What a Prison Reform Tour Can’t Show

When Ivanka Trump came to Indiana Women’s Prison (IWP) in December 2019, the visit was framed as a look at prison reform done right.

Before the fourth meeting of the White House’s American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, Trump spent roughly an hour touring prison workforce programs, including culinary arts, cosmetology, service-dog training, mosquito-net production, and, finally, the Last Mile coding program. She was accompanied by a high-profile delegation that included Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, and rapper-turned-prison-reform advocate MC Hammer.

The Last Mile, a California-born coding and reentry program that Indiana leaders had embraced as a model, began at San Quentin and grew into a nonprofit prison education program focused on technology training, reentry support, and fair-chance employment. (Hammer is a board member of the org.) Indiana was the first state outside California to adopt it, launching the program at IWP in 2018 with support from then-Governor Eric Holcomb. A portion of a $2 million Google.org grant later supplied the IWP program with new computers and audio/video equipment.

The appeal of The Last Mile was easy to understand. In a system usually associated with punishment and stagnation, the program offered a story about skill, modernity, and economic possibility. The public story was clean and compelling: women learning to code, building websites, preparing for jobs in a high-demand field. Transformation. Opportunity. Second chances.

That version of the day was true, but it was not the only truth. I was there, and what I remember about that day is how much care went into what would be seen.

After arriving at IWP around 8:15 a.m., Trump toured the prison’s education building, visiting cooking and cosmetology classes before entering the Community Outreach sewing room I supervised, where incarcerated women made mosquito nets through the One Net–One Life project. As IWP’s Community Engagement Director, I coordinated volunteer programs, community partnerships, donations, and outreach projects, though much of my day-to-day work involved supervising incarcerated women as they completed sewing-based Community Outreach projects. The women presenting that day received new blue uniforms because they photographed better. Women in the prison who were not showcasing programs did not get new uniforms until later, and we made sure none of the visitors saw any of the women wearing the old uniforms, which was most of them. I was instructed to cover holes in the walls in the room that housed the One Net–One Life program. Maintenance finally repaired the ceiling after I had requested the repairs months earlier.

The One Net–One Life program at the prison began years before the visit as a partnership connected to Oakland City University at IWP. Its stated mission was to “save lives one net at a time,” with incarcerated women sewing mosquito nets designed to help prevent malaria and sending them to communities overseas. Michelle Daniel Jones, who helped shape the One Net–One Life program while incarcerated at IWP, later became a nationally known scholar, playwright, and prison historian and earned a PhD in American Studies from New York University.

I remember standing in front of a model of a finished mosquito net with notecards in my hands alongside two women assigned to the program, practicing what I was going to say. Trump and Governor Holcomb led the group of VIPs into the room, followed by MC Hammer. They were warm, kind, and supportive of the women they spoke with. They asked follow-up questions.

From there, the group continued its tour through the education building, learning about other programs, including the college program operated through Marian University in collaboration with the Bard Prison Initiative, the ICAN service-dog program, and the prison’s maternal-child unit, which allows eligible pregnant women to keep their babies with them in the prison. Their final stop in the education building was a computer lab that housed The Last Mile program, where the instructor and his students gave a presentation. Afterward, Trump addressed the group, praised their skills, and discussed the need for more women in technology.

The group then moved to the prison’s chapel, where the fourth meeting of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board took place. I had helped prepare for the meeting the previous day, carrying poinsettias into the building and arranging them around the chapel.

Later, a photo featuring me was posted to Trump’s Facebook page. I saved a screenshot. It shows Trump, Holcomb, and MC Hammer standing across from me and two incarcerated women presenting in front of the finished mosquito net. But the caption is about The Last Mile. It never mentions One Net–One Life or the other work seamstresses at IWP do.

That day’s visit by Trump and members of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board unfolded alongside something much larger. On Dec. 5, 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would proceed with drafting articles of impeachment against Ivanka’s father, President Donald Trump. According to WTHR, Secretary Ross excused himself from the visit shortly after news of the impeachment broke.

The contrast was strange: inside the prison, the official story was order, opportunity, and reform. Outside it, the administration represented in that room was in crisis.

