Dignity Inside & Out with Mary Heinen McPherson

Mary Heinen McPherson, a survivor of domestic violence, shares her experiences with the injustices of the prison system and the role of art in reclaiming dignity. She advocates for incarcerated people and prison reform, using her own experiences to support formerly incarcerated individuals. Mary discusses the power of art, theater, and writing in healing and returning home. She emphasizes the importance of reclaiming dignity through advocacy, activism, and retelling one's own story. The conversation explores themes of justice, freedom, power, healing, and the violation and reclamation of dignity.

Episode Resources

• More about Mary Heinen
• Adolescent Maturity and the Brain: The Promise and Pitfalls of Neuroscience Research in Adolescent Health Policy
• Augusto Boal was heavily influenced by Paulo Freire's educational philosophy, especially his seminal work "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."
• More about Buzz Alexander
• More about the Prison Creative Arts Program
• PCAP’s Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing

Takeaways

• Art, including theater and writing, plays a crucial role in reclaiming dignity and healing from the harms of the prison system.
• Advocacy and activism are essential in addressing the injustices and disparities within the correctional system.
• Reclaiming dignity involves retelling one's own story and becoming the subject rather than the object of harm.
• The power of art lies in making the invisible visible and creating freedom through movement and expression.

Exploring what it means to live and lead with dignity at work, in our families, in our communities, and in the world. What is dignity? How can we honor the dignity of others? And how can we repair and reclaim our dignity after harm? Tune in to hear stories about violations of dignity and ways in which we heal, forgive, and make choices about how we show up in a chaotic and fractured world. Hosted by physician and coach Jennifer Griggs.

For more information on the podcast, please visit www.thedignitylab.com.
For more information on podcast host Dr. Jennifer Griggs, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/.
For additional free resources, including the periodic table of dignity elements, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/resources/.

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Transcript

It's a vehicle to be able to, for the artists themselves as they're doing their art, to work out their own stuff, you know, to cry, to grieve, to think, to create. It's a beautiful thing because it opens that person up to possibility and to recovering from shame and grief and guilt and, you know, all the crap that sent you to prison. So it's very healing. 

INTRO

Welcome to The Dignity Lab. 

Our guest this week is Mary Heinen McPherson. Mary is the Program Coordinator and Co-Founder of the Prison Creative Arts Project. In our conversation, we talk about Mary’s experiences with the injustices of the prison system and the ways in which art, including theater, create inner–if not outer–freedom. We talk about humor in the face of absurdity, the ways in which we heal, and what we Mary believes we are called to do to address the problem of mass incarceration. 

And if you stay with us until after the closing credits, you’ll hear how Mary ended up driving a state trooper car after nearly 30 years of imprisonment.

Jennifer 

Mary Heinen McPherson, welcome to the Dignity Lab.

Mary Heinen  

Thank you.

Jennifer

I’d like to start by having you tell us about yourself and how you got to where you are.

Mary Heinen 

I was born in Jackson, raised in Flint. I'm from Michigan. I was in Michigan all of my life. I was incarcerated in Michigan. I was a former lifer. I served almost 27 years inside of, in total, four women's prisons in Michigan. So I've been incarcerated with hundreds and hundreds of women for a very long time. And I went in right after the end of the Vietnam War and I didn't come home until the summer after 9/11. I've been home 23 years. So I've almost been home as long as I was locked up, which makes me very happy. I was worried that, you know, some prisoners are scared that they're going to die inside. And that wasn't me. I wasn't scared of death, but I was scared that I would never live.

I, when I was a young girl, landed in the Detroit House of Corrections, DeHoCo they called it, in Plymouth. And immediately I saw that there was no school, no library, no law library. It was pitiful. It was an old, dilapidated, run-down farm. And they had a canning factory where they can the tomatoes and it was just an ugly scene.

