Prison and Neighborhood Arts-Education Project

Classes: Each year PNAP offers 13-15 non-credit college-level courses in subjects ranging from printmaking and criminology to poetry and womens studies. Faculty are independent artists and Chicago university professors. A committee identifies new faculty and courses based on student interest and a desire to offer classes in a wide range of subjects taught by faculty that are representative of our student population. Our commitment to non-credit classes has been supported and articulated by our students in prison, as access to general education and art has been a critical gateway to higher education. Along with classes, PNAP hosts guest lectures where speakers discuss their work as writers, artists, and activists together with a group of incarcerated men in the Stateville auditorium. University Without Walls: In 2017, PNAP launched University Without Walls (UWW) at Stateville in partnership with Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU). The launch marked the first time a secular, degree-granting program was offered at Stateville in more than 20 years. Walls Turned Sideways: Walls Turned Sideways is an art and community space dedicated to people impacted by incarceration, with a focus on collective liberation, healing, and abolition. Think Tank: The PNAP Think Tank started in the fall of 2017 as a way to support community building inside Stateville maximum-security prison, and as a space to reflect on and refine PNAPs programming. Since then, it has grown into a hub of strategic knowledge and cultural production around issues of long-term incarceration, sentencing policies, and transformative justice.Learning Fellows: Learning Fellows are returning citizens engaged in a fellowship program sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) and PNAP. Each of the Learning Fellows receives a monetary award, as well as academic support from PNAP; they are current students at NEIU who will help to create events on campus, around the city of Chicago, and at Stateville during the fellowship period. These events will highlight the importance of education as a human right for all, while providing multiple constituencies the opportunity for dialogue around education in prison, prison abolition, alternatives to prison, and related topics.Cultural Projects: Projects developed by PNAP members inside and outside the prison are designed to engage issues and bring forward the questions and visions of the students in our classes. Over the years, PNAP members have developed projects specific to individual courses and created themes that are discussed and developed in many classes, over several semesters. Projects materialize as videos, installations, paintings, works on paper, performances, and texts. Content for projects is often developed across a range of communities: artists in the prison, poets in Chicago, students in university classes, community partners. PNAP members have worked collaboratively to author books, create public artworks, produce touring exhibitions, and more. PNAP projects have been used in K-12 and college classrooms, projected on prison walls, and performed in parks and at Stateville prison.Community Events: PNAP views access to art and education for incarcerated folks as a means to create networks that challenge boundaries between inside and outside. Community events create spaces to hold critical conversations about the prison industrial complex, criminalization, and access to art and education; the thoughts and expressions of incarcerated people are centered through sharing their written and spoken words and artwork. Events including musical performances, workshops, readings, and conversations are always free and are hosted in neighborhoods across the city.