The Redemption of Prison City
Some things to know:
The slice of land that is my now-hometown (Jackson, Michigan) was first settled in 1827.
Aka a lonnnnng time ago.
It’s been a city for almost as long (think 1832).
The way they tell it, at the time, Jackson and Lansing were both in the running to be the state capital.
You know who won.
Apparently second prize was housing the State Prison.
Really.
Because just six years later, the state legislature voted, and Jackson began a 172 year long love affair with prisons.
At first the “prison” was just a temporary wooden building set on sixty acres. It held 35 prisoners.
Rinky dink.
But by the end of the civil war, we were making our prison-happy mark on the world with 500 prisoners in a permanent facility.
Apparently, Jackson had the knack for imprisoning people too.
By 1929, it had 2,200 prisoners, which required building an even bigger facility (do you get excited about that or don’t you?).
And so a new prison, a FAMOUS prison with the dubious honor of being the largest walled institution in the world, was built to accommodate a whopping 5,180 inmates.
Today, 172 years from the prison’s inception, Jackson, Michigan still hangs onto our Prison City origins. We are still, in 2010, home to of one of the world’s largest maximum-security prisons.
If you travel outside of Jackson, people even elbow you and make winky jokes like, “Fortunately, I’ve never been to Jackson.” (Meaning the state pen.) Never gets old. Ever.
But where I really hate the prison-aura most is how it manifests in the students I teach, most of whom are in the juvenile justice system and a few who are in the adult system. They talk about the prison like it’s existence a few miles up the road gave them no choice–like just having the barb-wired buildings in town means crime is in the water.
They drop, sometimes brag, that they’ve got “people” in the prison like other towns might brag about residents who made it in Hollywood. Dads, uncles, older friends, what have you, who rode the justice system all the way to the state level. Dare to dream.
So I spend a lot of days fighting the prison mentality that still hangs on with the five separate prisons located along the same stretch of Cooper Street.
But at the same time, knowing the prison history gives me a healthy interest in other identity streams for our city.
One of my favorite ones, hands down, is the Armory Art Village, which redeems a little bit of Jackson’s prison history with the call to create–a mix that gets at all the parts of me that fall in love fast.
The Armory Arts Village is an artists’ community with 62 apartments, studios, classroom spaces and galleries reimagined from four tiers of used-to-be prison cells in the old historic walled Jackson Prison.
The community kept the prison’s original walls, barred windows and ceiling, while filling its rooms with paintings, sculpture, pottery, glass and mosaic works. Resident storyteller and author, Judy Gail Krasnow, even developed a walking tour “From Historic Prison to Artistic Vision,” that tells the fascinating history of how a dedicated night-watchman and the art programs of a reformist Chaplain improved life within the prison walls and ultimately inspired the artists’ community it is today.
The idea has generated so much goodness for Jackson, in fact, that we were named one of Michigan’s Coolest Cities.
I smile every time I pass the building.
Every time.
And I tell my students as much as I possibly can.
Because I’m hoping they will conceptualize something–that creativity and vision hold redemptive potential for even cities who have prisons in their souls.
(Check out the vid below. But stay tuned. In some future posts, I’ll tell you about some of my friends involved in this project, and some of the cool stuff coming out of the creative underground of Prison City.)
Bobbe Van Hise March 26, 2011 (1:38 am)
I found your blog on prisons very interesting. I’ve been a part of a jail ministry in the San Diego area for over 10 years now. I blog on my involvement now & then. I believe all the Bible studies I’ve written for the women inmates have helped me write my blog and shown me how to apply Scripture to real life.
Bobbe
website June 3, 2012 (1:25 am)
Even though I genuinely like this post, I think there was an punctuational error shut to the finish from the third sentence.