Can a Virtual Prison Arts Event Begin to Bridge the Distance between Incarcerated and Non-Incarcerated Communities?

Background and Purpose: Prisons are physically separated from society. As a result, the general public has little contact with incarcerated people, and few avenues for understanding their lived experiences and empathizing with people re-entering society after incarceration. Arts-based prison programming may be a powerful antidote to bridge the distance between incarcerated and non-incarcerated communities.

Our evaluation built upon construal level theory (Liberman & Trope, 2010) – the idea that the more concrete something becomes, the more psychological proximity we perceive – to consider whether attending a virtual prison arts event may foster psychological proximity to incarcerated individuals and issues of incarceration among the general public. Further, we considered whether increased psychological proximity is associated with shifts in attitudes towards, and intentions to act regarding, issues of incarceration.

Methods: Evaluation data were collected using a pretest-posttest survey design administered directly before and after a 3-hour live virtual arts event broadcast from inside Colorado prisons. The pretest survey included 12 questions: four demographic questions, and eight questions measuring psychological proximity, attitudes about incarceration, and intentions regarding actions towards shifting incarceration. The posttest survey included the psychological proximity, attitudes, and intentions measures.

Data were analyzed through paired sample t-tests to measure change between pretest and posttest responses, and linear regression analyses to explore whether changes in psychological proximity were associated with changes in attitudes about, and intentions to act regarding, issues of incarceration.

Results: We found that event attendees (N=142) who had been inside prisons previously had higher levels of psychological proximity at pretest. All attendees demonstrated significant increases in psychological proximity between pretest and posttest, and attendees who had not visited prisons previously experienced greater increases in psychological proximity over the course of the event. We further found strong evidence that psychological proximity is predictive of attitude and intended behavior changes, but minimal evidence for a linear relationship between increased psychological proximity, shifted attitudes, and stronger intentions to act.

Conclusions and Implications: Contact through virtual arts event may be a valuable mechanism for bridging the distance between incarcerated and non-incarcerated communities, with the potential for building empathy and understanding towards people re-entering society after incarceration. Our findings foreground the need for future research which explores what kinds of events, and for whom, these effects are most impactful. We suggest that policymakers and practitioners in justice settings consider virtual arts events as a cost-effective, yet meaningful, way to bridge the gap between incarcerated people and their communities as a part of broader humanization and re-entry efforts.

References

Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440– 463. doi:10.1037/a0018963