“My No. 1 job is to remind everyone living and working in prison that prison isn’t the world,” he says. “People are resilient. People are resourceful. They’re able to build a world within a horrible world. They build a world that is theirs, one they can control and lets them shape the world around them.”
One of the nation’s oldest correctional arts endeavors, the Prison Arts Program is run by Community Partners in Action, a Hartford, Conn.-based criminal justice nonprofit whose founders included Mark Twain. Besides teaching, the program holds annual art exhibitions that have displayed as many as 750 works.
Greene fell into this work by chance. After graduation, he volunteered to curate an annual show at the maximum-security Cheshire Correctional Institution. Until then he thought art was “an academic, technical, intellectual pursuit.” When he saw dozens of people behind bars making art, he realized it was also spiritual.
Meet people taking Hamilton’s motto to heart as they discover and explore their passions in an effort to make valuable contributions on College Hill and beyond.
“All of a sudden it was revealed to me that an artist is someone who can’t help but make art, and it has to naturally come from you,” the Portland, Conn., native says. “It has to be authentic. The substance has to come from inside you. That blew my mind.”
Immediately he knew he had found his life’s mission.
“What also blew my mind was how absurd the prison [system] is. It’s criminal these places exist in the way that they exist. I saw this closed, repressive world. I wanted to liberate it. I was furious,” he recalls. “There were all these petty expressions of petty power going on around me. I thought if I can have any role in mitigating all that bullshit, I want to do it.”
Now 55, Greene almost always finds himself the oldest person in the prisons where he teaches. He has to educate younger prison staff and wardens about his work. “I’m always, like, preaching to a new pharaoh,” he says.
