Providing opportunities for incarcerated men and women to study, rehearse, and perform the works of William Shakespeare.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
97% of all prisoners will return to our communities.
How do you want them returned to us?
Provide your answer by donating to the
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Prison Outreach Fund
Your tax-deductible donation will help us to buy books and materialsfor college courses and educational programs for incarcerated men and women in Wisconsin.*
The first $2,000will buy enough textbooks for Communication Professor Jonathan Shailor (Director, The Shakespeare Prison Project) to be able offer a class in Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Racine Correctional Institution in Fall 2013. (Shailor is the author of Empowerment in Dispute Mediation (Praeger, 1994) and Director of the Certificate Program in Conflict Analysis & Resolution at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.)
and include your name and address if you wish to receive a letter confirming your donation
MAIL TO
Dr. Jonathan Shailor
Prison Outreach Fund
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
900 Wood Road
Kenosha, WI 53141-2000
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! Your donation is tax-deductible.
*The evidence in the U.S. over the past 40 years is
overwhelming: more education in prison is always positively correlated with
lower rates of recidivism (see Steurer, 1996, 2001, 2010).
Steurer, S. (1996) “Correctional education: A worthwhile investment.” Linkages, 3,2. Washington, DC: National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center.
Steurer, S.J., Linton, J., Nally, J., & Lockwood, S. (August
2010). The top-nine reasons to increase correctional education programs.
Corrections Today.
Steurer, S.J., Smith, L., & Tracy, L. (2001). Three state recidivism study. Study
sponsored by the Correctional Education Association and submitted to
the U.S. Department of Education (Office of Correctional Education).
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Robert Mentzer column: 'Theater alone changed my life'
Published in The Wausau Daily Herald on April 17, 2013
Megale Taylor stepped out of Racine Correctional Institution almost
exactly three years ago, on April 14, 2010. The next day was his 40th
birthday.
From the time he dropped out of
high school at 17, Taylor lived a life of petty crime and drug
addiction, no structure, no goals. He started smoking marijuana as a
teen but by the time he was in his 20s he had graduated to crack
cocaine. In 2002, he was arrested on charges of battery and cocaine
delivery. In the end, he served six years in prison for his crimes.
“Everything
came into focus in that six-year stint,” Taylor told me in an interview
last week. “I realized, I’m too old for this. I have to change my life.
... And I just got tired. I got tired.”
Re-entering
society is hard and Taylor did struggle to find his footing. But he
avoided falling back into drugs and crime. He found God in prison, he
told me, and he connected with church families in Wausau when he got
out. And he felt he knew himself in a way he never had before.
“I
had a new beginning when I got out of prison,” said Taylor, whose first
name is pronounced like “Miguel.” “I looked at myself with new eyes.”
On
Monday, Taylor turned 43. He has a year left before earning his degree
at Northcentral Technical College as a computer support specialist. He
has a sense of life goals, a sense of what he wants his future to be
that he never had before. This weekend, he will appear in the River
District Theatre group’s production of “The Death of Innocents,” a play
by the anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean.
And in a way, Taylor’s path back to society began when he was introduced to the plays of William Shakespeare.
'Theater has opened my eyes'
Taylor
is a graduate of the Shakespeare Prison Project, a program in the
Racine prison that was administered by Jonathan Shailor, a
communications professor at University of Wisconsin-Parkside. In four
years, Taylor played The Fool in “King Lear,” the scheming Roderigo in
“Othello,” the drunken butler Stephano in “The Tempest” and, his most
intense role, Marc Antony in “Julius Caesar.”
“Theater has opened my eyes to humanity,” Taylor said. “In fact,
theater alone changed my life. It opened my eyes to humanity, emotional
intelligence, empathy.”
For inmates, being
involved in a theatrical production works on many levels, Shailor said
in a telephone interview. There’s the simple act of working as a team,
learning to trust others and overcome obstacles. There’s the sense of
accomplishment for the men at being part of something larger than
themselves.
But
it’s more than that. Theater teaches things that another discipline
can’t, Shailor said: It’s empathy and humanity, but it also provides
illustrations of how decisions have consequences. Theater invites actors
to identify with the characters — their own, of course, but also others
in the play — and also demonstrates the way each individual character’s
actions affect the rest of the play’s world.
“It’s
an ethics lesson, an opportunity to practice empathy or understanding,
to look at conflict from a holistic perspective,” Shailor said. “And it
stretches you beyond yourself.”
Shailor
worked with the inmates for nine months per play in what he called a
fairly intensive program that helped them master each play, make it
their own. That is a real accomplishment. It’s scaling a mountain.
When
he entered the program, Shailor said, Taylor “had some issues with
self-esteem, with feeling that he couldn’t get along with other people.
It was really something he grappled with, and I saw him get better at
dealing with it.
“When
he played The Fool, he was not sure of himself at first,” Shailor said.
“Then something clicked with him in his ability to speak the language,
to feel comfortable speaking the language. ... He confronted his demon
and I think he overcame it.”
A love for people
On
Friday, Taylor will take the stage for the first time since he left
prison. In “Death of Innocents,” he plays Dobie Gillis Williams, a poor
black man from Louisiana who was executed in 1999 for a murder that
Prejean, in her life and in the play, contends he did not commit.
The play, which runs through Sunday — visit www.riverdistricttheatre.org or call 715-298-9250 for tickets — is heavy, and in some ways it’s written to make viewers uncomfortable.
“I
can see the injustice that’s taking place within the play, and I can
dig deeper into that character and what he’s going through,” Taylor
said. “It’s a really emotional role.”
Taylor
is not nervous; he’s on a mission. He feels he has a story to tell and a
desire to tell it — through theater itself and by talking about and
sharing his own experiences.
“I
really have an ambition and a love for people,” Taylor said. “I love
people and I want to help people accomplish their goals, like I’m
accomplishing mine.”
Megale Taylorparticipated in The Shakespeare Prison Project from 2004 to 2008. He was released in 2010.
THE RIVER DISTRICT THEATRE PRESENTS
MEGALE TAYLOR
Sister Helen Prejean's
DEATH OF INNOCENTS
Co-Directed by Gary Anderson and Jessica Benton
April 19 through April 21, 2013
7:30 pm
Mount Sinai Congregation
910 West Randolph Street
Wausau,WI 54401
$10.00 advance, $15.00 at door
‘Sister Helen reminds us that the law is fallible, and so are the humans who regulate it. The Death of Innocents is thought-provoking and thoughtfully written.’ … Roberta O’Hara, Book Reporter.com
Sister Helen Prejean has accompanied five men to execution since she began her work in 1982. She believes the last two, Dobie Williams in Louisiana and Joseph O’Dell in Virginia, were innocent, but their juries were blocked from seeing all the evidence and their defense teams were incompetent.
‘The readers of both her book and this play will be among the first “juries” with access to all the evidence the trail juries never saw’, she says.
The Death of Innocents shows how race, prosecutorial ambition, poverty and publicity determine who dies and who lives. Prejean raises profound constitutional questions about the legality of the death penalty.
