March 22, 2016
My kids I wonder where your mind are
I hope missing daddy from afar
My kids I know I made promises in the past
That’s before I get my GED and now attending a college class
My kids I say to you that I are all grown up
So you can stop worrying about me my time almost up
Day-Day
Guest post by Warren “Ren” Hynson
All last week I read the handout “The School,” and I was confused. I felt the story was all over the place and I was lost. As I walked around the prison compound, everyone I saw from our class asked, “Did you read ‘The School’?” They all followed that question with different but similar opinions. One person said that they thought Jess had us read “The School”and then answer the questions to psychoanalyze us. A few others shared these thoughts. I thought, because of the waiter and vessel clip-art, that the story was teaching us how not to write a story. I left the conversation even more confused.
The day of the class, prior to Mikita and Jess walking in, I was still lost. Everyone was talking about different things going on in and outside of prison. I asked the men, “What do you all think of the story?” It started a brief conversation that didn’t really shed any light on my struggles to understand it all.
Moments later, Mikita and Jess walked in. I was happy to see that it was the Jess that was part of another class I took with Mikita a couple of years ago. Jess did an amazing job facilitating a discussion and asking the right questions that finally started to enlighten me and others in the room. She helped us find the answers in the same place that our questions lay, and that was within ourselves. It felt good to understand what I’ve always known to be true and that is that authors may intend to tell a few stories in one. Maybe one is literal, and another is written between the lines for only others to see.
Facilitate means “to make easy,” and what Jess did was make it easy for us in the room to look at “The School” from a different perspective. Her discussion-based way of facilitating the class is a great way for students to learn, and I think she will continue to do an amazing job as she teaches more classes.
I felt bad that I didn’t do the reading “The Black House” because I wasn’t able to participate in the discussion. I love to talk in class, and for that part I was silent. I was playing close attention to the dialogue in the room about “The Black House,” and the discussion got really good, especially the part when people shared stories passed down from generation to generation about certain places they went growing up. All the rituals people participate in may not really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but to the people going through the experience, it means everything.
All in all, I liked how that class went. It was a great experience, and I liked how Jess was professional and about her business. Keep up the good work Mikita, and keep bringing these amazing individuals in.
Inauguration Speech by Patrick Holmes, in response to guest visit by MICA professor John Barry
My Fellow Americans,
Today marks the dawn of a new age, a new beginning in which “We the People” will be reborn by an awakening of the Republic’s consciousness to guide our country back to the fundamentals that made our society great. In order to facilitate this rebirth, we must break out of that mass consumerist, military-industrialist fog that has encapsulated our minds, inhibited our spirits, and suppressed our creative abilities. In times as dire as ours, we need a leader who is not beholden to special interest groups, big banks and multi-national corporations that steal the best jobs from the American people and transplant them to overseas factories and pennies on the dollar. We need to get back to the fundamentals of small-town business mentality with a global outreach, where mom and pop can still make enough money to feed themselves and save money for a brighter future for their children, and our children.
We need to bring back the prosperity of this country by chopping down the trees of Big Business, rooting out corruption on all levels of government, business, and our uniformed services, and to reinstall honor, integrity, duty and respect into our civil servants. After all, that’s what we are here to do. Serve the people. For the people. By the people. A country where, once again, a man’s word is better than the gold that he would now sell his children to procure.
Guest post by Shane Barnett
We were honored to have Professor Paul Jaskunas from MICA present to us the first chapter of his novel “Cybelle” this past Tuesday, a story about the coming of age of a rural West Virginia girl battling to overcome mediocrity. In his first chapter, Jaskunas illustrates the struggle of Cybelle to maintain her dysfunctional family while still managing to meet the demands of college so that she can attain the means to her lofty aspirations. So far, “Cybelle” is a somber story of the personal struggle that so many of us daily face. Such is life.
Professor Jaskunas captivated his audience with his soft-spoken narration of the very intriguing depths of female nature, dealing with men and sex and where these things can lead when haphazardly approached. The story so far seems to be a description of the age-old inter-relationship of woman to man in using her assets to obtain the security she needs for survival, as she tries to overcome her dependence upon him – a vicious cycle of give-and-take that so often is our existence.
