LONG HAND
My teenaged daughter has been home all week with a cold. She has been reporting to school remotely. To think she holds in her hands an entire universe to let her know what is going on in class, turn in her work, and stay connected to friends. The knowledge at her fingertips is staggering — so different from my school days.
I think about walking into a prison, putting my cell phone in a locker, and bringing the papers I prepared upstairs to our classroom. In prison, I can’t take a photo to jog my memory or confirm a date on my iCal. Inside, we use a dictionary to look up a word, take notes, and photocopy pages to share a poem. I watch grown men writing a second copy of their poem on notebook paper to submit to the PonyXpress. It reminds me of being sixteen, taking me back to how I gathered information from books and newspapers, radio and television. I had to pay attention because the information couldn’t be re-Googled. It is interesting to toggle between the digital and analog. Since I am fluent in both, I adjust pretty easily. Many people in prison are firmly planted in an analog world, compared to my daughter and her peers who inhabit a digital existence. Talk about a generational gap — it’s a cultural chasm.
Tablets are making their way to prisons across the country. In California, prisoners have been issued one and now can make free phone calls to people on the outside, in addition to accessing myriad digital content. Calls from prison are expensive (again, something that takes me back to my teenaged years when we paid long-distance charges.) Previously, I have written about how critical phone calls and visits are to a person’s mental health. Maintenance of healthy relationships helps returning citizens land on their feet.
Bridgeworks Oregon will be working with Edovo, which is a free platform that provides educational and vocational training for the incarcerated through self-guided study on prison tablets. This month, we will be adding past publications to their site, including some PonyXpress writing. Over the coming months, we will be creating curriculum alongside our OSP editors for Edovo. Understanding how the digital world operates will aid prisoners as they transition into the day-to-day world of PIN codes and online paychecks. We are dreaming up all manner of artistic ways to spark new ideas to make intellectual life a little richer in prisons across the country. Our work will become available to 100K currently enrolled Edovo learners. With the platform loaded on 350K tablets across the country, we hope to reach many more people by the end of the year.
Each new technology brings unexpected trade-offs (writing really put a damper on the oral tradition.) Prison tablets are highly regulated as they operate in a closed system. Prisoners will not be engaging social media algorithms and the click bait found swimming through the web. I can’t help but think about how a rapid deployment of this tool will change the prison environment — much for the good — but also with some social trade-offs. I am concerned that we will see fewer books in facilities, that information may be restricted or censored in some states. I know from personal behavior that the satisfying push of buttons rewards my impulsive attention. I joke that Google is the end of wonder. Sure enough, six little devices sitting on the table at a dinner party are deployed to end guessing games. And if the party is teenaged, the conversation wavers as soon as screens connect with eyes. Like my sick kid upstairs “at school” but not talking to anyone, I imagine tablets may further isolate people. After all, social skills require constant practice and a fair amount of effort.
On this International Women’s Day, I started writing about my daughter and quickly moved to communication technology. Historically, the Pony Express delivered letters across long distances over one hundred years ago. I imagine packets arriving dusty, a little worse for the wear as they were unloaded from a saddle bag. This delivery technology fell away and was replaced, but letters remained. Letter to My Daughter by Jimmy Kashi is the kind of letter some children wait a lifetime to read from their fathers. Jimmy and his daughter are held apart by the wall and by state lines. He recognizes that he must humble himself and make amends: “I hope that we can learn about each other, and together we can build on our bond as father and daughter.”
Here’s a call back to Kristie Jeffers, one of our Coffee Creek writers who has recently moved to the minimum facility, which means that she is that she is much closer to returning home to Grand Ronde and to her daughter. All the Times is a celebration of breaking the chains of addiction to freely mother.
OSP editor Scott Bitter responded to Stephen Little Foot Lister’s Family Preservation: “I admire this image of multiple generations of family reflecting love for each other. Ideally, we are all brought into this world surrounded by loving family. Your first selection of the word “calmness” reminds me of the sacred births of my children, which ensures family preservation for at least another generation.”
Will this digital technology hold our memories? Or will the cloud implode from the weight of 1s and 0s? Perhaps it is wise to go ahead and hand write a copy of that letter to your daughter. | TDS