A biweekly newsletter about the future of postsecondary education in prisons. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here’s what you need to know:

• This week, we dive into censorship of incarcerated artists and prison arts programs. Check out Juan Hernandez’s illustrations about higher education inside, including a piece that was destroyed by prison mailroom censors. 

• ICYMI: We collaborated with our local partner WBEZ to cover what the closure of Stateville Correctional Center, a 100-year-old maximum security prison outside Chicago. In August, some incarcerated students were abruptly transferred to other facilities around Illinois despite efforts by college programs to keep their program participants together.

The struggle for artistic freedom in prison

If this story were in The Onion, the headline would be “Mailroom officials thwart prison escape via giant tassel.”

A few months ago, I got a message from Juan Hernandez, an artist incarcerated in Illinois. We’ve been working with him on some illustrations for this newsletter. He told me he’d sent me three sketches, but only two of them made it out of the prison. 

He wrote that he received an “unauthorized mail notification” stating that one of the images he drew caused a threat to the safety and security of the prison. “It was a sketch of a gun tower with a huge graduation cap on its top where its string tassel was hanging over the fence outside of the prison’s compound,” he wrote. “I drew a prisoner using the tassel as a means to climb towards freedom. Hence, I called the sketch ‘Education = Freedom’, but the facility didn’t see it that way. They just had me destroy it.”

The next week, he sent me another version of the same image that made it past the mailroom censors. 

Hernandez is an independent artist who has been able to work with outside organizations such as galleries and the Design Museum of Chicago. (You can also follow him on Instagram.) This week we’re showcasing some sketches he did about his experience — or the lack thereof — with education in prison. 

This incident with the prison mailroom censors at Hernandez’s prison highlights the challenges that artists inside face both with sharing their work with the outside world as well as getting access to resources and materials for their art. In this case, the censorship seems to be arbitrary as a similar sketch — the one you see above — got out the next week without any push back. 

Many incarcerated artists like Hernandez work with arts programs such as University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project, which offers art, theater and creative writing workshops in the state prison system and hosts an annual art exhibition. These programs have to navigate a delicate balance of providing incarcerated artists a public platform without alienating the correctional officials who grant college staff and students access to the prison system. 

“You have to work within the confines of the system in order to actually get in the door and do the work you want to do,” said Nora Krinitsky, the director of the University of Michigan arts program. 

It’s worth noting that these kinds of prison arts programs aren’t available everywhere. Hernandez’s prison in Illinois, for instance, doesn’t offer any art programs — or much at all in the way of higher education.

Small acts of creative defiance

Both educators and artists say that prison officials are particularly sensitive to depictions of correctional officers and prison facilities, contraband-related content, or anything that might be construed as an escape plan. “Pieces that are kind of strident in their critiques of the carceral system or a particular facility are often ones that we see censored,” Krinitsky said.

She added that the biggest challenge the Prison Creative Arts Project faces with censorship is the art that doesn’t even make it into the room to be considered for their annual show. 

Alvin Smith, who sent us this painting commemorating the return of Pell Grants for incarcerated students last year, shared one such example. He said prison officials did not allow him to submit a painting depicting the 13th Amendment as modern day slavery to the University of Michigan show. He said the image included a figure who was split into two halves: an overseer with a bullwhip on one side, and a correctional officer uniform with a taser on the other. 

Yusef Qualls-El, who we profiled earlier this spring about the challenges he faced getting an education as a juvenile lifer, was another incarcerated artist in Michigan who often received push back from prison staff. He drew what he was seeing and experiencing, which often meant his work was critical of the prison system and the conditions he experienced. At one facility his artwork was routinely confiscated, he said. He shared one incident where staff took around 15 pieces he had made. 

"When they took them, they let me know that they took them, but they didn't do paperwork. They just took them and destroyed them. I didn't have proof that I did them," he said. 

Small acts of creative defiance allowed him to maintain some sense of artistic freedom. Qualls-El described creating a piece depicting a mother who was handcuffed to her baby, with a correctional officer standing behind them. Staff told him to remove the officer from the image. He refused and snuck the piece into the portfolio he showed the Prison Creative Arts Project, he said.

The painting was eventually displayed during the show, Qualls-El said.

Creative workarounds

Emily Chase, arts programming coordinator, said that the University of Michigan program also has internal curation guidelines, such as not depicting gang symbols, hate speech, or violence directed towards a specific individual or group of people. “​​That ties into being part of a really big institution,” she said. “We have to be aware that whatever we hang up, we're hanging up as part of this huge university.”

Chase said the curators sometimes decide not to include something in order to protect the artist. In one case, someone had submitted a handmade tattoo gun for consideration. “It was super cool, but if we take this as a piece, the director is going to see it,” she said. “What’s going to happen to the artist if we take this piece and display it?”

Krinitsky said that artists often find creative ways to work around the restrictions, including the use of metaphor. That was a strategy that Qualls-El employed. He created a piece depicting bears who were wearing correctional uniforms. “You want to punish me by saying that I was drawing officers,” he said. “But I'm drawing bears, so I don't know what you're talking about."

When art becomes contraband

Bruce Ward, who spent 11 years incarcerated in Arizona, said that he faced extreme difficulty when he wanted to study art history and theory. He subscribed to ARTnews, a visual arts magazine, but received only a handful of issues over three years. He also tried to order a book that was the definitive guide to pencil drawing techniques. That book, called The Pencil, was rejected because it has figure drawings that violated the prison’s no-nudity policy. 

This fall, Ward is starting a masters of fine arts program at the University of Hawaii. He can feel the gaps in his knowledge compared to that of his peers, he said. He would be in a much better position if he had been able to use the time he had inside to study reference materials about art. “Now I'm suffering in a master's degree program where it's like, ‘Name 10 contemporary artists you look up to,’” he said. “I came out of a completely blind spot.”

He also faced challenges getting access to materials to do his art. While he tried to stay away from controversial themes, he said that officers were so heavy handed in their censorship “we were just hiding our artwork and treating all of it like it was contraband.”

He and other artists also ended up making their own art paper after his prison eventually restricted them to notebook paper. “We’d rip the skin off of cardboard property boxes and then wet them in the shower and press them under our mats,” he said. “Then you’d have a 20 inch by 14 inch piece of paper you could paint and draw on. But as soon as you did that, it was contraband.”

He would have to sneak out his art by mailing it home when there was someone he knew was friendly working in the prison mailroom. 

Ward’s first opportunity to showcase his work was through Arizona State University’s {Ink}arcerated: Creativity Within Confinement program, which organizes an annual gallery show and charity art auction. While the show didn’t initially give him the big break he was looking for, it did provide a stepping stone to enroll at Arizona State just nine days after he was released from prison in 2020. He graduated in December 2023. 

Qualls-El similarly credits the Prison Creative Arts Project in Michigan with giving him one of the few positive outlets he had during his nearly 28-year incarceration. Until someone told him about the program, “I had a story that I wanted to tell, but I didn't have an audience to tell it to,” he said. 

Art itself also became an escape from the realities of prison. “PCAP probably saved my life, because I could literally spend days working on a piece, which prevented me from being in the mix of things,” Qualls-El said. 

Related coverage:  
”Many states don’t educate people sentenced to life. Now some are coming home.”

Let’s connect

Please connect if you have story ideas or just want to share your experience with prison education programs as a student or educator. You can always reach me at [email protected] or on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To reach me via snail mail, you can write to: Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

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