32 Prison Chronicles.

In the Classroom

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Prison Chronicles was brought into the classroom again!

If you would like to bring Prison Chronicles to your students, we have a curriculum section with various short and long form workshops, you can find that here.

This year approximately 40 Grade 10 students read Samuel’s writings and responded to his work in the form of digital collages. Here are some of the beautiful pieces that came out of this assignment.

"Embody Your True Self"

My collage shows Samuel's life from beginning to middle, and to where he is now and that people can always change.

"Everyone’s hands here are so beautiful and hold so many stories."

This is a digital collage about "The Prison Chronicles". It shows how everyone's hands tell different stories. My mother always told me to take care of my hands, because that's the first thing people look at and it's how they judge you. I believe there is some truth to that, because you can sort-of tell a lot about a person's life through their hands, how well kept they are, the length of the nails, the markings on the hands, and so on. i found what Magida (The creator of "The prison chronicles") said about hands to be very true, and I really liked it.

I made it all in black and white, making only the word "STORY" in colour, because even when life seems so dull and grey (especially in a prison environment), stories always add a spark of light, or a bit of colour in an otherwise dull world.

Prison Chronicles-Childhoods

In this collage I mainly wanted to show the composition of Samuel's childhood, in the background there are pictures of his mom, himself and his visitor Magida's childhood; the white silhouette is also one of his childhood pictures and the text on it is a poem he wrote, this poster also contains a lot of his artwork.

Samuel

The main message of my photo collage is to highlight Samuel's upbringing, and also his time in prison.

The Effects of an Abused Childhood

How a poor childhood, or something traumatic in one's childhood could set them down a very dark path, highlighting the importance of good parenting and such.

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I will leave you all with another poem by Samuel:

“When Will We Wake?”

It is said that we are all born equal,
But I knew this was a pipe dream at a young age.
When people like me get the least of education,
Force-fed poverty so we can blindly waste our lives away.

Either shot dead by our own kind,
Or put in prison where we’re taught to be institutionalized.
When are we gonna shake off the chains of ignorance?
We can look back in hindsight,
Where people like me and those of colour have no rights.

We are actually a part of a slave corporation.
When are we gonna wake and educate,
So we can shake our own fate
And take our rightful place
In our community, in each state?

Instead, I write from this prison cell.
My dreams—short-lived because of my own ignorance.
My reality of life is a daily hell.
When will we awake?
Why do we wait?
Let’s wake up.