Connecting Literature & Incarceration: English Students Visit the Eastern State Penitentiary

One of Millbrook's newest course offerings, Literature and Incarceration, offers a consideration of literary and cultural expression centered on the experience of being incarcerated. It is a new elective for VIth formers, and the class has been reading poems, novels, and other stories of corrections, criminal justice, and prisons in several countries while exploring questions about democracy, freedom, citizenship, and humanity.

"We are currently reading about American prison systems and looking at the use of solitary confinement," says English Department Chair Samantha Goodwin, who recently took her class to visit the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to experience prison-life firsthand. The Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP), which closed in 1971, allowed solitary confinement of all of its prisoners all of the time and held some of America's most well-known criminals, including "Slick Willie" Sutton and "Scarface" Al Capone.

Students toured the facility and participated in an interactive exhibit exploring topics such as criminal justice, the death penalty, patterns in American incarceration (e.g., race, economic status, gender, and age of those incarcerated), and mass incarceration in the United States and other countries. 

"My goals for this trip were for students to see prison conditions, understand more deeply the personal experiences of prisoners, consider the evolving understanding of mental health in prisons, and put real faces and places to the stories that we have been reading in class," says Mrs. Goodwin.

Students will now turn their focus to making connections between their recent trip and their current text, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.



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