An attorney that had just graduated from U of D Mercy walked in the door named Judith Magid. And she had posted a memo on the walls of the place and was pulling together a class to teach constitutional law and appellate law. So I signed up immediately. I was 21 years old and that changed my whole life. I met a group of seven lifers that were in that original class and in various stages of incarceration. Some had been there a long time, some just walked in the door from young to old. And she had held a spaghetti dinner to raise money for us for books. 

She came in every week. And then out of that effort, as we were sitting there with the plaster falling on us and the cat bringing a litter of kittens inside to go behind the stove, we, she, unbeknownst to us, put together a class action case on conditions of confinement and unconstitutional deprivation that the women suffered from not having programming, not having a line item in the budget for the state of Michigan, even though the men clearly had one and had for a long time. They had apprenticeship programs. They had a master list of programs and opportunities that were denied to women because they said there were too few of us. So in May of 77, we sued and we went to trial, and we won in 1979.  And so the day came when they asked me if I'd like to go to the University of Michigan. Well, hell yes. I want to go today. 

We started taking classes with Buzz Alexander. And Buzz Alexander was a professor at the university at that time. He was tenured. He was wonderful. And he walked in the door and I was standing there and I said, why are you here? So he said, well, I've been studying Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire and there's this concept, this idea of guerrilla theater and theater of the oppressed where the people have the answers and it's like a “power to the people” thing. And you can help yourselves if given the opportunity to act and to work this out together. 

Well, I was all in and I was really all in when I discovered we could scream because they put us in a TV production room and they had us play vampire and we did some theater exercises and we can make noise and we can move around and we could dance. And you know, there's all these rules in prison that you can't do. You have to be very quiet. You can't cause any trouble. dancing and touching is considered a serious infraction. 

And then out of that one single workshop, Buzz, who had been teaching about Vietnam, started teaching about mass incarceration because that was like the dawn of the enlightenment when people realized how bad mass incarceration really is and was at that time. 

Once Buzz started teaching students and training them to facilitate workshops inside of prisons as part of the coursework, as part of the community action, then it just lit a fire under everything. And so over a long period of time, now 34 years, PCAP, the Prison Creative Arts Project was created. And I've been doing this since I was 21, and I'm almost 70. So my life has been PCAP and my family, and just trying to come home and carry on after all that time inside.

Jennifer 

I noticed as you described theater, there was room and space for dance and the scream is what drew you in and the touch. And it feels like that venue, that space created a space within a space where you'd been so literally and figuratively confined. And although the space was smaller, you were more free.

Mary Heinen  

Exactly. And for me, it gave me the opportunity to work out problems that I was having in the units and with bunkies and with guards and with whatever I was going through at the time and whatever everybody else in the company was going through at the time. And you could figure out your problem if you took it to the group and acted it out. And I did that for years.

It was so cathartic and it was so healing and helpful for me and to get the response and the feedback from, you know, my sisters and the people that were in the troop and the people that were our guests when we had a public performance 

Jennifer

What is the role of art in reclaiming your dignity after so much harm?

Mary Heinen  

I think in the acting and in the painting and drawing and writing and music and creating that we do with prisoners and in institutions, it gives folks with just a miserable living situation that beam of hope. And the prisons...are an oral culture. So the culture of folks that are very disadvantaged and don't have a lot of resources are storytelling and they're oral. And so for me, storytelling is a way to just in my own life to be able to talk about things that happened inside like the rats and the sewer pit in the front yard that aren't recorded anywhere. They buried those records. Nobody's going to look, no historian is going to look up and find the story of the rats in the pit because that kind of inhumane treatment and gross negligence is hidden in it. they knew that they were unconstitutional in their dealings with us. But for me, it's a way to be able to tell what happened to my sisters that died from abuse and from medical neglect and from being poisoned or even tortured.

Prison is a terrible thing. And it affects generations. And there's so many women that have children and grandchildren that are locked up. It's well over 80%. And of my group that I hung out with back in the day, I was probably the only one that I can remember right now that did not have children. They locked me up so young, I never had kids.  Those kids suffer along with the mama and the dad and the uncle and the cousins and the whole family. 

