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Welcome, thanks for being here.

We're here today to talk about the experience of incarceration,

what it's like to be in prison.

Both for the incarcerated, and for their families and the people who love them, and

their communities.

We just want to have an open conversation, back and forth.

But I thought we might start just by introducing yourself,

however you want say a few words about why you're here.

>> Well good morning, my name is Rahim Buford and

I am a formerly incarcerated person.

I was caged for 26 calendar years of my life, from age 18 to 44.

And I am now a prisoner's advocate, I work with the Children's Defense Fund,

I founded Unheard Voices Outreach.

And I volunteer at the juvenile detention center, to try and

plug this pipeline to prison.

>> Thank you. >> My name is Molly Lasagna,

I am a student at the Divinity School at Vanderbilt.

Last year, I facilitated a program at Tennessee Prison for

Women called Family Reunification.

Where we worked with women inside the women's prison, to rebuild some

relationships with their family members and loved ones on the outside.

And this year, I work as the program coordinator for

the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative.

And so what that means, is that I run a college program inside of,

actually, two different men's facilities in Tennessee.

>> Thank you.

>> Hi, I'm Casey Wilson,

I am married to a man who has been incarcerated for 25 years.

We were high school sweethearts and we got married three years ago,

and so I'm here just to represent him.

>> Thank you.

>> My name is Ndumai Olatushani, and like Rahim, I'm a formerly incarcerated person.

I spent 28 years in prison for something I didn't do, and

21 of them was spent on death row.

Doing a lot of good work now, hopefully good work.

Working with young kids through the Children's Defense Fund,

just trying to deal with this whole issue of this cradle-to-prison pipeline.

>> Thanks, and I'm Graham Reside, I teach here at the Divinity School,

I teach in the area of ethics in society.

And it strikes me, that our system of mass incarceration is one of

the most challenging ethical issues that we're facing as a society.

And I'm here to learn from you all.

So we're particularly interested today about what's it

like to be caged, as Rahim said, to be on the inside.

So I'm wondering if you could share a little bit, and also,

what's it like to be a family member of someone who's on the inside.

What are the effects, both psychologically, personally,

spiritually, and in terms of your relationships, of being caged?

>> I think that for me, unfortunately, for me,

I mean, the 28 years that I spent in prison,

Weren't the first time that I was incarcerated, so.

But I think in terms of, when I think about the effects of the incarceration,

obviously, I mean, you go to a lot of these prisons.

Wherever you go, most prisons, I mean, you go to them, and

they got manicured lawns, everything look good.

And but for the fences, some people might say, it could be a college campus.

But I think that kind of belies the truth about all the mental and

physical deprivations that actually happens inside prisons.

I think, for me personally, though I was one of them people,

I think, that I tried to, I certainly tried to,

as much as I possibly could, make my experience be something that,

when I walked away from it, it wasn't in vain.

I like to think that whatever

experiences we go through, I mean, we can learn something from anything.

I mean, nothing is wasted time, if you can kind of learn something from it.

So I always took every opportunity to just try to do what I could,

to better myself, and so.

But I certainly witnessed and seen a whole bunch of stuff, I mean,

where people were psychologically and physically affected by the prison.

I was one of them people who decided not to be broken by it, so yeah.

>> Yeah, and I don't think you have to be the person in

prison, to feel a lot of those effects.

In my experience, it is psychologically destabilizing for

everybody caught up in the system.

And that means the folks who are locked up,

the folks who love the folks who are locked up.

The folks who work with the folks who are locked up,

I think it's challenging for everybody.

Last year, I was part of a support group that runs here in town called

Separate Prisons, and it was for people who have loved ones who are incarcerated.

And the idea is sort of that, you are also stuck in a prison of sorts, if you

are trying to do the work of supporting, loving someone who's in prison.

And I don't say trying because it's hard to love a person in prison,

I say trying because the system makes it hard to support someone in prison.

I don't know if you want to say anything about that, but-

>> Yeah, the system definitely just,

even getting married was a very tedious process.

