Gabriel Gudding outside the Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he founded the Marshall County Correctional Facility Writing Program. Photo taken March 2002.
In 1999, Gabriel Gudding, a graduate student from Cornell University, went to jail. He arrived at Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, New York with a bag full of notebooks, novels and a lesson plan. Gabe wasn’t a prisoner. He was a teacher.
He taught an American Literature class to 30 inmates, all violent felons, sentenced to 25 years to life.
“They were there for murder, armed robbery, rape and other very violent offenses,” says Gabe. ”You feel this vibration, it’s sort of an emotional atmosphere, walking through a series of clanging, banging doors. It’s unlike any other experience one has.”
He and the other teachers would break up the classes into small groups and discuss the day’s readings. Classes lasted for three hours with a tea break in the middle.
“They were a very eager group of students. If I give an assignment, they write down everything. They’re much more organized than I am. They’re ready for business. They have done the assignment, they present the assignment, they don’t wait for me to ask about the assignment. It’s very different from a normal class,” he laughs. ”They have many, many questions. And if I don’t come up to the mark, they tell me. But it makes sense. They have so much time, but they don’t have time to mess around. It’s too important to them. This is their education.”
After spending a year at Auburn and starting a creative writing program at the prison, Gabe moved out of New York and headed south where he taught at the University of Mississippi.
“While there, I was so taken with my experience in prison in Upstate New York, I sought out a prison to teach in and found one in a little town called Holly Springs, Mississippi,” he recalls. ”I started a creative writing program there that’s still going, actually. I’m very proud about that.”
After Mississippi, he began his position at Illinois State University in August of 2002 and it wasn’t long before he started a teaching position at Lincoln Correction Facility in Lincoln, Illinois.
“It’s a women’s prison and I’ve always wanted to teach at a women’s prison,” says Gabe. ”They’re much more guarded in a lot of ways. Most of the prisoners are mothers. To be without your son, without your daughter, to be kept from them by the state, a huge powerful apparatus against which you can basically do nothing is deeply sorrowful. When you walk into a men’s prison, you feel fear. In the women’s, you feel sorrow.”
Check out Gabe’s blog: http://gabrielgudding.blogspot.com
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