Inside Voices: Finding Freedom in Creativity within Illinois Prisons

How Brian Beals of Mud Theatre Project and educator Melissa Amelia Pavlik help rewrite the mass incarceration narrative

Your story, your voice

“There are so few opportunities within correctional, judicial, and even educational systems for those serving long-term prison sentences to access platforms where they can share their own stories in their own voices,” shares Melissa Amelia Pavlik, an educator at North Park University who taught at Stateville and Logan Correctional Centers, and currently teaches at Sheridan Correctional Center and Kewanee Life Skills Re-entry Center. “So, they experience early on how when they can’t tell their stories in their own voices, someone else will tell a different version of those stories.”  
 
Pavlik has led a weekly writing group at Stateville Prison named WRIT112 since Summer 2023, with the help of founder Rayon Sampson, who initiated group meetings for those on the inside. The group is made up of incarcerated North Park writing tutors who are also students or graduates of North Park’s MA in Restorative Justice Ministry program.  
 
Her ethos is rooted in theory and scholarship, but she is driven by compassion and encouraging a lifelong love for fearlessly speaking one’s truth. She shares that it’s important for her to provide “a space to reflect, process trauma, put words to feelings, and to not feel so alone in the process.” 
 
She quotes one of her members, Jamal Bakr, on his growing relationship with writing: “For me, carceral realities have influenced me to view writing as a way to discover the power of my own voice and to experience a transcendent freedom by utilizing it…. Writing allows me to express my fullest existence even when my circumstance attempts to oppressively suppress it. Writing allows me to escape the realities that my body itself cannot.”

The power of accessibility

More than playwriting 

Before creating the Mud Theatre Project, Brian Beals founded the Dixon Performing Arts program while serving a thirty-five-year sentence for a wrongful conviction. During this time, he and his group developed plays and spoken word performances that illuminated the realities of prison culture and conditions and re-entry into communities that stigmatize those who were formerly incarcerated.

The need for an arts-driven community was abundantly clear to Beals. Dixon Correctional Institution hadn’t offered education or re-entry programs prior to his performing arts initiative, and the lack of the facility’s care to provide an outlet for artistic expression clearly demonstrated the carceral system’s investment in oppression.  
 
“Art opens windows to think abstractly, which allows us to better conceptualize and then express the pain caused by the trauma and be able to understand and verbalize in a way that leads to healing,” Beals shares.

For so many men struggling to cope through the trauma of incarceration, learning how to process their emotions in their own way, on their own terms, was transformative. 
 
Through making art, he says that participants developed greater emotional intelligence and conflict resolution and that the men warmly embraced learning new skills for effective communication. What began as exercises in how to write a play turned into newfound personal growth and confidence that extended beyond the walls of the workshops. 
 
The response to the program was wildly successful, welcoming hundreds of members, and participants went on to win national awards for their stellar playwriting and artistry.

Molding Mud Theatre Project 

After being exonerated in December 2023, Beals used the framework of the program inside Dixon Correctional Center to mold the Mud Theatre Project, whose goal is to use theatre to advocate for social change. 

“Our performances are crafted to engage and educate about the need for criminal justice reform and oversight,” Beals explains. “We use theatre… to amplify the voices of incarcerated people struggling in a system not designed to rehabilitate them, using art to speak out for themselves.”

Illinois Humanities’ Envisioning Justice grant will support the Mud Theatre Project’s first workshop series, which is currently being incubated by the Chicago Torture Justice Center. Beals is hopeful that its impact will surpass the legacy of the Dixon Performing Arts program and will encourage greater societal harmony inside and out.

While its workshop program is simmering, Mud Theatre Project has been building deep community connections, collaborating with Chicago Votes, Project H.O.O.D., Imagine Englewood If..., and more. 

“Incarcerated people are the most marginalized people in America. The loss of liberty and becoming disenfranchised grinds away at the connection to family and community,” Beals shares. Mud Theatre Project picks up those pieces and begins the journey ahead to repair those connections.

The organization’s work is an investment in strengthening support for those upon re-entry—both by creating an outlet for formerly incarcerated people to tell their stories, as well as equipping the community to welcome formerly incarcerated people with enthusiasm, empathy, and open arms.

Coming up

WRIT112’s anthology, Writing from Both Sides of the Moon, and Feather Bricks magazine will be celebrated at “Catalyst on Campus,” an event co-facilitated by North Park University’s Office of Civic Engagement, in Spring 2025.

WRIT112’s work will also be shown at the Prison + Neighborhood Art/Education Project’s Walls Turned Sideways art and community space in Spring 2025.