So being able to tell those stories to the community and shine a light on a place where there's no communication going in and out of there unless they control it. It's a really horrible thing to be in a cage. And it's a horrible thing to have to share that legacy of the cage with your family and your kids. But they're important to women's history. You don't hear a lot of stories about women in prison. It's always male-focused, male, you know, directed, male-led. And so I think storytelling is critical to an understanding of what has actually happened to hundreds of thousands of thousands of women and children in this country.

Jennifer

You’re making visible those who would otherwise be invisible.

Mary Heinen 

Yes, definitely. And for me, some of those stories over time have taken on a life of their own, like my rat story. And it's kind of a shocking story. But I try to tell it with humor. I try to describe it, what happened, you know, because I'm kind of a physical storyteller, so that you can see it while I'm telling the story. And I think that that's one of the things that I really learned in theater studies at the university, inside and out, is how to use the spoken word, how to use your body, your hands, your delivery, how to deliver so that the audience really connects with what you're saying. And I think that that's...that's a big deal. It's a big deal if you can tell those stories and pull it off.

Jennifer 

Your body is an instrument in that setting. 

Mary Heinen 

Yes, that's true. And the sentence is worn in your body

Jennifer

Is there a freedom in moving the body through theater?

Mary Heinen  

Yeah, no doubt. I think Paolo and Augusto had the right idea. They're right on, man. They knew that acting things out, it's totally healing, you know, along with music, along with writing. Some of our PCAP workshops are...They're part writing and part theater. So you'd write for a while and then start acting it out or putting the pieces together to do a play. So the Sisters Within Theater troupe in Huron Valley. They are...amazing. The Sisters Within Theatre troupe acts out what they do in improv and they piece them together until they have a play. They're very good and they're very witty.

For me, you can't do anything but laugh. It's so absurd, some of the things that happen inside. You can't be downtrodden your entire life. There comes a day when, all right, you're past the arrest, you're past the courts, you're past everything. Now, what are you gonna do for the rest of your life? So, many of us take great pleasure in each other and sharing stories and the sense of community that we have when we're all sitting around the table early in the morning having a cup of coffee. We might be waiting for the raid. But all you have is a sense of humor. There's nothing else you can do but cry. And that wears off eventually. And you have to pick yourself up and keep going.

I mean, it's amazing that people can survive what they survive inside, whether by their own creation or not. And I think that for me, if I couldn't find humor in what I was doing, I don't know if I would have made it. Because when they're giving you a hard time, it can be completely inappropriate to start joking around, but there are some situations where humor really works. And there's situations where, you know, rather than fight or rather than, you know, get into a big thing, if you just crack a joke and blow it off and keep going, you can completely defuse a lot of negative energy. And I got pretty good at that.

Jennifer 

What comes up for you when I say the words power, dignity, and art?

Mary Heinen  

Well, if you mix power with art, you have the Prison Creative Arts Project because art is a vehicle to communicate. So you can walk in a gallery at one of our annual exhibitions. We just had the 28th and see a piece of art and it can totally communicate to you what's happening. For example, when I first came home, I walked in the gallery and it never occurred to me before I arrived that I would see the men's and the women's together. I just didn't think about it. I've created art, but I never thought about the effect of that with folks from the men's prison. 

So when I walked in, I walked all the way around the gallery and on the wall I saw, and it was packed, it was just loaded with art from floor to ceiling, a painting with a parole denial of a friend of mine. And it had a rose entwined in it and the rose was dripping blood and it was a five year flop. So the parole board had seen him and had given him five more years. That was his way of telling us all that he had been denied parole and for how long and what it looked like. And that's just an example. 