Our class became a panel of critics full of questions and suggestions for the author. We wanted to know why he does what he does and how he does it. We wanted him to tell us more. What does Cybelle look like? Where is her story headed? Is she destined for success and the proverbial happy ending, or failure and tragedy? We did our best to exhume the details from the mind of our subject in order to ascertain the motive for his composition and the objectives for his forlorn heroine. From what I can gather, Cybelle has a long hard road ahead, but where that road leads has yet to be seen, even by Jaskunas himself, as he leaves us with awesome insight for our own development of plots and characters. “Let your characters be as chemicals in a scientific experiment … create conditions for them and see what reactions ensure…”
Good luck, Cybelle!
We finished the class by watching the 1954 animated version of Animal Farm, directed by Joy Batchelor and John Halas, which is an interesting movie in its own right, but a very watered down version of Orwell’s allegory. I’m sure none of the men 
were surprised that the ending of Animal Farm was depressing, but possibly some were disturbed to realize just how terrible things finally got. But I have to say, most of the animals were asking for it. They followed the pigs blindly and naively; they didn’t pay attention to what was going on around them; they trusted that Napoleon had their best interests at heart, they forgot the past, and they didn’t look out for themselves.
At the beginning of Chapter 10, years have passed since the rebellion. Many of the animals involved in it are dead. Most of its ideals and promises are dead as well. The younger animals simply accept Napoleon’s historical account and the way he runs the farm. They are now far worse off under Napoleon than under Mr. Jones. The windmill, before it’s exploded, is used to mill corn and increase profits. The pigs, under Napoleon, have become worse than the humans. The commandments have been changed so that the pigs are considered superior to the others.
This is a very cynical story. Orwell seems to be suggesting that all power corrupts. There’s no way out. In our own lives, we can either join the pigs, and become corrupted, or go on quietly with our own lives, and be led blindly and naïvely. There is a moment of potential enlightenment when seems as though thing
s could be turned around when Boxer is taken away to the slaughterhouse, and Benjamin has a heroic moment when he tries to mount a rescue operation. But in the end, even Benjamin is cynically resolved to the disastrous fate of pig rule.
There can be no actual hero on Animal Farm because totalitarianism eliminates all heroism. There can be no daring individual acts because all such acts end in death. On Orwell’s Animal Farm, it may well be that cynicism is not just an optional disposition; it is a duty. It is the only possibility of opposition. It’s the realist’s version of hope, the only disposition that can penetrate beyond the implacable barriers of oppression. The cynic does not accept power, but nor does he accept the tyranny of the status quo. As usual, another depressing book to end the course.
Animal Farm is starting to get depressing, but I think we all predicted that. And not all the animals are having a hard time. As top pig, Napoleon is in the pink. He’s even going to market and bringing home the bacon. By the end of these two chapters, Napoleon’s regime is definitely worse than that of Mr. Jones. As Napoleon’s 
henchman, Squealer circulates disinformation, blaming everything bad that happens on the absent Snowball. He also accuses certain animals of plotting secretly with Snowball, which is obviously untrue. What makes matters worse is that the animals admit it, internalizing their self-hatred. Napoleon doesn’t even have the decency to give them a fair trial; he just has them taken round the back of the barn and the dog rip out their throats. So much for Commandment Six, “No Animal Shall Kill Any Other Animal.”
These two chapters are important because they show how the animals are being manipulated into following anything Squealer claims Napoleon has said. The animals are so obedient that they don’t even realize how gullible they are. The truth is, they’re so used to having someone else think for them, that they don’t even consider objecting. They just assume Napoleon is right all the time.
Although he uses the word “Comrade” and uses the inclusive “we,” Squealer is starting to speak in a formal way, beginning to isolate himself from his fellow beasts. No longer is he an everyday pig. Though he denies that the top pigs have power over the others, his speech, charisma and closeness to Napoleon all give Squealer implicit authority.
For example, when Squealer bans “Beasts of England,” he says, “In ‘Beasts of England,’ we expressed our longing for a better society in days to come. But that society has now been established. Clearly this song has no longer any purpose.” When he says “we,” he sounds as though he is speaking on behalf of the other animals, but he is also assuming that they all feel the same way. He is not open to disagreement or protest. He pretends to be a “pig of the people” but is actually authoritative and hard headed.