A few months later, another crisis would make the gap between public presentation and daily prison life harder to ignore.

I was still working at the prison when COVID-19 hit in early 2020. I contracted COVID early in the first outbreak, often coughing so hard I struggled to breath. I took several weeks off work, running through a considerable amount of PTO. My children were three and six years old at the time, and I worried about giving them the virus. I returned to work several weeks later, worn down and still coughing. Nearly all programming in the prison had shut down. Volunteers and visitors were no longer allowed into the prison.

But the Community Outreach Program, which One Net–One Life workers were a part of, was an exception. Unlike most programs at IWP, it continued operating because we were making masks.

As I remember it, at first the masks were for staff across Indiana’s prisons. Then we made them for the women incarcerated at IWP, then for incarcerated people across the state, and, eventually, for members of the public. For the first time, I worked alongside the women in the Community Outreach Program in a physical way. I didn’t possess their tailoring skills so I couldn’t sew the masks, but I could cut fabric using an outline the women created. By the end of each day, my hands and arms were sore from the repetitive labor.

There was something meaningful about that work. The women in the Community Outreach Program knew what they were doing. They were contributing to an emergency response at a time when much of the world was afraid and uncertain. But that meaning sat beside a harder reality: incarcerated women were making protective equipment inside an institution where their own access to protection, movement, air, water, and safety remained controlled by the prison. They were paid pennies on the dollar for their work.

Groups of women cycled in and out of Community Outreach as outbreaks were identified in different housing units and dorms were locked down. The same institution that could describe the mask project as service and public contribution could also confine women for long periods in conditions they did not control. The contradiction was not that the mask project was false or meaningless. The contradiction was that useful work and unsafe confinement happened within the same system.

As spring turned to summer, temperatures rose, and conditions inside the prison worsened. In June 2020, WFYI reported that many women at IWP had spent long periods locked in cells that had no toilets, running water, or air conditioning, with limited chances at relief.

That reporting was not about The Last Mile, the One Net–One Life program, or the other programs visitors had been shown. It was about the parts of prison least likely to appear in a reform tour: heat, plumbing, movement, dependence, and control. The mask project did not erase those conditions. The tour did not reveal them. Both were true at once.

That is a problem with prison reform narratives: they can make individual dignity visible while leaving institutional power intact.

The women I saw presenting that day were not pretending. They were proud of their work. They deserved to be heard, and they deserved to have powerful people pay attention to what they had built. But they also deserved more than attention during a tour. They deserved living conditions that did not become dangerous the moment the prison locked down.

That is what prison reform narratives often miss. They focus on the parts of prison that can be made palatable to outsiders: a classroom, a certificate, a coding project, a work program, a polished presentation. Those things matter. But they do not show what it means to live in a place where access to water, toilets, air, movement, and safety is granted or withheld at the whim of the institution itself.

Reporters would later document heating issues at IWP during the winter of 2021, including women who had tested positive for COVID-19 being quarantined in a barely heated gym. They had to wear gloves and hats to stay warm. That gym was inside the education building where I worked.

As I remember it, the heat in the education building failed for months. Programming continued in a frigid building during the day, while women were also housed there at night. I wore fingerless gloves and a winter coat at my desk while a generator ran downstairs on the first floor. At times, it had to be turned off after people began complaining of headaches.

This was not the same as the most severe COVID lockdown conditions, when women described being confined without reliable access to toilets or running water. But it reflected the same deeper problem as the day of Trump’s visit: the prison could be carefully prepared for public view, while the basic infrastructure of daily life and work remained fragile, uncomfortable, and neglected. The visit itself wasn’t fake, and the programs shown to visitors did matter.

But the most hopeful rooms in a prison are still rooms inside a prison. If reform narratives only show the parts of incarceration that photograph well, they can turn real moments of dignity into propaganda that makes it appear the institution itself is working.

^{Image Credit: Maurice Denis, Illustration with the Crucifixion of Christ and Nuns (1895), via rawpixel / Flickr.}

Contributors

Lyndsey Lane Lyndsey Lane, LSW, is an outpatient therapist in Indiana.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• conditions of confinement
• mass incarceration