Date Published: 2026
Course Context
The Write On! Writing Inside (WRA 491) course is an upper-division elective offering from a Midwest Research 1 university in conjunction with a nearby correctional facility. The course is open to graduate and undergraduate students in a 15-week semester, face-to-face format.
Reflection
MSU’s Strategic Plan 2030 plots the university’s future: “To continue to lead, [the university community]must aggressively pursue external resources and partnerships that give [MSU] the platforms necessary to develop solutions to the big problems that confront us globally.” In the U.S., the incarceration rate is 583 people per 100,000 residents. Nationally, 1.9 million people are detained. This rate is higher than any country in the world (Prison Policy Initiative, 2024). In 2023, Michigan incarcerated over 64,000 people, and, including people on probation or parole, over 172,000 people under criminal justice supervision. Write On!, a larger prison writing project of which this course is a part, partners with the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) to reduce the rate of incarceration and confront the inequities and biases causing the problem of incarceration. The project will achieve this goal by “enriching the student experience and deepening learning with opportunities for creative expression and engagement with cultural experiences” (MSU Strategic Plan 2030). Incarceration is a disproportionate cultural experience for poor people, black people, and Hispanic people.
Write On!’s mission, a prison writing project of which this course is a part, is to connect MSU undergraduates with incarcerated writers in the Greater Lansing area so both may develop deeper understandings of and connections with one another while developing practical skills in writing, critical thinking, multimodal creation, innovative problem-solving, and approaches to fostering social justice. The mission is rooted in the Ubuntu philosophical tradition, a key tenet of which is, I am what I am because of who we all are. This tenet emphasizes the interdependent basis of humanity and that efforts aimed at segregation are therefore dehumanizing. Judith Butler, in Precarious Life, makes a similar argument about how exclusionary practices like censorship, among others, violate the interdependent nature of humanity. The program’s goals, aligned with the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures’ (WRAC) mission, are to: make community-engaged work more visible; create educational opportunities for marginalized people; counteract the social stigma of incarceration; contribute to social justice work focusing on marginalized, underserved, and underrepresented communities; promote writing as a humanistic act; contribute to the preparation of community leaders, researchers, innovators, and thinkers. To attain these goals, this course offers MSU undergraduate students WRAC-based credit-bearing courses to: prepare students to understand working in a prison context, train students to be writer-supporters and responders; teach students to develop and facilitate content-specific writing workshops; provide context-sensitive and learned individualized writing-support in a prison. Crossing lines of enforced difference subtends social justice; this course is that work as it challenges the social narratives legitimating mass incarceration. The course is designed to promote equity through writing workshops and content-specific writing practice in a non-structured space; reinforce writing as humanistic work; and contribute to the preparation of community leaders, researchers, innovators, thinkers who will advance social justice principles.
