I came into this work—namely education in prison—the way we find many meaningful things: in search of healing. In 2017, I survived abduction and predatory sexual assault when I got into a car that I mistekenly thought was my Uber. I was diagnosed with PTSD and became useless to my own theater company. It was only after extensive movement therapy with friends and colleagues that I could find some semblance of normalcy. I was compelled to pay this care forward. So the following year, I began offering movement therapy for trauma rehabilitation at Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center.

This work immediately inverted my narrative about crime and prisons. It became clear that these institutions were the real crime—symptoms of centuries of racist policing and economic disenfranchisement. I realized that people often traumatize others out of their own complex traumas, which our carceral system refuses to address. More than anything, meeting those extraordinary men helped restore my faith in my fellow humans.

As the years went by and our group evolved into The Incarcerated Mass, I came to understand that there is no healing for any of us until there is healing for all of us. We needed each other to heal, we needed to see one another, to confess and cry together and to remember that ‘I am because of who we all are.’

After all, when we banish those who have created harm from the world, we serve no one. Incarceration leaves a new trail of victims in its wake, more traumatized humans. I do not feel safe inside a system that locks people up and throws away the key. Proximity, interdependence and mercy have been my freedom and my oxygen as the world has become more frightening and complex.

-Melissa