by Susan Hutton > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
In 2008, Shaka Senghor met Ashley Lucas at the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility. Senghor was serving the seventeenth year of a murder sentence. Lucas, an associate professor in LSA’s Residential College and the director of the Prison Creative Arts Program (PCAP), was conducting research on a theater workshop in which Senghor was participating.
Start the Conversation TWO THINGS BROUGHT THE PAIR TOGETHER: the theater work, which both had found powerful and transformative, and the landscape of prison itself, where Senghor had spent almost two decades and where Lucas had been visiting her incarcerated father for almost as long.
“Shaka and I connected,” Lucas explains, “to tell the stories that mattered to us.” While there are 2.4 million people currently imprisoned in the United States, millions more have been affected by violent crime. Senghor believes that conversations between incarcerated people and crime victims about forgiveness, atonement, and reconciliation can bridge these groups, helping people with a troubled past use the arts to reimagine a future they thought they had already forfeited. As a result, he created the Atonement Project, an initiative he designed to help victims and violent offenders heal through the power of the arts. PCAP was a natural partner. Founded in 1990 by English professor Buzz Alexander, PCAP has grown into the largest program of its kind in the country, linking college students and prisoners through art and workshops. Atonement Project workshops teach LSA students to help prisoners create art to start a very challenging dialogue. “Art makes conversations that are normally difficult easier to digest,” Senghor says. “It makes these painful subjects easier to think about on their own without contentiousness.” “The situations that bring us here are not black and white,” agrees Lucas. “It’s not good people here, bad people there. Prisons hide the human and beautiful parts of the people inside them. “When we tell these stories in highly beautiful language and images, we see ourselves as part of the struggle without implicating everyone,” Lucas continues. “Seeing art or a performance by formerly incarcerated people exposes the connection. It gives you a way to have that conversation in an expansive and meaningful way.” n
FALL 2014 / LSA Magazine
15