Volume: 59 Issue: 12
DECEMBER 2, 2015
driftwood.uno.edu
PERSPECTIVES ON INCARCERATION
UNO students collaborate on National Public History Project BY ANDREW LABORDE Driftwood Staff “Global Dialogues on Incarceration”, this year’s National Public History Project coordinated by the New School for Social Research, is a collaborative effort between universities and institutions around the country—including UNO. Ben Weber, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard and current adjunct professor at UNO who specializes in the history of incarceration, along with his students, worked to contribute to the traveling national exhibit through their work with Angola inmates. His class “Policing and Prisons in Local and Global Perspectives” teaches the history of mass incarceration in Louisiana and around the country. By using the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola as the case study, the class aims to study prisoner work, organizing, writing and art as well as examine the beginnings of mass incarceration through time.
“The students in the class are producing UNO’s piece of the national traveling exhibit, and that is supposed to give the public across the country a look at the history of incarceration in Louisiana,” Weber said. “[The students] are basically creating windows into the prison’s past, and those are different aspects of the history of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. They’re 3-5 minute video says that are going to be a part of the national traveling exhibit.” Hannah Mohr, an Interdisciplinary Studies major, chose her topic, along with a partner, to focus on death and dying in Angola. “At first we planned on talking about the death penalty and the electric chair and execution because it was something we both had strong opinions on, but then we ended up making it more about dying in Angola because it has its own cemetery and the funerals are all run by the inmates,” Mohr said. The class took a tour of the prison on Oct. 1 to see the
fields, buildings, museum, have lunch, and see a tier of death row. “When I went into college I thought I wanted to do behavioral analysis, but in this class I’ve reconsidered what I want to do,” Mohr said. “I am considering studying law for my graduate degree, and do appeals for the wrongly convicted.” Weber’s class also has a “windows into the present” component, which is a postcard exchange with currently incarcerated prisoners at Angola. This part of the class is called “Stories from Prison: Honoring Ancestors. “I was volunteering at the prison this summer and got them to approve this exchange with my class. So it’s guys who are doing life at Angola who are from New Orleans wrote stories about loved ones who passed away while they were incarcerated,” said Weber. Weber collected these stories and gave them to his students and the class did commemora-
tions for these prisoners’ loved ones that included releasing balloons for a girlfriend who died of brain cancer, placing a dozen pink roses on a mother’s grave site, and placing a bouquet of flowers and a bingo chip on the rocks at Lafreniere Park for a prisoner’s grandmother who loved bingo. They took pictures of the commemoration and are mailing them back to the prison. The students’ projects on honoring these prisoners’ loved ones were on display at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center on Nov. 14. There is an online forum that all the universities partake in who are involved with the National History Project. Weber’s class posted entries detailing their visit to the prison and they received feedback from their partner school, the New School in New York City, about how their projects are going, and Weber’s class provided feedback as well. Weber also wanted to involve local area high schools. “The original idea was to
get them to create art that’s responding to Richard Ross’s photo exhibit called Juvenile Injustice,” Weber said. “A lot of his photos are pictures of shackling and handcuffing and people in locked cells. We wanted to have the high schoolers in New Orleans to have a chance to respond artistically to the idea of what a world without prisons would look like.” The event was called “Picturing a World Without Prisons” which took place on Oct. 29, and the schools that participated were NOCCA, Bard Early College, KIPP School for the Performing Arts, and Episcopal High School in Baton Rouge. Included in the high schools’ art show was a discussion panel with local artists talking about the connection between art and activism. Weber said, “The goal of the [National Public History Project] is to create conversations nationally about the past, but also about the future of criminal justice reform.” See page 4 for photo