Black History Month is often referred to by my fellow Blackademics as “the high season.” Schools and organizations across the country seek us out for obligatory assemblies and programs. Though the shortest month, February is the most popular time of the year for scholars of color to situate our scholarship within longstanding questions of freedom and justice.
Last month was a dizzying whirlwind for me filled with twelve speaking engagements that literally stretched from Feb. 1 to Feb. 28. I began Black History Month in conversation with graduate students at the University of Connecticut’s School of Social Work discussing the relationship between community development and what I term concentrated punishment.
Concentrated punishment exists in communities with disproportionate rates of surveillance, incarceration and disenfranchisement that undermine stability. The urban concentration of these communities, coupled with their distinct racial and ethnic diversity, creates a perpetual gap between the principle and practice of American democracy. It’s fitting then, that I ended the month honoring Black History Month in prison.
The Cheshire Correctional Institute is a level 4, high-security facility. There are bars and barbed wire, double windows and striped lines on the floor to clearly distinguish between inmate and outsider. Most inmates wear state-issued khakis and a plain white shirt with sneakers. Some have to wear brightly colored jumpsuits to mark them as high-risk.
Two sets of reinforced doors separate the small entry room where visitors are ID’d, sent through a metal detector and forced to leave scarves, jackets and car keys in grey lockers. Cell phones aren’t allowed in any part of the building. Even when you have the ability to leave of your own volition, entering a prison is a visual and visceral reminder of boundaries both real and imagined.
Cheshire’s Black History Month program featured Reginald Dwayne Betts and me in conversation. Betts is a poet, Yale Law graduate and father who was sentenced to prison at the age of 16 for a carjacking in Virginia. We met years ago on the beach in Puerto Rico as our kids played together.
The tension in Dwayne’s voice is palpable. He’s quick to reject the tired “felon made good” trope and admonishes those who label him as an “ex-felon” in some obtuse effort to distance him from the 60 inmates who sit across from us on the other side of the sunken floor. We sit at a crooked table in hard plastic chairs with a few sheets of blank paper, two books of Dwayne’s poetry and a blue pen that we share. A poet and a professor.
