The prison classroom was where she could finally be herself. Now it's gone

The Guardian

10-05-2025

Every Monday for over a decade, I left my home on Peaks Island, Maine, boarded a ferry to town then drove inland to the Maine correctional center to lead a creative writing class for incarcerated women.
After a 30-minute drive, I park my car, walk to the facility, leave my cellphone and keys with the front desk guard, walk through a metal detector and several sets of sliding doors until I reach the women's unit. My classroom is a tiny space, bare bones, with plastic chairs, cinderblock walls and fluorescent lights.
I teach to a rotating cast. Many are in for drug-related crimes and leave after a few months. Others, like the lifers, are always there. After all these years, we're more like siblings than co-workers. We see one another.
My students write about addiction and hope, survival and abuse. They write about their childhoods and their children. The write about the foods they miss, the sex they still want. They write to remember themselves, to reclaim their identities as human beings rather than rap sheets.
Months ago, I had a new student, a transgender woman. Ashley was tall, meticulous with her makeup, and unreasonably punctual. One Monday, I passed by a jazzercise class on my way in and spotted her through the glass: pigtailed, beaming, sweat-drenched, dancing with abandon. A towel slung over one shoulder, she darted to class right after. After a few weeks in the classroom, I gained her trust and, one day in class she shared with me: 'I used to look in the mirror and ask, 'Who are you?' Now I look and say, 'There you are.''
She told me that, ironically, the women's prison was the first place she felt like herself. Ashley had been welcomed as she was by the other incarcerated women, and with open arms. 'They're teaching me how to be a woman,' she said.
This isn't a procedural shift you'd find in a sentencing report, but a deep, internal, transformational, emotional, psychological, even existential one. It's the kind of change rooted in healing, in feeling safe, and in finally being seen by others as who you truly are. That kind of safety is rare inside prison walls, and it's exactly what just got taken away: this April, the federal government revoked more than $1.4m in grant funding from Maine's department of corrections. The reason? The state had housed a trans woman in a women's facility, following medical recommendations and the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.
The woman, Andrea Balcer, had been living in constant fear in a men's prison. She, too, said that in the women's unit, she finally felt seen and safe. The Trump administration's Department of Justice didn't see it that way. Under the attorney general, Pam Bondi, they declared Maine out of compliance with 'agency priorities'. The punishment: cut funding, and not just any funding, but programs that worked. Programs that healed and transformed lives.
Gone: a substance use treatment initiative serving more than 300 incarcerated people, that was vital in a state affected by high rates of opioid addiction. Gone: a re-entry program designed to reduce recidivism through community-based support. Gone: the Lullaby Project, through which professional musicians helped incarcerated mothers write songs for their children.
None of these were symbolic programs, they were lifelines.
Other states are watching. Some will fall in line, but few can afford to risk losing the funding that props up their already hollow systems. But Maine didn't bend, and that matters. When the state refused to move Shelley back to a men's facility, the federal government retaliated – not against policymakers, but against mothers, recovering addicts, probationers, artists. The ones with the least to lose, and who keep losing anyway.
I, too, have been cut from teaching at the prison. Most of us volunteers have been suspended: a Bible studies teacher of 23 years, a prison hospice coordinator, the list goes on. After over a decade of volunteer work, I was suspended from facilitating creative writing workshops, my badge revoked, my relationships severed because I advocated for my students. I wasn't suspended because of budget cuts. I was suspended because I spoke up. Because I asked too many questions, pushed for dignity, and treated incarcerated women like their lives mattered.
My classroom is now gone. My volunteer badge won't get me past security any more. And I have no way of reaching my students, including Ashley, any more. Any snail mail I send comes right back to me with a stamp reading: 'Return to sender: non-allowable inside.'
But I can still write this.
I believe that prison should be a place of rehabilitation rather than regression and retribution. I still believe in what we were building in that cinderblock room. That writing is a form of repair. That dignity doesn't end at the prison gate. That women like Ashley and Shelley and any other woman deserve to see themselves reflected, not just in mirrors, but in policy, in possibility.
The last time I saw Ashley, I was walking to my classroom. She was finishing jazzercise, tall and joyous and glowing with sweat. We saw each other through the glass wall and waved. Then, I arrived at my classroom, sat down and waited for her to join me at the table.
Untitled
A poem by Ashley Bushey (with permission to be shared)
… We're the blades of grass who withstand the shifting winds with an unyielding stamina that bends, yet never breaks. We're the tumbleweeds that follow the winds, looking for the perfect note we seek.
We're the waves of the oceans, carried away to new lands whose speed, size and strength are constantly taxed by brewing storm and rising tide. Only to be washed ashore. Not finished. Fresh and new to begin again. Only to find that all lessons are lost, because, as we changed, so did everything else.
We're the bottle with the message. When finally opened there is only a blank page and a pen. Then we realize, of course it's blank. How can we write what is undreamt? We're the solution. We're the anomaly. We become one.
Mira Ptacin is the author of The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna and the memoir Poor Your Soul. She lives in Maine.