Sundays with TED: A Professor’s Passion

Megan Sweeney, a professor of English and African American studies at the University, provides a voice to the voiceless in her latest book “Reading Is My Window.” She boldly shines light on a group of citizens which stands far removed from our mainstream consciousness: female prisoners.

Sweeney’s motivation for writing the book, according to a recent author’s forum discussion in Ann Arbor, was to learn about the “people who live outside the usual daily frame of reference, and to show [their] lives as textured, versus presenting a reductive view of women prisoners.” She laments that the material available to these women all too often falls within the three categories of urban fiction, memoirs about victimization, and self-help.

What’s quite clearly missing out of these three categories are choices of intellectually stimulating material. And, unfortunately, trivial reasons are commonly responsible for this void. For example, Sweeney notes a 2006 Pennsylvania  law which prohibits secular newspapers, merely on the grounds that the absence of these papers contributes to  the “personal growth” of the inmates. If you’re shaking your head in puzzlement right now, we’re right there with you. This unconvincing political rhetoric all to often goes unchecked.

But it doesn’t have to.

Sweeney is a part of a cohort that seeks to place focus back on the rehabilitative aspect of our prison system, instead of concentrating solely on the system’s retributive purposes. Sweeney’s work also focuses on the history of education in our prison systems, and suggests that we need to “re-humanize” the current, shadowy paradigm which forsakes the intellectual capacities, and developments, of today’s prisoners. She’s definitely on to something.