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The Incarceration of Kindness

The question is not whether kindness exists in prison, it does. Instead, my question in this essay is not if but how kindness functions; understanding kindness not based upon the idiosyncratic virtues of an individual but how the community and structure of prison enables or hinders kindness. To explore how kindness exists within prison I asked prisoners participating in the Prisoner Express project to describe four different experiences involving kindness. (PE is a distant learning project for which I am the volunteer art director, providing courses for 6500 prisoners throughout the United States and to whom I send several newsletters a year.) In one newsletter, I invited prisoners to describe: Kindness that felt sincere; kindness that seemed masquerading for something else; kindness that began with sincere intention, but got misinterpreted and misdirected into another action (often violence); kindness between a prisoner and staff or volunteer; what I refer to as “across the border” kindness. In understanding the phenomenology of kindness in prison, this essay examines both the prisoners’ descriptions of kindness and my own observations from teaching in various prisons for several years.