Sabra Williams on the Transformative Power of Art and her Fight for Prison Reform
The accomplished actor and co-founder of ‘Creative Acts’, Sabra Williams, sits down with MADE IN BED’s Anindya Sen to discuss her work and agenda for change.
Creative Acts is a social justice organisation that uses the arts for transformation through engagement programs in American prisons and juvenile facilities. Sabra Williams has received praise for her work with social justice organisations from world leaders. President Obama named Williams a “Champion of Change” in 2016, and she was honored with a British Empire Medal for services to the Arts & Prison Reform by Queen Elizabeth in 2018.
Image courtesy of Sabra Williams, Executive Director, Creative Acts.
AS: How did the idea of using the arts for prison reform come about?
SW: I am an actor, an activist and also an immigrant in America. When I lived in London where I was born and brought up, I worked with the English Shakespeare Company who had a program of taking Shakespearean plays into prisons. Then I moved to America in 2002 and joined the Actor’s Gang, actor-director Tim Robbins’ theatre initiative. I thought that their highly physical and emotional style of theatre would be really good for rehabilitation inside prisons. Tim was supportive and encouraged me to invent something that could be applied there. I started this theatre program in 2006 working inside California prisons. On the very first day the experience was so dramatic that I was like “Ohhh! we need to do this!!!! Because this actually has an effect!”
The Actor’s Gang Prison Project was about using the power of theatre to give people tools to make different emotional choices, to help them heal trauma and to break down barriers of race and gang affiliation; to lower violence and to create empathy. After a thirteen-year journey with them, I left two and a half years ago to start Creative Acts. Here we are trying to deepen and broaden the work that I did at the Actor’s Gang. As a social justice arts organisation, we are about using the arts in the process of healing and reimagining how our world can change.
AS: What is wrong with the American prison system and in your view how does it further discriminate against people of colour?
SW: The American justice system includes policing, incarceration, parole, probation and also the foster system. All of these people are what we call systems impacted. There are many places in America where one in three Black men are in the system. So, in these communities nearly everybody knows somebody who is touched by this system. Black people are 13% of the population in America, but 33% of the incarcerated population. So that gives you some kind of idea.
The American so-called ‘justice system’ came directly out of slavery. The first police were employed to catch runaway slaves. It has been born from white supremacy and is held up by the same system of white supremacy. Most of the people who make the laws have historically been white men and people who impose the punishments are majority white men on majority people of colour. So, you can never tinker with a system that came from slavery without acknowledging its roots, and ripping it out from the roots. This justice system is also deeply entrenched in punishment and does not focus on rehabilitation.
Also, America incarcerates children. In many places there is no younger age limit. So, the age of kids who are arrested can be as young as 8 or 9! Not only does the system incarcerate young people and children, it gives them multiple life sentences. This is all only just starting to change now.
I have worked in several girls’ prisons, and I have never met a girl incarcerated who does not have the same story – of being raped, trafficked, suffering from drug abuse, generational incarceration. If you have been raped by your uncle and left for dead by the garbage can and how can you be expected to go to school and learn like a “good girl”; that is impossible to do. So, they start acting out from their trauma. They end up going to the streets. They get trafficked and they get incarcerated. So basically, they are incarcerated for their trauma. A lot of them are mothers, and their next generations are already incarcerated.
Let me also add that this system today in America is the most evolved that it has ever been. If you think today is abysmal, when we started, in 2006, it was a lot worse than it is today.
AS: What are some of the challenges you have had to face in this journey and how have you overcome them?
SW: When I went into the prison system for the first time, I wanted to break everything down because it was such an injustice. But it didn’t work, because what happens then is that people hold on tighter.
It was actually a play that informed my approach. I learnt a lot from my role in ‘Tartuffe’, a Moliere play I acted in during my Actor’s Gang days. I played the role of a maid, a central character, who is the power behind the scenes who disrupts the hierarchy from the inside.
And so, I started to listen to the prison staff. They revealed that they didn’t like our program because now people had an opinion about stuff. Prisoners answered back and they carried themselves differently. I found that interesting because the data also suggested that the inmates became less violent, implying the job for the prison staff became safer.
I realised that the program makes one self-reflect and take responsibility for their lives. That could be terrifying for people tasked to oversee them. So, we can just dive in deeper and create the best curriculum. One that helps them realise their own power and how to make change themselves, rather than us trying to come in and change the system. That has proved to be very effective. We have never had any violence in the room in the last fifteen years and have seen a massive drop in violence among people who do the class.
AS: Please tell us about your more recent project ‘Art Attacks’ program which works with children’s prisons? What impact have you been able to achieve through that program?
SW: In 2017, LA county passed a legislation empowering children’s prisons inmates to vote. When I spoke to the director of probation there, I found out that while they had registered around 600 kids, only 35 had voted. So, I said to her that if she would open these prisons to us, we could bring in a program which would raise their rates of voting.
