News

The Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) is a year-round program that brings the University of Michigan community and those impacted by the justice system into creative collaboration for mutual learning and growth. It links pedagogy with practice by training undergraduate students to facilitate weekly arts workshops in adult prisons, youth detention and treatment centers, and prisoner re-entry programs.

Facilitator teams open creative spaces in institutions where they do not exist and enter equally with the other participants, bringing—as they do—their individual energies and skills. Through individual and group activities, honest discussion, and hard work, each workshop creates original art in the form of plays, writing, dance, music, and visual art that is ultimately shared with others through performances and/or exhibitions.

The Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) was co-founded in 1990 by a University of Michigan professor named Buzz Alexander and an incarcerated woman named Mary Glover (now known as Mary Heinen McPherson) who launched a weekly theatre workshop in the only women’s prison in Michigan. That workshop grew into a theatre company called the Sisters Within that endures today inside the prison and also a pedagogical model where faculty and staff at the Univ. of Michigan train students and community volunteers to facilitate arts programming in Michigan. Directed by professor Ashley Lucas since 2013, the program currently sends about 100 students and volunteers a week into prisons and youth centers to facilitate workshops. PCAP has hosted its Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners on the U-M campus for 26 years, and it has published the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing for eight years. It is one of the largest and oldest prison arts programs in the world.

Photos: Courtesy of PCAP