NEWS & EVENTS
UNO STUDENTS EXPLORE INCARCERATION AS PART OF NATIONAL PROJECT One of the prisoners asked the students to place a bouquet of flowers and a Bingo chip on the rocks at Metairie’s Lafreniere Park in honor of his Bingo-loving Grandma Betty. Another requested balloons be released in memory of his girlfriend who died with brain cancer. Another simply asked that a dozen pink roses be placed at his mother’s grave site. “She loved pink roses,” the man wrote in a note to a 17-student class at University of New Orleans. Students in Benjamin Weber’s class, “Policing and Prisons in Local and Global Perspectives,” collected stories and postcards from inmates at Louisiana State Prison in 16
UNO MAGAZINE
FALL 2015
Angola over a series of months for a public history project called “Windows Through Walls: Angola Penitentiary Over Time.” They asked the prisoners—all from New Orleans—to tell them the stories of loved ones who died while they themselves remained incarcerated. And they asked the question: How would you like to commemorate them? In response, seven graduate students and 10 undergraduates crisscrossed New Orleans performing requested rituals of remembrance to honor these inmates’ relatives and loved ones, people who died while the inmates were serving time, unable to pay their respects in person.
UNO students release balloons at the corner of Orleans Avenue and N. Galvez Street at the request of a man who was incarcerated when his girlfriend died with brain cancer.
“What they’ve found is that behind that label ‘criminal’ are people with real lives and real families and real loss,” says Weber, a visiting scholar at the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at UNO. The Ashé Cultural Arts Center last winter highlighted the students’ work so far in a display called “Stories from Prison/ Honoring Ancestors.” It included a display of