| The Reentry National Media Outreach Campaign offers media tools and resources to support informed discussion, decision making, and action about solution-based reentry programs that foster public safety and support healthy communities. We encourage you to review the diverse materials and consider how you may be able to use them effectively. |
| The Reentry National Media Outreach Campaign acts as a catalyst to encourage solution-based reentry activities. Review this chronicle of public television and community events/actions to gain ideas on what may work in your arena. |
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WHAT I WANT MY WORDS TO DO TO YOU Addresses AECF’s Core Results Launched in March 2001, the Making Connections Media Outreach Initiative (MCMOI), funded by The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) offers vital media-based resources and strategies to the Making Connections Network. Outreach Extensions will assist public television stations and their partners by identifying relevant content within MCMOI productions and by creating outreach materials that can be used as resources to address AECF’s Core Results. This will enable stations to collaborate with the Casey site teams to help them reach their goals – and link their efforts to the long-term development of neighborhoods and families. WHAT I WANT MY WORDS TO DO TO YOU focuses on a writing group led by internationally acclaimed playwright and activist Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State. Ensler's classes have given birth to a powerful writing community in which women from strikingly different strata of society, all of whom are serving long sentences, help each other tell their stories. The film documents both the wrenching personal journey undertaken by the inmates to find and understand the words they need to use, and the power of those words to move the wider world. Core Results AECF hopes that children will be healthier and do better in school; that more parents will be working and have good jobs; that more families will be able to save for the future; that more residents will be involved in community groups and activities. It also hopes people will feel safer and more connected, and as importantly, have a voice in decisions that affect their families and communities. To achieve these kinds of results, the local AECF sites are moving toward specific, measurable results for children, families, and neighborhoods. The following information suggests “matches” for WHAT I WANT MY WORDS TO DO TO YOU that can assist stations/sites in achieving specific Core Results related to Economic Opportunity, Social Networks, and Quality Services and Supports. Primary film subjects
Families have increased assets. Mary Alice (actor): I really felt that they (women in prison writing group) captured how fragile life is. I mean, how in two or three seconds one’s life can change. You could lose your freedom. You could lose your rights. You could lose your children. You could lose your family. Keila Pulinario: For me it has been my education. I truly didn’t have a care in the world for seeking further education once I finished high school. And my views on education have changed a lot. I want to learn every day, every minute, every second. Roslyn Smith: So much transformation goes on behind these walls. A lot of the outside people don’t even understand how people reinvent themselves, how they become aware of things they weren’t even aware of before they got here. It creates new people. We’re not the same people who came in here ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Donna Hylton: I’m serving a 25 to life sentence for murder. I’m 37 years old. I’m a nurse’s aide in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and I’m working on my Masters. Cynthia Berry: I’m 37 years old. I’m serving a 25 to life sentence for second degree murder. I’m a peer counselor at pre-release transitional services in Bedford Hills. I’m also a college student.
Migdalia Martinez: Where I come from, even if they see you going to the cops, people might not think that that’s where you’re going and therefore they might think that you’re going in there for something else. They might consider you a snitch. And, in her [Keila’s] case, she might have put her life in danger just by going to the cops and accusing him. Jan Warren: When I was married, I was sexually assaulted. First thing I did was run to the police. And they actually got the guy. Arrested him, brought him in, and found out that he was a rapist. Wanted in another state. Roslyn Smith: In our society, a lot of the powers that be don’t realize that our world [African Americans and Hispanic people] is different from their world. Just like Kelia said, she didn’t call the police because the police aren’t our allies.
Eve Ensler: Well, why don’t you read it this week and then we’ll give you support about working on it if you need to work on it more. Keila Pullinario: No, [it never occurred to me to tell my mother]. Me and my mother never had a relationship like that. I couldn’t talk to my mother about having a boyfriend, let alone trying to talk to her about, you know, things like that [being raped]. Roslyn Smith: When things happen to us [African Americans and Latinos], we don’t look to go to the police. We either handle it ourselves, we move, or you move on with your life. Roslyn Smith: I feel my grandmother, my great grandmother, was my core. But, when I moved away from her, I lost that and I never regained it. Pamela Smart: I wish now that I had talked to someone, anyone, about my transgression. Eventually the torment became too much for me, so I decided to end the affair. Michelle McWilliams: …We are both each other’s conscience so you [Pamela] should never in a million years think that I would judge you. Cynthia Berry: This [letter] is to my mother-in-law. This is the mother I never had….[The man I killed] was not the one who I was angry at. He was not the one I was killing. I didn’t see him, I saw everyone who ever harmed me. My mother, my uncle, every man that has kicked me in the heart. Cynthia Berry: He was seventy-one years old and his mother still lived. I watched his daughter cry. I learned that when he met me three months before this happened [killing him], he had just lost his wife. He wanted to be with somebody because he was mourning the loss of a woman he’d stayed with for forty years and now was dead. Betty Harris: I killed my mother and I deprived her of her children and her grandchildren and her great grandchildren. Cynthia Berry: Your victim is dead. He ain’t moving. He’s not going to visit anybody. He’s not going to have another birthday that’s going to be celebrated by his family. He’s not going to see his family anymore. Roslyn Smith: You know the only thing in here that really made me feel that I was doing something for society aside, from my other work, was something tangible that I was giving back to them – training these guide dogs….To make a difference, you got to think about what can I do to make a difference? What can I do that this won’t happen to anybody else. Donna Hylton: It’s hard for me. I mean I’ve had acts of kindness in my life, but it’s hard for me to accept it and relate to it because I still don’t feel like I’m ready enough for someone to treat me nice. Eve Ensler: Well, I also think that if you’re used to having things be cruel, if you’ve been suffering and suffering and suffering and managing it and you’re containing it and you’re holding it and then someone comes along and [is kind], your whole system completely falls apart. So, kindness can be very disturbing if you’ve managed your life without it for a long time. Kathy Boudin: We’re able to do a lot with each other….I feel like our relationships, the friendships, the work we do, the way that we help each other, it’s real. It’s not that reality is outside. We’re just as real as the outside….Keila working with the children in the children’s center, a lot of us working in the parenting center, helping mothers with their kids….It’s real. This is our life right now. Mary Alice (actor): I could thank the women who have given me a word of encouragement, through seeking the road along the journey I traveled. It is the human kindness of so many that has touched me….They encouraged me to live. They gave me ways to find love. To bring alive the life that was once dying inside of me. Kathy Boudin: When I walk out of the prison gate, I will gently touch the air that surrounds me like a shawl. I am with my child in freedom, reunion with my family and friends who have lived these decades with me. Together with them, I step into a new life, filled with uncertainties, the uncharted waters of freedom that we all live for and do not know really what it means. Rosie Perez (actor): I could thank the woman who did not have to stay around after I left her son, but did, and became the mother I never had.
