"Rewind"

In February 2005, I saw, and blogged about, a most amazing performance given by members of the North Carolina Women's Prison Repertory Company. One of them was Regina Walters. She has completed her prison sentence, and her story is the subject of a new performance, set for December 1, at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro.

Hindsight beyond 20/20. "Rewind" traces the steps and missteps that led an enthusiastic cheerleader and talented ballerina to life as North Carolina prison inmate #0423358. Recently released from prison, this former member of the N.C. Women's Prison Repertory Ensemble was incarcerated for 12 years. Now Regina looks frankly at the personal traumas and choices that landed her at 17 in an alley beside a man with a gun and at the challenges and uncertainties of her new life outside.

The question that the 2005 performance raised for me was this: what are prisons for, punishment or rehabilitation? It seemed that the state was not so interested in rehabilitation. Yet these women, dreadfully sorry for dreadful things they had done, were searching desperately for a way back: to wholeness, to some promise of life after they had paid their proverbial dues. The state was not offering that; but at least this program was. Still I wonder what the state has to offer to Regina Walters and others on their return to society. One of the issues that keeps surfacing in our discussions about homelessness in Orange County is the critical lack of planning and transitional services available to people discharged from prison. (Ex-cons aren't exactly welcomed by employers either.)

Regina Walters will be at the performance for discussion afterward. I hope to be there too.

N.C. Women's Prison Repertory returns to Chapel Hill

A year and a half ago, in the Carrboro Century Center, I saw the most amazing performance: the North Carolina Women's Prison Repertory Company, founded by Judith Reitman. As I blogged it at the time, this project, which involves writing as well as performing, is a lifeline for these women--women who have done terrible things and are paying the price, but who are not beyond hope of redemption. Rather, they desperately need constructive tools for finding their way back through remorse and redemption to wholeness. Ordinary prison life doesn't give them that: far from it.

In the comments to my blog entry, a reader wondered if I was suggesting that they did not deserve their punishment. Not at all, and that's not what I heard them say either. But I do believe that a person can do a terrible thing and be genuinely sorry and that society has an obligation to help such a person on that journey through atonement to forgiveness. As I said in that comment thread, it's as if we've forgotten the root of the word "penitentiary." I realize it's not a view universally held.

You can catch the Women's Prison Reportory Company tomorrow night at the ArtsCenter. You won't be sorry.