Malcolm Harris is skeptical about programs like Shakespeare Behind Bars:
The syllogism goes like this: If Shakespeare speaks to universal humanity, and Shakespeare speaks to a prisoner, then the prisoner is human after all. The non-incarcerated can rest easier knowing bad guys get rehabilitated and punished. But this instruction isn’t just a performance for viewers at home, it is educational. What exactly do jailers want their captives to learn?
Wrestling with questions of choice and responsibility, of betrayal and remorse — in the official American curriculum this is called existential thought. But Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth aren’t everymen. It isn’t simply enrichment to dress up a society’s captive marginalized as kings and princes and have them rehearse tragedy. Even if it’s more fashionable to do post-colonial readings of Shakespeare than write him off as emblematic of Western hegemony, the use of treacherous Nordic royals as exemplars of human interiority is suspect.
His broader argument:
At the heart of both the Shakespearean tragedy and the story the American justice system tells about itself is a bad choice. Prisoners, it’s nice to think, are people who have made mistakes and are facing the consequences. But this national bedtime story is contradicted on the front page of the paper every day. An alien observer looking at the US prison population would never guess its organizing principle is justice. Rather, the penal system is index and engine of social marginalization, with the groups who most frighten the people who run it — young black men, trans women — facing the highest incarceration rates. Adam Gopnik is right when he calls the American mass incarceration “a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” American prisons are central to defining and maintaining the host of unequal, intersecting relations that make up the national fabric, all while literally acting out tales of human universality in middle English.
This American Life‘s episode on prisoners’ performances of Hamlet is here.
The Dish 