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The former are allowed to gain a deeper understanding of humanity and so of themselves, in the process of making their art; the latter can only reject their social position and the society itself, essentially trading in the one identity for another—one that is definitively hostile to society. Acting broadens one’s social experiences, while criminality not only limits experience but also severs one’s social connections. If the impulse toward deviant behavior can be redirected into acting performance, it can firstly afford the participants a self-contained, healthy release of the frustrations of their marginalized existence. Secondly, it will be able to create some visibility for a disenfranchised fraction of our population, allowing them to feel a sense of recognition, accomplishment, and self-worth.
Another central element of the theatre that is essential for prison inmates is the medium’s emphasis—indeed, reliance—on human interaction. With the escalating problem of prison overcrowding, the need for inmates to cooperate and cohabitate peacefully is becoming increasingly more obvious. Much rehabilitative and job-skills training tend to isolate the convicts in solitary endeavors such as printing, data entry, machine work, or bricklaying. Even the most commonly found arts activities of drawing, painting, creative writing, or reading are wholly individual pursuits. While the skills and self-discipline acquired from these endeavors are unarguably valuable, they lack the one essential feature for resocialization: namely, actual socialization. The theatrical work of those few institutions that offer such programs affords the inmates a singular means of supervised social interaction. Acting, after all, is interrelation: an exchange of giving to and receiving from one’s cast mates.
Unfortunately, it is precisely this, the most salient and (for our purposes here) most beneficial feature of dramatic performance that has made theatre-in-prison so controversial. One reader’s response to the Christian Science Monitor’s coverage of the Shakespeare Behind Bars program was, to use her own word, “appalled.” “Here they are,” she complained, “criminals, doing something they’re enjoying, while their victims and/or victims’ families suffer.”1