The Prison Creative Arts Project's mission is to collaborate with incarcerated adults, incarcerated youth, urban youth and the formerly incarcerated to strengthen our community through creative expression.

Core Values We believe that everyone has the capacity to create art. Art is necessary for individual and societal growth, connection and survival. It should be accessible to everyone. The values that guide our process are respect, collaboration in which vulnerability, risk, and improvisation lead to discovery and resilience, persistence, patience, love and laughter. We are joined with others in the struggle for social justice, and we make possible spaces in and from which the voices and visions of the incarcerated can be expressed.

PCAP is a student/faculty/community organization based in the Department of English Language and Literature and generously supported by English and by the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. Members join primarily through taking Buzz Alexander’s courses that train students to facilitate workshops in the arts in state prisons and juvenile facilities and Detroit high schools or Janie Paul’s course that trains them to facilitate art workshops in juvenile facilities and prisons. Others join through a disciplined training program. We work with respect for institution rules and regulations and maintain close links with facility staff to whom we are responsible. Students in the courses and PCAP members meet on a weekly basis to share, discuss, and support each other’s work.

We also maintain close links with the facility staff to whom we are responsible. We maintain a spirit of friendliness, respect, and cooperation with corrections officers, recreation, athletic, religious, and special activities staff, and with assistant deputy wardens, deputy wardens, and wardens. Our work is open and positive, and we are responsive to any queries or requests for documentation a facility may ask of us. We are proud of our work and of our collaboration with each facility, and we do everything we can to enhance and improve that work and that collaboration.