And certainly the art is not all, you know, sorrow and parole. There's a lot of joy. There's a lot of whimsy. But it's a vehicle to be able to, for the artists themselves as they're doing their art, to work out their own stuff, you know, to cry, to grieve, to think, to create. It's a beautiful thing because it opens that person up to possibility and to recovering from shame and grief and guilt and, you know, all the crap that sent you to prison. So it's very healing. It's a way also to be recognized as a human being and not a piece of shit because you committed a crime and went to prison. 

It's been my experience that when an artist is working inside or out that they get lost in the art and that's the whole objective when you're inside. You really want to get into something, tune that place out and create and, you know, think and dream and grieve. That it’s very important to have the space and the time and the grace and the dignity that is inherent in the human being to be able to recover. And so recovery can be a really long process if you're locked up and you have a long sentence. And then as you work your way through that, to have something to focus on and to have something that's pleasurable that you enjoy or to create for someone like drawing or painting for a family member or your children or to share with the people that you live with, you know, it's more than something to do. It's something to reinvent yourself as an artist and not a scumbag that committed a crime.

For PCAP artists in particular, most of those artists have painted and draw it and done their thing for years and years and years. And that was really illustrated to me one time when we went on a curation trip. We went to pick art up. And we were at Lakeland, which is where Coldwater was. And this guy had the lifers. When you walk in a room of lifers of the really old guys, a lot of them don't have teeth and hair.

And you can spot, you know, you pretty much know who's alive because they help each other so much and because they're together. And you can tell they've been locked up for a long time. They're really not doing good. But this guy had these beautiful sculptures that he did out of paper. And so he had a flying eagle and he had an owl and he had these beautiful pieces. And I mean, they were like museum worthy. 

We chose a piece, but we didn't choose the one he thought we were going to choose. And when I turned around and looked at him, he had to take it back to his unit. And he was clutching it and he was crushed. He was crying because they didn't take his eagle. 

And then it dawned on me, this guy has been working on his eagle for hundreds, probably of hours. He slept with it and in the room, he's, you know, this eagle has been his thing all this time and we took the owl or something else and we didn't take his eagle. And so it really hit home how meaningful the creations themselves are in addition to the work that goes into it and all the human aspect of being the artist. But the actual creations have a life of their own too. And we've had artists that have had paintings that have ended up, one painting is in the Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor has Martin Vargas' painting in her office. We've got paintings in the parole office in Lansing. 

In my tenure, in my lifetime, I've seen it go from, that's nice, you're drawing butterflies on an envelope. You can sell that for a cigarette. To the Supreme Court has Martin's painting. That's amazing. It was gifted. It's understood that social change primarily includes art and art isn't everything. It's an absolutely everything in a way that was not honored before. And with prisoners that would never have been respected and honored, but for their ability as an artist and the work that they produced. And that's so important because, you know, it's books, not bars, education, not incarceration. You can't get to the back 40 to all those prisoners out in the yard with education programs and with the things that we would like to see happen because there's not the money for it. But, you know, a pencil and a piece of paper or paint and a canvas, you can hustle. You can come up with it and you can keep working and you can perfect your art and you can share it with each other and you can make a life out of your own creation. And that's really what's so important about PCAP. 

And it's so important as a 70-year-old woman now in September, I'm ready for Social Security. My whole life has been prison art as an adult and prison education and trying to verbalize the situation of women and children, in particular in prisons in Michigan, because the situation is just dire. It's really serious. There's women that I was locked up with that were locked up under the old unconstitutional felony murder rule. And it was ruled unconstitutional in 1980, people versus Aaron. But they wouldn't make it retroactive. And so there's prisoners that had women prisoners that had felony murder cases, some of them with domestic violence against them that they fought against. And that also was not recognized as a legal defense until a certain year. And so they can't get out. And it's just a terrible situation. But art gives us the opportunity to talk about it. And it gives the artist inside the opportunity to create art, to sell it at the art exhibit so that they can buy stamps, coffee, tampons, you know, whatever, art, paint, whatever they need. You know, there's hundreds of people that live to sell their art in Michigan that, you know, that are telling you the story and that we're helping survive.

