My Father’s Cell

The small group of students had registered for a host of reasons. Some were broadly interested in pursuing a career in education, while others were enrolled in a class on Michel Foucault and using his writing on prisons as a primary resource. Of everyone in the class, I was the only student with a parent who had served time—at any rate, the only one who chose to disclose it. For many, a familial history of incarceration remains a source of shame not to be revealed publicly, while my father’s incarceration inspires my academic research, personal ambitions, and defines my understanding of justice.

It was January 2025 when a classroom of Emerson College students met for the first time to commence our semester-long “co-curricular” experience with the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI). EPI, like a handful of other programs, enables incarcerated individuals to earn a bachelor’s degree through an accredited institution while serving out their sentences. While incarceration and isolation are inextricable, the co-curricular course attempts to bridge the space between EPI’s two campuses: Emerson’s downtown Boston campus, where all of the faculty are based, and MCI–Norfolk, a medium-security prison where EPI’s students are incarcerated. The aspirational bridge serves a function of educational solidarity more than one of practical knowledge exchange (though select graduate students work as teaching assistants in the prison, enabling them to engage intimately with EPI’s incarcerated students). But as an undergraduate Boston student, navigating the shortcomings of the relationships between campuses became integral to understanding the limitations of pursuing formal education while living in exile.

After introductions, Mneesha Gellman, associate professor of political science and founder of EPI (whose words about the initiative can be read here), asked us to rearrange the room. We pulled desks out and pushed them into the shape of a cell—roughly the size of a parking space.

Once we had finished constructing our makeshift cages, Professor Gellman instructed us to sit in them. Just sit.

On my hands and knees, I crawled under a desk into confinement. My familiarity with the carceral experience had previously been more abstract than I’d realized. I knew the details—that my father had served seven years across sixteen facilities—yet I had never viscerally felt the true claustrophobia of confinement. As Professor Gellman dictated how the space we were sitting in would hold two beds, a toilet, and all of our earthly possessions, I felt that I understood him for the first time. Not as my father through the lens of our complicated relationship, but as a hurt child failed by structural poverty. When my father was twenty-one—my age—he had already been in prison for two years. He had five left to go (though at the time, he believed he had twenty-one).

As I sat there, I began to cry, overwhelmed by thoughts of my father alone at nineteen in a cell. I gained a new perspective on the anger he carries with him, his diligent sense of time, his inability to connect, and his insistence on my education. Despite not completing his formal education in public schools, my father understood education to be a radical means of transformation: following his release, he earned his bachelor’s degree (there was nothing like EPI in his facilities, and his constant movement from prison to prison would’ve made finishing such a program impossible anyway). My earliest memories include spending mornings with him at the library, being taught to read before I even entered school. My father looked back at the cradle-to-prison pipeline from which he’d emerged and knew it was urgent that he write me a new path: having a parent who has served time makes you three times more likely to become involved with the justice system. However, when provided with the resources needed to nurture success, it becomes clear that the seeming inevitabilities of life are not so. With his own experience in educational failure at the hand of the state, he understood the critical importance of my education in paving a path away from the justice system. And so we read, conducted science experiments, and solved math problems. Education prepared me to succeed.

One of the books we read in the co-curricular, James Kilgore and Vic Liu’s The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration, includes images from penitentiaries around the world. As with the experience of sitting in a cell, the book devastated me. Poring over photos of cells the size of football fields packed to the brim with bunk beds, each and every one the resting place of a person, made the jokes I’d casually made about my dorm feeling like a prison less funny. Prison is a visceral experience, and photos and testimony from inside break down the barriers between inside and out, and offer us the chance, just briefly, to empathize. As our class discussed The Warehouse, our refrain became: “I had no idea it was like this.” We said it over and over. We had no idea.

The barriers that keep prisons functional are not only—perhaps not even primarily—the physical walls trapping people inside; they are the theoretical barriers that disable flow between worlds. It’s easy enough to ignore what carceral systems are doing, and how such systems operate, because they remain shrouded in secrecy. This is the point. British intellectual Stafford Beer coined the phrase “the purpose of a system is what it does,” an adage I find myself returning to repeatedly when grappling with my beliefs about the carceral system. Despite the popular ideal of a “justice” system meting out punishment and consequence for the betterment of society, the reality of incarceration makes clear the purpose of the system: to harm, not help, to obfuscate, not enlighten.

Part of decarceral work involves bringing the carceral experience into reality for people who have fallen into the trap of ignorance. Carcerality must be felt to be understood. Opportunities abound for community members to foster connections with people who are serving time. The meditation center down the street hosts trips to nearby compounds, allowing the space for people to sit with their incarcerated brothers and sisters. The Prison Book Program, based in the Boston suburb of Quincy, offers the opportunity to read heartfelt, profound letters from the incarcerated and allows for a diplomatic exchange of words and ideas beyond barriers. My involvement with organizations such as EPI that promote intellectual exchange across prison walls has shaped my belief in radical empathy and the life-affirming power of education. It has also confirmed for me the transformative power of bringing decarceral ideas into dialogue whenever possible.

In March, EPI opened its doors to the public by hosting a conference on education in prison (Inquest was a cosponsor), bringing carceral experiences out of the abstract and into reality for a broader public. EPI graduates who had subsequently been released from prison were able to participate as panelists. They expressed the positive impact of college education in prison as well as the inherent harm of incarceration. The conference offered the opportunity for the audience to benefit from the authenticity, and urgency, of firsthand testimony. And so doing, it broke some of the barriers that ordinarily restrict firsthand knowledge of the carceral system.

Americans flaunt an intentional ignorance of what incarceration means: to consider it fully demands too devastating a confrontation with our willingness to outsource the costs of the systems we live in. Involvement with EPI and programs like it (either as a student or observer) provides free individuals with opportunities to break from the notion that incarceration is separate from their reality. Punitive systems persist when they aren’t questioned, and questions are not posed unless prompted. In the cage in the classroom, the reality of incarceration demanded a look inward to prompt the questions that would begin the process of breaking the cage of carceral thinking.

My father’s incarceration—despite the prevailing belief in the United States that prisons exist to separate bad people from good people—has never been a source of shame. Rather, his suffering inspires me endlessly as I continue to learn, using my detour from the paved path to rewrite what masquerades as inevitable.

_{Image: Federico Lancellotti / Unsplash}

Contributors

Chela Wetzel Chela Wetzel’s fiction and poetry have been published in Concrete Literary Magazine and Two Cardinals Literary. She reads for the award-winning literary journal Ploughshares and volunteers regularly at the Prison Book Program. Currently, she works with 826 Boston to provide creative writing support for students in Boston public schools.

Topics

• Futures

Tags

• education
• families
• family separation