Prisoner-led cultural groups in Washington say they’ve been sidelined under state's prison diversity initiative

F

riends Mark Cook and Andy Pacificar sit across from each other conversing over a six-pack of beers in Cook's small, one-bedroom apartment in Seattle. As they chat, Cook begins identifying the Black Panther Party founders pictured in the photographs on the walls surrounding them.

“Bobby Seale, Huey Newton,” Cook says before turning his attention to a third man in the picture: Richard Aoki, a famous Black Panther who FBI documents show was an informant in the early days of the party’s radical civil rights movement.

“These Japanese guys are the ones who gave them their first firearms to start off,” Cook adds.

A political activist himself, Cook is candid about his attempts to break political prisoners free in the 1970s — an endeavor that, in part, landed him in prison for 24 years.

While incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Cook helped kickstart a series of cultural awareness groups for prisoners, each connecting to different ethnic or racial communities. They hold classes on social justice issues and work with loved ones and advocates on the outside to prepare incarcerated people for life beyond prison walls.

The Washington State Department of Corrections has recently attempted to standardize how these groups operate. Advocates say this has eclipsed prisoners’ ability to organize cultural awareness courses and events, undermining what little self-determination they can exercise on the inside.

In January 2023, the Department of Corrections launched an initiative called Pro-Equity Anti-Racism and issued a report on how it’ll apply those goals — partly inspired by diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives laid out in an executive order signed by Gov. Jay Inslee in 2020. While this particular program emerged last year, the agency says prison-run diversity programs have existed for more than 15 years at its facilities.

“This process allows prison leadership to have visibility into the group’s actions and activities and can help strategize ways to improve accessibility to programming,” a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections told KUOW last year.

Under the state’s new initiative, cultural awareness groups can’t meet unless a volunteer sponsor from outside the prison is present. They also have to follow a prison-approved curriculum, which participants say sanitizes the social justice issues they teach about.

“They’re trying to rebrand [prison-run diversity programs] as cultural groups,” Jojo Ejonga, a member of the Black Prisoners’ Caucus at the Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Grays Harbor, told KUOW in September. “They’re really trying to tell us how to celebrate our culture, or how to acknowledge or practice our culture.”

The recent changes conflict with the nature of cultural awareness groups, says Felix Sitthivong, who was part of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Awareness Group at Stafford Creek.

“We don’t mind being transparent, we’ll fill out all of this [paperwork],” he told KUOW in September. “But what we do have a problem with is that, what you’re trying to do is box us into volunteer group policy…we’re not a volunteer group.”

RELATED: Advocates challenge the suspension of prisoner-led cultural groups at Stafford Creek

In an email, a Department of Corrections spokesperson said the presence of a volunteer became a requirement because of “serious violent incidents that happened in low-supervised areas.”

Advocates say the new policy calls back to earlier times, when emerging cultural awareness groups faced pushback.

“They know what to do with us when we’re fighting each other, but they don’t know how to act when we’re getting along,” says Pacificar, who founded the first chapter of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Awareness Group at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center in the 1990s. “And so they shipped me out [to the Washington State Penitentiary] with a quickness.”

Cook tells a similar story of being met with resistance as he helped form the Black Prisoners’ Caucus, a social justice organization, in the 1970s.

“‘If you can't find me somebody who will speak up for the Hispanics, Indians, and the whites to start a cultural group, I’m going to lock you in the hole for one year,’” he says he was told by Washington State Penitentiary leadership at the time. That threat never came to pass.

Prior to being classified as volunteer groups by the Department of Corrections, cultural awareness groups were lumped in with religious groups, leaving a lot of gray area and questions about how they could operate. A coalition of cultural awareness groups across state prisons, called the Culture Collective, proposed a policy in 2018 that organizers say would have standardized how the groups function. They say they were ignored, while the Department of Corrections maintains that a version of that proposal is baked into its current policy.

Tensions over the state’s new restrictions for cultural awareness groups reached a boiling point last fall, when officials canceled a social justice summit organized by the Black Prisoners' Caucus. The group planned to bring various lawmakers, advocates, and community organizations into the Washington Corrections Center to talk about social justice reforms and progress related to mental health, support for incarcerated people leaving prison, and other recent policy changes affecting people in prison and the communities they're from.

RELATED: After officials spike WA prison summit on social justice, organizers say they aren't giving up

A spokesperson for the Seattle-based nonprofit Columbia Legal Services says its staff met with the Department of Corrections “to see if [the department] would be amenable to adopting a clear policy governing cultural groups that allows the groups to engage in their historical practices…without content censorship.” The nonprofit also plans to introduce legislation aimed at protecting the rights of cultural awareness groups during the 2025 legislative session.

For their part, the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Awareness Group and Black Prisoners’ Caucus at Stafford Creek have agreed to abide by the Department of Corrections’ new rules and are allowed to hold gatherings again. But they say they’re moving forward cautiously as they seek volunteers to help pull meetings and classes together again.

Jeanie Lindsay contributed to this report.