Under what conditions are we free to think? To open ourselves to relating across boundaries of class, color, and experience? To fully give of ourselves to others and to fully realize our own potential? This weekend, we will focus on these and other core questions of being within the extended context of incarceration.
Why incarceration? A substantial body of literature, from Karl Menninger’s The Crime of Punishment to more recent works by James Gilligan, Michelle Alexander, and many others in the field, form a chorus proclaiming that our system of incarceration, particularly in the United States, is profoundly ill-suited to the task of reducing crime or delivering justice. Instead, the system is designed to create a criminalized undercaste, and then to isolate that undercaste from the rest of society. Our society does this in large measure so that “we” who are outside the system have an object—a “them” forced into it—into which we can project disavowed aspects of ourselves and of our society itself.
Isolated and most often surrounded by high walls that are both physical and psychological, places of incarceration are largely hidden from view and constitute a closed society that for most of us—particularly those of us who are white and privileged—is fantasized, demonized, even romanticized—but never fully conceptualized or experienced. People who have not experienced the carceral system can all too easily live with the belief that its punishments are a productive way of delivering justice; of separating the guilty from the innocent; and of keeping society safe from criminality. Specifically, from the mostly fantasied criminality of the Other.
Imagined in this way, jails and prisons comprise a highly racialized world that has been flattened into stereotyped darkness so that the world outside can feel brighter. The truth is of course far more complex than this flattened imaginary. The societies inside jails and prisons mirror in large part the society outside, placed into a pressure cooker with the heat turned on high. These are extreme environments in which virtually everything that is wrong on the outside—and far too little of what is right—is vividly represented. People who have lived and worked within the carceral system know that its caged world is designed to deaden the mind and spirit that for many have been under attack by our society since early childhood. Yet those who have endured these conditions know things about living that the rest of us do not.
How do people who have experienced incarceration manage to open their minds and spirits, even while under the severe constraints of confinement and oppression? How do people who have not experienced incarceration nonetheless subject themselves to severe constraints on thinking and being even while enjoying the privileges of freedom? And how do exchanges across these boundaries help us all to think more fully about our own humanity and about what a society that values shared humanity would look like?
What can we learn from each other when the walls of incarceration come down?
Weekend Coordinator: Tom Hennes
Speakers:
James Gilligan, MD, is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University. From 1966 to 2000 he taught at the Harvard Medical School, where he headed the Institute of Law and Psychiatry and served as Director of the Massachusetts Prison Mental Health Service. He then directed or participated in other violence-prevention programs in the U.S. and other nations, and has served as a consultant on violent crime and punishment to President Clinton, Tony Blair, the World Health Organization, the World Court, and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. From 1999 to 2001 he was President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. His books include Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (1997), Preventing Violence (2001), Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others (2011 – a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year”); and, as a co-author of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2017, 2020 and 2024), a New York Times best-seller.
Michelle Good, CM, LLB, MFA, is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. In 2014 Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practicing law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award, and Canada Reads 2022. Her latest work is Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous life in Canada. She is the recipient of two Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees and was named the University of Calgary Distinguished Writer for 2024/2025. She is the winner of the 2025 Indspire award in the Arts category and was admitted as a Member of the Order of Canada on October 17, 2025.
Mario F. Wright, AA, is the Founder and Executive Director of Beyond City Limits Inc. (BCL), a nonprofit using creative arts, writing, and mentorship to open pathways for justice-impacted youth and communities. A formerly incarcerated author and educator, Mario built BCL on the belief that healing happens when people are given room to put down the armor they were never given a choice about picking up, a philosophy he calls ego dissolution, rooted in his own journey of learning that being seen in his pain didn’t destroy him, it freed him.
Mario has authored five books, including The Janitor: No Such Thing as a Bad Child and Poetic Freedom: Born a Caged Bird, and teaches directly from his own writing in the programs he runs. He currently leads a college-level Cultural Literacy course at Juvenile Detention Centers along with other programs and is pursuing his own education at John Jay College after holding the CUNY Harry Belafonte Memorial Scholarship and receiving his Associates, Writing & Literature at BMCC.
Under his leadership, BCL has served 300+ youth and families across 10+ programs in New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, with expansion underway into Chicago, Milwaukee, and Georgia. Mario was named 2026 Poet in Residence at Civil Rights Corps and is a recipient of the Canary Impact Prize. His work centers formerly incarcerated leaders, himself included, as the mentors and messengers best equipped to reach the young people he serves. Wright resides in New Jersey and has three children.
Barbara Bethea, PhD, PTR, LCAT, CASAC, is the first African American Registered Poetry Therapist certified through the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy (IFBPT) and licensed by New York State as a Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT). Dr. Bethea is also the first African American Certified Mentor for the IFBPT. Dr. Bethea completed her Master’s in Psychology, Poetry Therapy, and Counseling at Vermont College of Union Institute and University and her Ph.D. in Expressive Therapies at Lesley University. Dr. Bethea is also a Master-level Credentialed Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC) through the Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS).
Dr. Bethea has been employed by New York City Health and Hospital (NYCHH) for over 16 years and is the only LCAT-Poetry Therapist on the NYCHH footprint. She retired from Verizon after 25 years of service in 2006. She began her second career providing services on the in-patient units at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in 2008. In 2010, she began working in the Chemical Dependency program at what is now known as Cumberland-Gotham Health Center. In 2017, she accepted an LCAT Level III position and began supervising other LCATs at Rikers Island. In 2021, she was promoted to Director of the Creative Arts Therapy program on Rikers Island and is currently employed. Dr. Bethea is the founder of A.W.E.S.O.M.E. Seminars for You and continues to inspire women through workshops, conferences, keynote speaking events, and spoken word.