InJune 2007, I began teaching poetry to inmates through Auburn University’sAlabama Prison Arts and Education Project (APAEP). Over the course of 7 months,I taught at Bibb County Correctional Facility in Brent, AL and St. ClairCorrectional Facility in Springville, AL.

            Onthe first day of classes at Bibb, myself and two colleagues pulled into thevisitor’s parking lot. It was a hot day—ninety-degree temperatures withunforgiving humidity. Carrying my see-through milk crate of teaching materialsbulging out the sides, it was evident that I’d over-prepared for class. We wereescorted by prison security guards through two check points, asked for ouridentification cards, and personal belongings like keys, jewelry, and currency.We were padded down, checked for weapons of destruction, our stuff sent througha metal detector. There were monitors. (As I write this, I’m bothered by theease with which this story is coming to me. As if my experience was comparableto a TV documentary on prisons. You know, the kind that generate populardistrust and contempt for inmates, and by association, neutralize one’s senseof alarm over the general malignancy of state punishment by inviting us to viewits organization—a system of monitoring, uniformed and armed securityofficials, buffed and shined floors, check points, etc.). In Michel Foucault’sbook Discipline and Punish, the theorist describes this organizedmonitoring as the panoptic process-a machine that functions to “induce inthe inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures theautomatic functioning of power.” We could have likely been at an airport orhospital with all the “security” measures. That’s a scary thought.

            Wefinally ended up in a large, air-conditioned room. It was surrounded by windowsthat fanned out to the prison yard. Brown lawns were evidence of Alabama’sdrought. Thirty-foot tall fences crowned with barbed wire ran the length of thefacility. A security tower. Many brick dormitories with barely opened, steelslats. Inside the meeting hall, a handful of inmates dressed in dingy-white,dickey-type uniforms sat waiting along a rear wall. Chairs hugged the walls instacks. I claimed the corner farthest away from my colleagues hoping this wouldmitigate the acoustics in the room. Three classes of 20 inmates occupying thesame space. With the help of my students, we set up our “classroom”: 15 chairsand two long tables facing south.

            IfI was nervous, the feeling dissipated once class begun. There was a sense thatI had work to do here with this group and myself, and that could only be donein this context. I’d had two brothers serve time in state penitentiaries inGeorgia. Thus, my stint teaching at Bibb seemed near-intimate and personal.

            BibbCounty Correctional Facility is home to some 1, 400 inmates most of whom arenon-violent drug offenders. This is sharply contrasted with St. ClairCorrectional Facility where in a prison with a capacity for 1,300 inmates, over300 are serving life without parole. A recent 2008 study from the Pew Center onthe States purports that the United States leads the world in its prisonpopulation with more than 23 million people behind bars as compared to China’s1.5 million and Russia’s 890,000. Throw race in there and it becomes a ball ofwax. It is no surprise that the history of slavery with its focus on theunlawful revocation of basic human rights for Americans, the large majority ofwhich are African Americans, has its tie to the current system of incarcerationwhich produces the ideology of racial subordination by imprisoning adisproportionate number of black and brown males at an alarming rate. One studysuggests that 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs born in the late1960s are imprisoned before the age of 40. On average, state inmates have fewerthan 11 years of schooling and come from disadvantaged parts of society. 

            WhenI took the job with APAEP, I had no plans to write the poem under consideration.Together my students and I read essays by Sterling Brown on the mnemonics ofsacred and secular music in African American verse traditions along with essayson the Reconstruction period in American History by W.E.B. Dubois. We examinedsong lyrics by Bob Dylan.  We readinnovators like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as well as contemporary poetslike Ilya Kaminsky and Honoree Fannone Jeffers. We talked about current events.Our discussions laid the groundwork for many of the poems we’d write inclass.  Each inmate kept a dailydream diary or journal. I encouraged them to use the material from theirjournals as fodder for poems.

             In the same way that Langston Hughes’sor Sterling Brown’s work embodies the vernacular of African American culture,in this long poem Alabama Inmate Notes (for Moses), I set out to gather an impression of the vernacular of lifebehind bars.