A picture’s worth a thousand words — but a thousand words to a prisoners may make them feel closer to freedom than anything else.
Benjamin Wills, a University of Iowa graduate teaching assistant in art, started the Prison Letter Project, a set of different efforts to provide communication to those in prison.
“The Prison Letter Project is like an umbrella for all of the work that I do for incarcerated people,” Wills said. “It really breaks down to the three different projects, and two of those projects deal with my direct communication with people who are incarcerated. Write a Letter to a Prisoner is my project for helping others engage with the prison community.”
The Prison Letter Project didn’t start as an art project, Wills said, but more a means to figure out how easy it is to write to those in prison.
“It turns out it’s really easy. I started writing a few letters every couple days or so, and the content I got back [from those incarcerated] was so rich,” he said. “How candid they would be, how open they all were was really kind of intoxicating.”
The project then snowballed from a few inmates to about 50 around the country. Additionally, there is a paper airplane project Wills works on — with 161 paper airplanes made by prisoners, which are currently on display at Studio Arts.
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“This one guy wrote me back and he said, ‘as far as sculptures go inside of prison, this is the best I can do.’ And that’s when he sent the first paper airplane,” Wills said. “I collect the airplanes because the idea of movement and freedom to fly that an airplane has is kind of juxtaposed with the whole prison thing.”
Wills said he also thinks of the airplanes as having the potential to showcase the individuals who are incarcerated, which is the underlying idea of his letter project.
“They’re all little paper sculptures, and everyone knows how to build one, but everyone makes them a little bit differently,” he said. “No two airplanes are exactly the same, you know? They’re each made by an individual and really capable of showing off an individual.”
Wills said around 50 participants showed up for the first Write a Letter to a Prisoner event successfully held last Saturday.
“It’s just cool to see the humanity,” said UI student Amanda Bartlett, an event participant. “We live in a society that incarcerates more of its people in this country than anywhere else, and we look at all these people in prison like they don’t affect us.”
“Going to this event really put everything in perspective and you realize this is a real person, someone just like you or me who just needs someone to talk to and who needs that companionship,” she said.
UI student Cameron York said the event helped break the stigma around people who are behind bars, and that people don’t need to be afraid of those who have a record.
“It makes it a lot more clear that we’re all the same, they just happened to make a different life choice than some of us have,” she said. “There can be a lot of loneliness being in that situation, and I think getting mail, having some sort of connection to the outside world is really healthy and helpful for these folk.”
Wills said he has received two important insights through this project.
“… creativity is everywhere, and also, people really desire direct, intentional communication,” he said. “Once people are incarcerated, the ability to have direct communication with the outside world is pretty limited, and so having a project like this allows them to receive that.”