Although the book may be getting depressing, I’ve got a lot to look forward to. I really love hearing the men’s responses to this novel, because they’re so complex and interesting. I’m used to listening carefully to the thoughtful responses produced by Mr. Arey, for example, and Mr. Doyle, and Mr. Simpson, but last w
eek I wasn’t prepared for Mr. Barnett’s paper. There was really too much for me to take in just by sitting listening to it—I had to take a copy home and read it again. And then there was Mr. Drummond’s impressively close reading. He gets right in there and turn the words themselves into a code to be cracked, creating mysteries he alone can solve. The progress of the pigs may be disheartening, but that of this group is just the opposite.
Our second book of the semester is Mike’s choice: Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea. I have to say: Hemingway is the kind of author I think of as another “man’s” writer. 
Like Steinbeck, it’s all externals, action, physical details. This is another book I’m going to be suffering through. I hope everyone else enjoys it enough to make my pain worthwhile.
Last summer, I read a book by Edith Wharton, a nineteenth century American writer, called The Reef. Towards the end of this novel, the female protagonist, Anna Leath, begins to realize that she has highly ambivalent feelings about the man she’s engaged to, whom, she’s just discovered, has had an affair with the family’s governess. Of Anna, Wharton writes:
“She recalled having read somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their power. So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny.”
I remember, when I read this passage, being so moved and impressed by it because it’s a perfect example of exactly the kind of thing I look for and love in a fiction writer – the ability to capture and express those psychological moments that are central to human life and relationships.
This may sound like a roundabout way of why I don’t like Hemingway and Steinbeck, but in fact I’m working very hard as I read to understand why this kind of writing does so little for me, and why I find it so empty.
In our discussion last week, Josh said, “men are visual creatures.” It’s certainly true that, in general, men respond to visual stimulation more readily than do women. The men in the group may enjoy this book because it’s so visual, and the characters so elemental, the story so simple and mythic: man and boy versus the elements. I’m not a visual person, however. What I look for is psychological insight and unexpected language, and this book has neither. Nor did the last one. Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the book – it just doesn’t have what it takes to get me going. There’s an old man, and there’s a big fish. But it’s not enough. Moby Dick, another story of an old man and a big fish, is much more interesting to me because there’s a lot of psychology involved (and some interesting secondary characters). But here, there’s just a man and a fish. And I’m not hooked.
Two months ago, the Attorney General Lorretta Lynch and the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came to Jessup to announce a plan to offer Pell Grants to some prisoners again. They gave us until October 2nd to find a university partner to offer credit-bearing programs.
I’m very pleased to announce that the University of Baltimore has applied to the Department of Education to offer degrees at Jessup Correctional Institution: a BA in Community Studies and Civic Engagement, and a BA in Human Services Administration, starting in Fall of 2016. We hope to enroll a cohort of 20-30 students, starting with eligible members of the JCI Prison Scholars Program!
There’s a lot of work to be done between now and next September, and it’s still possible that the Department of Education might refuse UB’s application. But I am bursting with pride in our students at Jessup for making this possible. At the University of Baltimore, it is our own Andrea Cantora who led the effort and will be shepherding the credit-bearing courses into being. Dr. Cantora came to us with plenty of experience working in prisons, but in her criminal justice courses she saw students who are deeply curious and hard-working taking classes without credit or recognition, and so she’s put an immense amount of time and effort into giving them what they deserve!
This excellent article by Beth Schartzapfel, Staff Writer at the Marshall Project, refers to the JCI Prison Scholars program, and includes quotes from scholars Josh Miller and Vincent Greco.
Obama is Reinstalling Pell Grants for Prisoners
Photographer Mark Hejnar attended my Advanced Literature class at the end of May and took some great photos of the students. Not all the men can be shown due to an arcane policy regarding victim notification rights, but here are some photos that have passed the censorship rules. Most of these men have been in the class for over three years now. Many of them are students in various other JCI classes, too, and have been so for years.
