Related Prison Projects
The many community projects operating in Iowa and beyond attest to the importance of connecting the prison community (and other under-served populations) with resources and support. The programs featured below only scratch the surface of the myriad programs committed to this goal.
Culinary Starts
The culinary training program at Iowa City's Culinary Starts leads to increased income, self-confidence, and an escape from homelessness. The proceeds from contract and catered meals go directly to the food production program and the homeless shelter’s operational expenses.
Catering your events through Culinary Starts directly benefits homeless people in the Iowa City community. Culinary Starts offers a twelve-week food production training program for men and women who are seeking new employment opportunities.
These individuals go through a rigorous training program to become Servsafe certified and equipped to work in a variety of food production venues. The program gives trainees new skills and access to a much wider range of employment options.
History Corps
History Corps is a graduate student-led, online digital and oral history project based out of the Department of History at the University of Iowa.
History Corps provides academic training and real-world experience to humanities graduate students interested in research and careers that straddle the academic and non-nonacademic worlds. The group aims to make the relevance of History and humanities education more apparent to the citizens of Iowa and the Midwest. By collaborating with community partners, nonprofit organizations, and graduate and undergraduate classes in the UI and Iowa City communities and beyond, we tell stories and lend our academic training to interpretive projects that prove how History and the humanities affect everyone’s everyday lives.
Liberal Arts in Prison Program
Grinnell College's Liberal Arts in Prison Program enrolls people in prison in a demanding, rich college program equivalent to a year at Grinnell.
The Liberal Arts in Prison Program provides liberal arts education to incarcerated men and women in Iowa's prisons and kids at the Iowa Juvenile Home.
The program began with a single class in the spring of 2003. From that one volunteer-run class, the program has evolved into a full-fledged college program that enrolls cohorts of incarcerated students in a demanding, rich curriculum equivalent to the first year at Grinnell, and an expansive, multi-tiered student volunteer program that by 2012 had involved one out of every seven on-campus Grinnell seniors.
During this radical expansion, the program has stayed true to its original vision of reciprocal learning and open intellectual exchange: exchange that enriches lives both inside and outside the fences and affirms the transformative power of a liberal arts education. The LAPP owes its success to this unique combination of social justice work and liberal arts learning.
The WiderNet Project
The WiderNet Project is dedicated to improving digital education and communications for all communities and individuals around the world.
Over the last 14 years, the WiderNet Project has developed and installed the off-line eGranary Digital Library in over 800 locations worldwide. The eGranary delivers millions of Internet resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access through a process of copying Web sites – with permission – and delivering them to intranet Web servers inside subscriber institutions.
Since 2007, the WiderNet Project has deployed eGranary Digital Libraries in a dozen prisons from Iowa to Washington State. With feedback from librarians and educators in a variety of low-bandwidth settings, we have developed the Corrections Off-line Education Platform (COEP), a secure, off-line digital information and education platform to serve educators and incarcerated individuals that lack adequate Internet access.
Education Justice Project
The mission of the Education Justice Project is to build a model college-in-prison program that demonstrates the positive impacts of higher education upon incarcerated people, their families, the communities from which they come, the host institution, and society as a whole.
EJP organizes educational programming at Danville Correctional Center through the University of Illinois. In addition, EJP members also produce critical scholarship about prison education, as well as creative works.
Offsite, EJP conducts outreach to family members of EJP students and to released EJP students, our alumni. Increasingly, EJP alumni are involved in leading such initiatives. We also conduct regular events on the University of Illinois campus to which we invite members of the larger Urbana-Champaign community. We seek to increase critical awareness of issues related to incarceration and criminal justice in Illinois and beyond.
We are committed to building an open, safe, gentle, inclusive learning environment within EJP. We believe that a rigorous and critical education program requires the cultivation of such an environment and that self-reflection is an important part of creating and sustaining such an environment.
Killadelphia: Mixtape of a City
Sean Lewis' one-man show, Killadelphia, compiles the voices and stories of incarcerated men, their victims, and the many community members invested in the issues surrounding prison in Philadelphia.
In the summer of 2008, it was often said that Philadelphia had “more bodies than days.” Determined to take an unflinching look at the causes of the crime rate and its effect on the community, playwright/performer Sean Christopher Lewis introduces us to the inmates of Graterford Prison – men employed to beautify the city even as they serve out life sentences.
The voices of the prisoners, their victims, Mayor Nutter, local rappers, conservative talk show hosts, trauma surgeons, and the citizens of the City of Brotherly Love crowd the stage to say their piece.
Played by Lewis, a performer described by the New York Press as “explicitly authentic,” these voices combine with a shocking document of life in America’s toughest town. The stunning result is Killadelphia: Mixtape of a City.
Lewis serves as artistic director of Working Group Theatre in Iowa City, a theatre whose original plays, events, and educational programs are created in collaboration with artists and community partners to engage a diverse audience and present the untold stories in the world around us.
Prison Public Memory Project
The Prison Public Memory Project uses history, dialogue, the arts and technology to build public memory and safe spaces where people from all walks of life can come together to engage in conversation and learning about the complex and contested role of prisons in communities and society.
PPMP works with local individuals and organizations in communities with prisons across the country to recover, preserve, interpret, present and honor the memories of what took place in those institutions, integrating community knowledge with more traditional forms of historic preservation.
Through a variety of creative, educational and participatory activities, the Project also hopes to help communities facing closure of their prisons to connect with their pasts in imagining and planning for new futures.
All prisons close at some point and the reasons for closure vary — buildings that are too old or outdated; changes in thinking about crime and punishment; a recession; a scandal. The United States is currently experiencing an unprecedented number of prison closures.
Too often, when the gates are locked, workers retired or reassigned, and the prisoners transferred elsewhere, the stories, photos, and artifacts — the prison memories of people obscure, famous, and infamous — are scattered and forever lost.