Jennifer

Could we talk more about healing?

Mary Heinen  

Sure. Boy. Healing starts with the will and the desire to overcome whatever it is that you need to be healed from or for. And so for me personally, I had a lot of healing that had to happen because of my physical disabilities. A lot of prisoners have been locked up so long, they have physical disabilities and there's no getting around it.

When I came home in particular, I had to face up to where I was as a 50-year-old woman recovering from being incarcerated and start over. And so when I went to my first doctor, she was a trip. She said, where's your medical records? I said, well, I've been locked up for 27 years. They sealed my file when I left so I don't have any medical records. She showed me out to the door and she told me if I needed help, call 911 and would not treat me. So that was totally humiliating. She wouldn't treat me. And so I stopped telling anybody that I went to that I had been incarcerated. I mean, I wouldn't repeat that situation again for anybody. And so it's a…you walk a fine line between trying to find help and trying not to have to disclose too much to put yourself in a situation to be discriminated against but still, you know, get your heart medication or your diabetes medication or whatever it is that you need. And to this day, I don't tell doctors where I've been. 

You have to become knowledgeable and you have to understand your own physical body and you have to realize what resources are available in the community on reentry. Reentry is really tricky because it's so physical. You know, prison is physical. It's mind, body, spirit, soul.

Your ass is locked up and you're going to be there till they let you go. And when they let you go, you have to figure out, okay, here I am. Do I need dental care? Do I need, you know, am I diabetic? I mean, so many people that I have known that have come home have gone right to the hospital or straight to a doctor to try and get help to get situated.

And so a lot of the healing process is it starts with your own agency, with you recognizing where you are, defining what you need, and figuring out how you're going to get there. So I've had five major surgeries since I've been home. I have stage two kidney disease. 

So healing is...it's more than mental, although mental is at the top of the list. You have to overcome the impossible. You have to overcome all the trauma and drama that you've been through and try to figure out what you need to do now and try to maintain housing and find a job and take care of your family and take care of yourself and dress yourself and feed yourself and all of that. 

And I've just now reached the point after 23 years where I feel really stable physically right now. You know, there's been a lot of correcting work that happened. And you just carry on. You get the best medical care that you can possibly get. And be very careful who you tell, where you've been.

Jennifer

In what ways did art, theater, and writing affect your return home?

Mary Heinen

It made it so much easier. You know, art is a, it's a method of communication. It's a language unto itself. It's a being. And to share that with other artists that I describe it as what is understood need not be explained because you don't have to explain to other artists that have been incarcerated anything. We all know where you've been, how much you suffered, how much you gave up in your life, how much you are, how delighted you are that you're home and you're able to carry on. And so for me, it was so much easier because I had friends and I had people that respected me and I was welcome. I wasn't a pariah. I was honored. I was treated with dignity. I was treated with respect and still am. I'm very well treated by the community as an activist and an artivist and a shit starter with all the lawsuits. 

But what's even more important to me is how art helps women and children in particular, because that's my situation. And I can't begin to tell you how important it is that that creativity is allowed to continue and is something that is recognized and respected when you get here. And for me, being able to come home to a community of artists and activists and shit starters out here, that's the cream of the crop, man. That's the best thing that could happen because I went in when I was a young girl, under current understanding of brain development. I would have been considered still a juvenile under current law.

I think that because I started so young, I was locked up so long, and I came home so late in life, it became what enabled me to overcome, what enabled me to fit in with society and my friends and you know, have dinner and have a cocktail and, you know, do exhibitions and work together and train together. So now I train about 200 volunteers a year to do workshops in currently seven prisons. That's six state and one federal. We just had as company, as invited guests, 10 Berlin-based social workers who are street workers. And in Berlin, in the morning, they hit the streets. They are so effective, they have a facility for juveniles and they can't even keep it full. Because they cut to the chase, they knock that crap off at the beginning level, they work with the family, they work with the community, they work with the person that is in trouble, and they provide resources and they help them avoid a situation where they would end up in prison for, you know, God knows what, something serious. And I just...I tip my hat to them, man, we got a lot to learn from other societies and people and social workers in particular that work with populations of people that are in trouble with the law and help them avoid arrest and detention and prison.

