On March 14-16, 2024, the Prison Story Project was honored to be an invited participant in “Inside and Out: The Humanities and Mass Incarceration, held at the University of Chicago.
The three-day “convening” was sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council, but it brought together representatives of humanities councils from 24 states and their community partners. It was in this last capacity that the Prison Story Project participated.
The meeting offered an impressive array of humanities-oriented projects offered in prisons and other correctional facilities – projects emphasizing formal in informal educational endeavors, creative and exploratory writing, and dramatic productions, all designed to foster a more humane environment for incarcerated people, to help these people prepare for their eventual release, and to focus the public’s attention on mass incarceration in the U.S.
Not only was the Prison Story Project able to share the narrative of its founding and dozen years of operation, but the Project also took the opportunity to establish cooperative relationships with similar projects in neighboring states. Look for those relationships to bear fruit over the next several months.