EXPANDING PRISON EDUCATION Thanks to a donation to the Department of English by Barbara Martinsons, the Prison Education Project is training graduate students and faculty to help with prison writing workshops and expanding the number and topics of classes at local prisons.
About 25 years ago, Barbara Martinsons was teaching at Marymount Manhattan College, a small college in New York City. The faculty received notes in their mailboxes asking if they wanted to trade a class in the college for teaching a class in a prison. Martinsons said ‘yes’ and taught “Sociology of Film” at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the state’s only maximum-security prison for women. “The experience changed the direction of my life and gave me a sense of vocation,” Martinsons said. Later, Martinsons moved to upstate New York and began teaching at Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximumsecurity prison for men. Along the way, she became a board member for Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison and started the nonprofit College and Community Fellowship (CCF), which helps women coming out of prison who are interested in going to college. Martinsons now lives part of the year in Tucson and is retired from teaching. But she is still dedicated to promoting education for those currently in or coming out of the prison system. She remains on the boards of Hudson Link and CCF and mentors people coming out of prison through Old Pueblo Community Services. Martinsons has also made a sizable donation to the Department of English to help it expand the Prison Education Project. “Most of the people in prison are going to come out,” Martinsons said. “Education can make them stronger citizens, parents, and participants in their communities. I think demanding college work can give a person a new way of being in the world and a new way of coping with difficulties.”
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SBS DEVELOPMENTS 2018
HUNGRY FOR EDUCATION Every Saturday, Erec Toso dons his khaki “prison pants” – the only pair he owns that the Arizona State Prison will allow inside the yard. Toso then drives to the south side of Tucson, passes through security with his cracked plastic tub filled with notebooks and pencils, and conducts a pair of two-hour creative writing workshops for incarcerated men. About 15 men usually show up to each of Toso’s workshops. They can write anything they want – poems, fiction, memoirs. They comment on one another’s work. Toso mentions one man with a shaved head and crude tattoos, in jail for dealing ecstasy. “If he were at the University of Arizona, he would likely be one of the star students in film or writing courses,” Toso said. “He works hard at his craft, taking it far more seriously than even my best university students. He devours the books on writing that I bring in.”
Erec Toso holding Richard Shelton’s book during a 2011 program called “Inside/Outside Prison Writing Workshop.” Photo courtesy of ASU Art Museum.