Thus, we created ‘Art Attacks’, an arts-based workshop to try to get young people to realise their power and to use voting as a tool to make change. A lot of the program is about physical drawing. We bring in a very big piece of paper that says “My voice is…” and we bring in high quality art supplies, which motivates them. They come together and create this beautiful poster.
We also did a multiple-choice fun quiz around the history of voting and then we turned that information into poetry. Spoken word, Rap – however they want to express and share it.
Then we did these protest signs, which they made in their own language. This began with “My vote is..” and was followed by their own thoughts. We exhibited it in the schools inside the prisons and then put up an art exhibition titled “We Rise” in LA. At the end we would register them to vote.
Out of the kids we registered, 86% of them voted. It was transformative, not because of some magic, but because they started to really understand the power of voting.
AS: What other social justice reform activities is Creative Acts involved with?
SW: Creative Acts is made up of three parts.
‘Art Attacks’ is related to civic engagement and voting. As is ‘Party at the Polls’ which we did during the midterm polls. For both of these, we asked artists, from across the nation, to perform outside their polling stations, after the artists themselves had voted. The aim of this was to keep people in line and to draw more people to vote. We will do that again in November.
Second, we do anti-racist training. Having worked for fifteen years in the most racist place on earth, which is prisons, we also train people how to work with impacted communities effectively.
The third part of our work is with people who are coming back from multiple decade life sentences. For them it is like coming back to another planet because it is all computerised. They struggle with basic things like checking out of the supermarket, going to the bank or pumping gas. Creative Arts uses Virtual Reality to bring those daily experiences to prisons to better prepare them to come back. That will launch later this year. Another thing we are doing with VR is travel. We had this person who did forty years in prison, thirty years of which in solitary confinement. We put him in the VR headset and he went to Thailand. He was crying his eyes out after that. It changes people’s narrative around who they are and what the world is for them.
AS: In the context of the urgent need for more diversity and inclusiveness, where do you think cultural institutions and creative enterprises need to focus on to bring real change? What actions would you like to see in the short term?
SW: What I am seeing right now is very concerning. Organisations are merely doing one-hour diversity and equity inclusion training and trying to bring some people of colour into their staff. I am seeing a lot of performative allyship, but not really a lot of deep work.
What is critical is that where power is held, that’s the part of systemic racism that is not being addressed. Boards, Executive Directors, Chairpersons – that is the level where the real power is held and decision making done – that’s the level that has to be dealt with. So how are you diversifying your boards? Before you even think about diversifying, first, you have to self-reflect on your day to day culture of the organisation, as opposed to the stated philosophy.
Having acknowledged the status quo we need to ask whether we want to change it; and if so, what steps do we need to take? How can we have a broader base of people who can make the decisions? After that, how can we be held accountable? How can we assure that this will have longevity? A lot of this is about positionality. Do you know when to be an ally? Do you know when it is a time to step back and share power? And do you understand how to do that?
Most organisations issued a Black Lives Matter statement when it started happening. For me and other people in the movement, we were like “You think that was an end in itself”. But to us that’s a call to action. So, a year from now, I am going to be checking back and asking you what have you actually done? How is your organisation different now? How are you acting in the world as a result of your BLM statement? A lot of people who issued it are now wishing that they hadn’t! Because we will keep them accountable!
AS: Are there any personal values that you have embedded as the leader in your organisation, that you would like to share?
SW: When Cheryl and I started Creative Acts, I clearly wanted a non-hierarchical organisation. I am called the Executive Director only because of the pre-requisites of grant applications. We are an all women organisation, led by, you can say, a black woman and are now building an advisory board that is majority BIPOC and systems impacted. We are all equally paid, the same amount per hour as I believe that our philosophy should reflect in how we are compensated. We are all actors, so we can all do other acting work. But I am determined to keep the hourly rate the same.
At Creative Acts, we don’t sit around a table in a corporate manner and discuss making a strategic plan or dealing with an obstacle. We go through a poetry writing process, an art drawing exercise or a theatre game to help us do what I call ‘turn it into art’. That’s what I mean when I say we are trying to make a new path and place the arts and an artistic approach within our core philosophy at Creative Acts.
What advice would you give to students who are about to enter the art world or to young art world professionals?
Don’t be in this world without understanding the power of the arts. The only way to understand that is to apply it to your own life. How can you use an artistic approach to self-reflect, and to understand where you are as a person in this world, and what you can do in the world?
Particularly young people, but people in general, have to realise that we are living in a pivot in history. What do you want to do at this time when we are called to radically reimagine the world and all the systems in it, not just tinker at the edges? What can you, as a human being, do at this historical time?
Thank you, Sabra Williams!
Follow Sabra Williams & Creative Acts at:
Website: https://www.creativeacts.us/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/creative_acts/?hl=en
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/creativeacts.us
Twitter https://twitter.com/creative_acts
Email: info@creativeacts.us
Anindya Sen
Contributor, MADE IN BED