A new podcast explores the power of the humanities in Wisconsin prisons.
When Dasha Kelly Hamilton first walked through the metal detectors at Racine Correctional Institution (RCI) 17 years ago, she’d seen prisons only on television and in movies (including every season of Oz). As correctional officers ushered her through a steel door that locked behind her, she was nervous.
“There’s a guard tower, and you just see this perimeter landscape of barbed wire,” Hamilton says, “and then you remember where you are.” But as soon as Hamilton entered the prison library, her nerves settled. “Any library anywhere where there are books on the walls, just makes it a different space,” she says.
Hamilton kicked off her visit by performing a poem, and then she led her “fellas,” as she calls them, in a poetry slam workshop. Though she’d led plenty of workshops before, something special took place that day. “I love seeing the same work flourish in a different way inside that building,” she says. “[The residents] need the interaction for different reasons. They need the writing release for different reasons.”