Mass Incarceration, Washington D.C.
A story of a prison writing workshop when D.C. was “the Murder Capital.”
“Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.” — Michelle Alexander
Poets in Prison
Back in 1995–1997, I taught writing in a prison. I did not know at the time that I was teaching in a mass incarceration writing program.
The writing workshop I became involved in within prison occurred in the now famous and closed Lorton Prison just outside Washington D.C. in Occoquan, Virginia.
Four of us made the trek every Wednesday evening back then to teach the incarcerated writing: Ta’nehisi Coates, the celebrated and award-winning international author; Darrell Stover, poet, and writer, who is Program Director for the North Carolina Humanities Council now; and poet, and guerilla intellectual, Joel Dias Porter, aka, D.J. Renegade, who has been published all over the place, and been all over reading his poetry.
