intensely you know in building and creating something that can really drive them and maybe even be some benefit to the community and arts is a great entrepreneurial environment I mean we have people we can create and survive in environments and economies that other folks can and so I think that if we use that as a transferable skill if we use that as a component of what we're doing with education with mental health with social services and we really do insert ourselves in this conversation as professional artists with something to offer we're not just a guy on the corner who's painted bronze right you know I mean I think that we have a lot of stereotypes to overcome as artists you know and you know for me it's I mean being walking in two worlds like this has been really interesting for me because you know it really has shown me that there's this huge disconnect but if we can start to adjust our focus I mean the work that we do is work that speaks for itself but every time we start talking about art to the people who have the strings right now we sign up the teacher on Charlie Brown you know they just nod until you finally get tired and walk away but this is a credible conversation and when you stop when you stop talking about it makes you feel good when you stop talking about you know the ability to express yourself and to speak you know and you start talking about dollars and cents you start talking about education and the arts together those two components education and the arts together are critical because they reduce criminality they reduce crime related costs across the board people who are engaged start to actually invest in the economy people taking their kids to Chuck E. Cheese and so for me all my conversations with the Rotary, with the chambers with legislators when I go down and have to testify I'm not talking about all the stuff that I grew up talking about how it saved my life because it gave me purpose and made me feel valuable because they just glaze over and so I just throw up the slide that says 30% reduction in violent crime you know 16% reduction in arson 10% you know and they go oh wait a minute is this the same conversation they go yeah and by the way you know it's cheaper too right right because and so it really is about us develop a more comprehensive conversation about what we do art is not an add-on art is not a supplement and for so long that is all we have been art is integral right it is necessary component to human beings and creativity and live spirits and we have never been able to express that in a way that allows other folks to understand it and so we have to adjust our conversations so that we get all the data points in there and then we can get to the work and I think there's lots of money out there to get this work done and we have to do what we do best get creative about getting to it. You should write a manual really should and thank you for your pragmatism and your passion for balancing your principles with this pragmatism you clearly read and want to scoop who sat by the door and you get in the door and you were really creating your change bus thank you for the experience that you brought to this I'm impressed I'm overwhelmed by the volume of work that you've done and that you've dedicated to and you so thank you for sharing your life and your story so selflessly with so many and for doing the work that you've done to restore Detroit and to restore the neighborhoods in Detroit and thank you all for listening and participating and let's enjoy some lunch so and thank you Dream for joining us in this conversation