Why is it important to learn about prison from people who have been directly impacted? Well, in this episode, Aimee and Kamisha share their own stories about incarceration – and what they tell us reveals a lot about community services, mental health and substance use treatment, intergenerational family trauma, and mass incarceration in our country.
Aimee and Kamisha also explain how they got started making art in prison and talk about the people and opportunities that inspired them to create The Returning Artists Guild.
Additional Resources:
Incarcerated Women and Girls (The Sentencing Project): https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2023/05/Incarcerated-Women-and-Girls-1.pdf
Pens to Pictures Panel Discussion (Chinonye Chukwu and others): https://wexarts.org/education/pens-pictures
For They Know Not (Aimee Wissman’s Pens to Pictures Film): https://vimeo.com/356550411
BANG! (Kamisha Thomas’s Pens to Pictures Film): https://vimeo.com/356291769
Story Chain (Jonathan Platt): https://story-chain.org/
Reentry Stories (Mary Evans/WYSO): https://www.wyso.org/reentrystories
The Inside Out Prison Exchange Program: https://www.insideoutcenter.org/
Call Declined is hosted by Melissa Beck and presented by the Sozosei Foundation, a philanthropic arm of Otsuka. The Foundation’s goal is to increase access to mental healthcare in order to eliminate the inappropriate use of jails and prisons for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in the United States. Learn more at www.SozoseiFoundation.org.
The Sozosei Foundation extends special thanks to Aimee Wissman and Kamisha Thomas, visionary artists and co-founders of The Returning Artists Guild whose creativity, resilience, and lived experience inspire us to build a world where mental illness is not a crime. To learn more about the Guild visit www.thereturningartistsguild.org.
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