P.O. Box 2954
Oxford, MS 38655
Phone (662) 816-4775
louis-bourgeois@hotmail.com
www.voxpress.org
Project Narrative
Education is a basic human “write.” Education should not be limited only to those who can afford it. Education
changes not only an individual’s mindset, but also it provides options and avenues for a different kind of living.
If every college and university faculty member made a commitment to prison-education partnerships, then
perhaps the U.S. would not have the highest incarceration rates in the world.
-—Sherry Robertson, Prison Educator
VOX PRESS serves Mississippi in an ongoing campaign to decrease the alarming rate of illiteracy in our
communities, through educational workshops and the dissemination of free literature for people who need it
the most, as well as free literary events and theatre. Over the past 5 years, our organization has fought the
spread of illiteracy (in our own county, the rate of functioning illiteracy is as high as 40% in some areas) through
a number of effective programs, such as our Kids Poetry Workshop, The VOX Artists Series, and Literature
Should Be Free efforts throughout North Mississippi. By partnering with other state and local groups, we’ve
manage to reach out to segments of our community that would not otherwise have access to free literature and
art events available to them.
This year, VOX PRESS, has extended its effort to improve reading and writing to a place where we feel it is most
needed and most underserved—Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm—the state’s
largest and oldest correctional facility. Our mission is rooted in the belief that the ability to read and write
effectively is a basic human right.
VOX’s Mississippi Prison Writes Program offers a pathway to reflective self-improvement and educational
enhancement to qualified Parchman inmates through the study and interpretation of literature as a positive
means of reacting to one’s circumstances and documenting the human experience.
Classes feature many of the traditional elements of college-level literature seminars and creative writing
workshops, taking students’ individual skill levels into account. The first half of the class is used to practice
reading, textual analysis, and critical thinking skills. Students are exposed to such writers as Toni Morrison,
Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, William Saroyan, George Orwell, Langston
Hughes, and William Faulkner. Through the careful study and interpretation of the works of great writers,
students use concepts such as literary devices, basic narrative structure, and the use of vivid, descriptive
language techniques to enhance their own writing.
The second half of the class is geared toward the writing process, where students write essays, stories, poems,
and plays with the instructor’s guidance and also with the constructive input of other students. Students are
encouraged to use writing not only as a means of clear, concise communication but to dig deeper to use writing
as a means of transcendent self-reflection and creative expression. In short, the writing instruction seeks to
enhance student’s ability to write with increased technical proficiency and creative precision. Great emphasis
is placed on expanding vocabulary by introducing new words each week to be used in both in-class writing
exercises and homework assignments.
After a very successful spring term at Parchman, our next class will begin on September 1, 2014 and end on
December 15, 2014, and will meet once a week for 3 hours per session over the course of 15 weeks. The
instructors involved in the program have already been through the prison’s extensive back ground checks and
have been through the 12 hour training process required by the Mississippi State Penitentiary. The program is
officially included in the fall sessions of Parchman’s education programming department.
Ample research suggests the effectiveness and long-term positive influence of prison education efforts,
enhancing prisoners’ ability to become useful and productive members of society and reducing recidivism rates
by as much as 30-50 percent. Mastering basic reading and writing skills can prove an invaluable asset to
prisoners attempting to re-enter the workforce.
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VOX PRESS is the first organization to offer this type of class in the State’s prison system history, offering
student inmates unprecedented access to traditional university-style humanities studies. Limited access to
quality education is often cited as one of the key components leading to increased criminal behavior. Just as
poor education often leads to a life of crime, so can quality prison education offer a powerful, life-changing
alternative to criminal behavior – as explained by Jennifer Hicks, an instructor of writing in the Minnesota
Prison System:
It’s not just humane or idealistic to give prisoners tools to lead an examined life; it’s logical, and cheaper in
the long run, than housing an inmate repeatedly or at length. Plus it seems like the right thing to do. If we
don’t work to rehabilitate the people we’ve locked up we have little hope of stopping the dysfunction and
destruction.
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