Roslyn Smith: I think coming to prison I’ve received more kindness in my life than I ever received at all. I mean I’ve met people here that have been just extraordinary. Inmates and civilians. Roslyn Smith: He came along with all the other guests to hear us speak about our involvement in the Puppy Behind Bars program. I invited him and his wife, a very beautiful Asian woman, to my cell to see how Thornton (dog) and I shared a room….I proceeded to show them pictures of Thornton on visits with my daughter. He then began to ask me a string of questions about me. Not the dog [or the program]….I answered all of his questions while plugging in how Thornton, my puppy, has helped me cope. By loving him and caring for him he gives me a purpose and a reason to keep on going. Eve Ensler: There’s nothing that happens in prison that doesn’t get taken away. When they started the [Puppy Behind Bars] program, Kathy Boudin had not seen a dog in twenty years. And when she saw the dog, she dropped to her knees and started weeping. So, pet a dog or not pet a dog. Pet a dog for three months or a year or never pet a dog. Of course she picked pet a dog. Everything is relative. Eve Ensler: But I think it’s the big question. Are you allowed to be loved if you’ve done something bad? And how complicated it is, you know, and how many determinations people make all the time, that if you’ve done a bad deed, then suddenly, everything should be withdrawn from you. Roslyn Smith: You know you can’t be with your kids. You can’t be with your family. You can’t be with your loved ones. Everything is like you’re being punished. You’re being taken out of society. And yet, within the prison, you’re being punished for everything on a day-to-day basis. That’s what the prison system in America is all about. Pamela Smart: I have a lot more patience with other people than I had before I came to prison, probably from being a teacher so much in here and working with other women who have no patience with themselves, so that I have to have patience for both of us. Kathy Boudin: I think for me being part of a community, instead of feeling very isolated has helped me connect to people in a deep way.
Judith Clark: I can’t remember how old I was when I got the chicken pox. About eight or nine. But I can still recall the pleasure I felt when the first red dots appeared. Finally, I was incontrovertibly sick. Sick enough to stay home from school. Sick enough to capture my mother’s harried attention. To pull her out of her work clothes and her morning rush toward the subway to stay home with me….Finally, I had my mother’s full attention. Roslyn Smith: It just breaks your heart. You think about … [Judith] was a little girl, you know, wanting that attention and not getting it. Keila Pulinario: I know as the only girl in my family, I always wanted my mother’s attention. It’s not like she was a bad mother. I mean she fed us, cleaned, took us to the doctor, and stuff like that. But, it’s like, if I would have had a relationship with my mother, how I wanted it, I could see my life totally different. Eve Ensler: This thing of mattering, this thing of being known [by your parents]. That’s the real food. That’s the sustenance. And I think that deprivation is the core deprivation….I’m going to go that far out on a limb and say that there is not one person in this group who had a core. Roslyn Smith: I never knew my mother until I was eleven. As soon as I was born, she gave me to my grandmother. Eve Ensler: I only want to share for me that I think you get your mother’s love or you don’t. This is my own theory. Kathy Boudin: I always felt very adored by my mother….She had a nervous breakdown and so the result was that she had to be hospitalized [for several years]. So maybe that leaving did the job on me even though certainly when she came back, I felt her love….But maybe the loss that happened left a big void in me that in some way or other affected how I felt about myself. I definitely think that’s completely related to how I ended up here and a lot of the other choices that I made. Hazelle Goodman (actor): When graduations, plays, family, and school trips come around, everybody else’s mother was there, but you weren’t. Marisa Tomei (actor): I live the double life of a girl who achieved honors in school, volunteered for the community, and worked hard in the church, and a rebellious, hurt, insecure teen who drank, smoked, got high, lied, stole from you, not truly being known by anyone.
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