You have to go through an application process,

you have to be approved by the chaplain,

you have to pick a date that's convenient for the prison, not for you.

And then when you go, you're ushered in, and you're in this little small

stair room with just your person, and whoever is performing your ceremony.

And you get 30 minutes from start to finish, so for 30 minutes.

So, you have 30 minutes to have a ceremony, and

basically get a few minutes of being able, and you're not alone.

It's not an alone time, you are sitting there with very watchful eyes,

and so there's no intimacy with your loved one.

Even as a parent, or as a wife, or as a child,

there's no intimacy with your loved one.

It's very sterile, and you have to have very sterile relationships that

don't foster connections.

You feel like you're there, but

most of the time there's no connection, and I think that's huge.

I mean, when you're caged, and locked away from society, and

you don't have any connection with another human being.

Is paramount to your well-being, to your psychological well-being, and,

Prisons try to take that away, as much as they possibly can,

which is, I mean, sad, and it angers me.

It's very, going from one place to another,

just even one prison to another prison.

The differences in your connections and your relationships are huge.

We just experienced that a couple months ago,

we went from a place where were relaxed, and we were able to have a connection.

We were able to be, quote-unquote,

normal, just about, we got to spend a lot of time together.

Our kids got to spend time with him, and

they were able to interact with him in a way that made it almost normal for them.

And now we're in a situation where they don't even want to go to visit,

because it's so sterile, and such chaos,

that they can't enjoy their time, they can't have a relationship.

And that's an awful reality, for a lot of people.

>> For myself, prison was a very frightening experience for me.

I can remember like yesterday, because I was still a boy,

and, There's a term called old heads.

People who have gone to prison sometimes, and gotten out, and

went back to jail, or those who remain in prison and are still there.

I was able to talk with some of those guys before I actually went into the prison

system, while I was still in jail.

And they gave me ideas about prison that weren't, not necessarily the truth,

because we all experience those type of conditions in our own ways.

And for me, having served or been caged at seven different prisons

throughout the state of Tennessee, I saw a lot of things.

I was afraid to go into that place, because of what I heard.

But I knew something that I could not explain happen to me,

as just the removing of my civilian clothing, and

replacing it with this uniform.

I understood something was happening.

I now look at it as the thing-ification process,

because that's your introduction to a new world.

It's not like being out here, although there are similarities.

Being on guard all the time, keeping your heartbeat up and down,

it just really depends.

And not knowing who you can trust, psychologically, love deprivation.

I didn't see my mother for about six years, because what a lot of people in

society do not understand, is that when prison affects a family,

there's a lot of guilt, there's a lot of shame.

And my mother really didn't want to see me.

And I had brothers and sisters who wanted to see me, and

because my mother didn't want to see me, they were unable to see me.

And as a result, the disconnection from them, that continued for

all of those years, pretty much made us strangers over a certain period of time.

Seeing the people physically murdered with knives,

the first death that I saw in the chow hall, I mean, I can see that still, now.

So when you talk about the effects, I think the effect's continual.

It's just that we, I deal with it in a way that when it comes up,

I recognize and I say, okay, it happened, he's here, you made it.

There was a point, when I was able to decide that prison was going to be

a place of education for me, and so I think my vibration changed.

And I think it's really true,

that the way that you think will attract what comes into your life.

Because when I began educate myself,

the environment seemed to change, although it was the same.

The feeling, however, was different, my confidence changed,

I realized that I was becoming something other than what I had bought into.

And that was the convict ideal, the inmate ideal, the criminal ideal,

I really believed that was true.

And over time, I began to shed those falsehoods.

And I do still have moments of depression when I think about prison,

because I have three biological brothers confined.

And I'm very close to many other who are still confined, and

I'm in communication with them.

I want to say caged, because I really want to get away from the sanitized

version of thinking that it's cool for people to be in cages.

Because it's wrong, and when we say incarcerated, or

confined, it sounds nice, but it doesn't feel nice.

>> Thank you.

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Roundtable Discussion: The Experience of Prison

Justice, Mercy and Mass Incarceration

Meet the Instructors