Hawai‘i's Women's Prison: The Role of the Kailua Prison Writing Project and the Prison Monologues as Expressive Pu‘uhonua

Abstract

Women’s plight in the prison industrial complex resounds within a broader, and disturbingly American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of non-whites in our prison-industrial gulag. Prisons in Hawai‘i indicate an ongoing colonial relationship to the United States of America, which overthrew the Hawaiian kingdom by force. While historical and contemporary prison literature addresses the Black male as the most marked body in the prison industrial complex, my intervention highlights the testimony of women, including that of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women who are overrepresented in Hawai‘i’s carceral landscape. This dissertation, rooted in my experiences between 2012 and 2016 as a researcher, a participant ethnographer and guest, and a creative writing teacher at the sole women’s prison on O‘ahu—the Women’s Correctional Community Center—addresses a scholarly lacuna in a tradition that privileges male prison writing by examining women’s prison writing in two genderresponsive programs: the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its adjacent Prison Monologues. The philosophy of the writing program is rooted in Hawaiian practices of ho‘oponopono (reconciliation and forgiveness) that resist state-sanctioned inscriptions on Indigenous bodies. Imagined by its founders as a place of refuge and transgressive cultural site, the Women’s Correctional Community Center is also a troubled site: a feminized (domesticated) carceral landscape against a backdrop of colonialism—a space between hope and despair. On the one hand, the Kailua Prison Writing Project is a cathartic medium that effects change. The women who write in an incarcerated space perform resistance, even as they confound the anticipations of readers familiar with an incarcerated male authorship. Yet their resistance necessarily runs against institutional constraint. If the creative writing classes function as a haven for the women, as the women themselves attest, they are never immune to institutional intrusions and fracture. My research holds in productive tension women’s testimony of the immeasurable value of the Kailua Prison Writing Project and the ways in which the carceral and colonial regimes continue to impinge upon the women’s lives. The story that unfolds is a cartography—a bridge between social justice advocacy and scholarship that interrogates social justice failures in the contemporary carceral archipelago.