Poetic Justice offers gender responsive and trauma informed classes in the following California carceral settings:
– CIW: 2 RAC classes/wk
– CIW: Children’s Literature Project, ongoing study, production, and publication of children’s books about incarcerated motherhood
– CCWF: 2 RAC classes/wk (including the high security 503 unit)
– CIW & CCWF:
———- Distance Learning Program
———- Voices on the Inside – ongoing self-portrait poetry and photography program with community exhibitions
———- Reentry Journal Project – ongoing paid stipend for first 12 weeks on parole
– Las Colinas (SD Jail): 3 classes/wk (mainline, high security, and psychiatric units)
– SD Youth Transitional Center: 1 weekly class for girls 12-19 y/o

Other PJ Work in California
– East Mesa Rehabilitation Program: (men’s facility)
– California Model Working Group Leadership Team
– Transitional Programming Works (TPW) Women’s Subcommittee Leadership Team

A typical weekly class provides gender-diverse and sensitive access by incorporating mindful breathing, trauma-responsive programming, community support, creative writing, and therapeutic visual arts.

For example, participants might explore aspects of anxiety, worthlessness, shame, etc. through poetry’s grapho-motor process within a trusted community engaged in evidence-based healing because putting language to the unspeakable supports healing from root causes of trauma and PTSD, and provides pathways forward. Whereas abuse, depression, and addiction damage language centers, poetry reactivates them. In fact research indicates that poetry (rhythm, metaphor, rhyme) activates the right hemisphere. The left brain is responsible for acquisition and expression, but the right brain’s ability to integrate unrelated concepts into comprehensible metaphor with repetition and syncopation can access language pathways damaged by trauma. Research, including JW Pennebaker’s work, shows “writing about upsetting events improves physical and mental health,” but only by creating safe communities for interoception and embodied agency. The traumatized brain doesn’t remember in logical sequences; trauma memory returns in sensory experiences rooted in the limbic system rather than language centers – this is why poetry is consequential for healing.