Jennifer

What do you think we as a society are called to do?

Mary Heinen

That's a good question. I think we're called to be open-minded. I think we're called to not be shaming and blaming and really into punishment because everything now is a crime. It's unbelievable what's been criminalized. It's...it's really hard to survive in a society where everything is punishment, punishment, punishment. And that's where we are now. And not just a little punishment, a lot of punishment. You know, whatever they feel like you deserve. And so if I had to ask, I would hope that folks would be a little more open-minded about who we send to prison, how long they go, and trying to help when they come home. 

Because the coming home part is really difficult for people with limited resources and the disadvantage of being locked up so long. I mean, I didn't know how to take the bus. There's so many things that you have to learn and it's...it's really important to have people not look down on you. 

The other thing is the policies. If I had a request to society, I would ask that they take a look at the policies that have gotten us into the situation that we are. Because it's not enough to change laws, to change attitudes, to change communication styles and systems if you've got policies in place that are crushing, like zero tolerance. It used to be if you got out and you did anything, anything, they had zero tolerance and they'd send you right back. 

Well, a lot of that changed when they kind of rethought reentry and made it a business and put money in it. And now there's a lot of, there's some opposition to the actual use of the title reentry because, you know, like my position is, man, I've been living in Ypsilanti, you know, right here. I didn't reenter. I'm from Michigan. I didn't go anywhere. I'm right here. I'm living in your backyard. So I think that the policies really need to change and the policies need to be influenced and guided by formerly incarcerated people and people inside. You know, it's unbelievable how policy can be made without ever consulting or talking or figuring out from our perspective.

Jennifer

Thank you so much, Mary, for being here with me on The Dignity Lab. 

Mary Heinen

Thank you.

Jennifer

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Dignity Lab. Mary’s story, her work, and her words will stay with me long after we’ve aired this episode. As she talked, I noticed no bitterness or anger. Rather, she has made a choice to move forward in a way that honors her own dignity, the dignity of her experience, and those who are still inside.

In thinking about this conversation, I can see how several of the elements of dignity–acceptance of identity, inclusion, safety, fairness, being given the benefit of the doubt, accountability, and autonomy–have all been violated throughout her life. 

I also see how her work in theater, art, storytelling, and her writing honor understanding, acknowledgment, and recognition. 

And when I think about the ways in which we can reclaim her dignity, what stands out to me is that Mary illustrates so many of the options for doing so, including advocacy, activism, holding others accountable, and retelling her story so that she is not as the object of others’ harms the subject of her own story. 

If you want to hear more about alternatives to “punishment punishment punishment,” which rarely results in healing for those who have been hurt, I’d invite you to listen to our episode in Season 2 with Dan Green on restorative justice.

What are your takeaways from Mary’s story? Is there something you heard that resonates with you?

We love to hear from you. You can contact us through our website, thedignitylab.com.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

OUTRO

My dad's idea of the car I needed was a state trooper car that was stripped. They had all this stuff off of it but you could still see police on the side of it. It was a trooper, blue, the blue trooper car. So he bought it, he paid cash for it, and that was my car. So I'm on parole, I'm running around in this old state trooper car. Traffic gets out of the way when I'm driving by. Nobody pulls me over. 

I had it when I was delivering art to Detroit. And one day I pulled through a neighborhood and there was a spot where about four or five fellas were hanging out on the windowsill, just shooting the breeze. And they saw me and they jumped up and they stood straight up, you know, trying to say, we're not doing anything. So so I knew it was I would not have that car for long. So I ended up cashing that baby in and got a new car.