Courtney Marshall, assistant professor of English and women's studies
It's more than research for this scholar of African-American incarceration
Prison is an institution that the humanities should have something to say about, says Courtney Marshall, assistant professor of English and women’s studies. With over 2 million Americans behind bars, the most by far of any country in the world, incarceration is that aspect of American life that seldom makes it to the forefront of public concern.
Marshall’s interest in prisons started in graduate school at UCLA. A native of New Jersey, she was struck by the sheer number of prisons that dot the California landscape. In order to understand how and why prisons feature so prominently there, she began studying them. She developed a course on prison literature and took her students to the LA County Jail. She read Chester Himes, Angela Davis, and other prison writers. She developed an interest in literacy and educational opportunities for the incarcerated and volunteered with the UCLA Incarcerated Youth Tutorial Program.
Although her career brought her to UNH, a long way from California, Marshall continues to be intrigued by what prisons say about American society. She’s writing a book that revolves around them and still works with inmates, this time in northern New Hampshire.
Literature on the Inside
A group of 10 men gather in the Family Connections Center at the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility in Berlin. Marshall leads a session of Connections, an adult literacy program run by the New Hampshire Humanities Council. One component of the program brings incarcerated men together with a facilitator to discuss books that the men might share with their children. The men discuss how to read to their kids and how to talk with them about complicated issues. They later record themselves reading books and send copies of the books and recordings home to their kids. The program is intended to strengthen literacy and family connections through reading. It does that, and more.
“We have very deep discussions about these books,” says Marshall. A book about Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major-league baseball in the modern era, addresses the relationship between Robinson and supportive white teammate Pee Wee Reese. That subject sparked an intense discussion about friendships and doing the right thing even when everyone else thinks it is the wrong thing.
In another session, literature helped calm an agitated inmate. Marshall recounts: “There was one man who was scheduled to be released and there were some problems with his paperwork. He was so angry when he came to the group that he wanted to go and yell at the officials. Though we couldn’t help him get released, I asked the group if there was a poem that could comfort him. We all had our poetry books with us, so we opened our books and read poems about patience and faith. The men were telling him that he shouldn’t be rebellious because that would just add more time to his sentence.”
When Marshall went back for her next visit, the inmate had been released and made it back home. “It was a really great moment for me to see how literature was impacting these men's lives,” says Marshall.
Marshall does this work because she sees a need: “There was no one driving to Berlin for the program, so I said, ‘I can do that.’” Marshall doesn’t know what the men did to land in prison and she doesn’t find it important. That’s not what the program is about, she says.
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