Inmates tell their own stories to bridge the gap to the outside world

Jerell Smallwood has been incarcerated since he was 19 years old. He is now 43, which means he has served 24 years of a life sentence without the possibility of parole. 

If you searched Smallwood’s name online, that’s what you’d learn about him. You’d be able to find details about his crime, his conviction and his sentencing, but nothing about who he is now, almost a quarter of a century later. 

But Smallwood recently had an opportunity to put some other, more recent information about himself out into the world by participating in a TEDx Talk event at Green Rock Correctional Center in Chatham.

It was the first TEDx event held inside a prison in the state of Virginia, and one that Smallwood and the event organizers hope will inspire more reentry programming and change the way incarcerated people are characterized. 

During his speech, Smallwood talked about his childhood in an abusive home, how he turned to crime, how he’s changed as a person since being incarcerated.

Smallwood spent his childhood in New York City and later Virginia Beach. He suffered physical abuse at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend, who was a drug dealer and an addict. 

“As I stand here in front of you today, I still have scars on the back of my legs from the summer of ’91,” Smallwood said during his May 7 talk, recalling a time that he couldn’t sit down on the bus to school because he had been beaten with an electrical extension cord the day before. 

He was kicked out of the house as a teenager after an altercation with his mother’s boyfriend, he said, adding, “I’ve been locked up pretty much ever since.”

Transitioning to the rigid, structured environment behind bars was a difficult adjustment for 19-year-old Smallwood, and it took him a long time to find his way, according to his biography in the event’s program. 

But through education, programming and faith, he began to “understand the ways he needed to evolve and change,” it said. “Since then, he has dedicated his life to helping others.”

Smallwood has also grown close to his mother again, and he shared that she has apologized to him for his unstable upbringing. 

Smallwood talked about how children who have been abused are at a higher risk for criminal involvement and mental health issues. He called on parents to stop using physical punishment on their children. 

In a few weeks, his speech will be available for anyone to see on YouTube, alongside speeches from other inmates. 

The process of writing his talk was “illuminating,” Smallwood said in an interview.

“It took so much introspection to find a topic that you want to put out in the world,” he said, adding that until the TEDx Talk, his only public profile was “stuck” in the past. 

Smallwood also helped organize the event, and he helped other incarcerated speakers write and develop their speeches over many months. 

The TED Foundation is a nonprofit that provides a platform to spread research and ideas across all disciplines. TEDx is an outreach that allows local events to operate independently while agreeing to follow TED’s format. These events are community organized and are typically composed of shorter talks that often focus on local issues. 

Close to 20 other incarcerated men at Green Rock also told their stories during the event. They shared the stage with speakers from the outside, including a correctional officer, the director of the Virginia Department of Corrections and a Virginia state delegate.

The audience included inmates and guests, who sat intermingled with one another to work toward the theme for the event: “Bridging the Gap.”

“Out of all the gaps that divide our world today, none are as large as the gap that divides those that are incarcerated and those that walk free,” said Darren Harris, who is incarcerated at Green Rock and was one of the emcees for the event. 

Bringing a TEDx Talk to a prison

The event was primarily put together by Delia Cohen, a TEDx Talk organizer who has worked in prisons across the country for 11 years. 

She first got the idea to host a TEDx event in a Virginia prison during a similar project at Attica State Prison in New York in 2019. 

She invited former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is from Syracuse, to speak at the event because of his work to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions in Virginia. 

“When he gave that TED Talk at Attica prison, I learned about all the things that he’d done for Virginia and it made me very curious about doing something there,” Cohen said.

Cohen contacted the former head of corrections for the state, who selected Green Rock, a medium-security facility that maintains a population of about 1,000 inmates.

She’s been working with a group of incarcerated men there since July.

“The first couple months, all we did was watch TED Talks,” she said. It was important to convey the concept behind the talks, and how they are unlike other types of speeches. 

The main difference, she said, is the purpose and feeling behind it. 

A TED Talk is usually about an idea to make the world a better place, she said, adding that TED recently changed its tagline from “Ideas worth sharing” to “Ideas change everything.”

“The speaker of a TED Talk is usually passionate about this idea,” she said. “Not only are they passionate about it, but they give us some personal background on why they are passionate about it. It’s very different from a lecture that’s more antiseptic about a topic. This is about a vision for a better world.”

After spending some time introducing folks at Green Rock to TED Talks, she held auditions. Anyone, staff or incarcerated, could audition to speak, so long as they hadn’t had any disciplinary issues in the past year. 

Otherwise everyone was eligible — their crime didn’t matter, Cohen said. 

About 78 inmates and a handful of staff members auditioned. Twenty-six speakers were chosen for the event, 18 of them inmates or staff at Green Rock. 

“They’re telling stories about their lives, like how they wound up in prison and what they’ve been doing since,” Cohen said. “The whole idea is to show our common humanity, whether you’re a correctional officer or an incarcerated person or an outside attendee or an inside attendee.”

Other inmates helped with other organizational aspects, like painting the backdrop behind the stage and designing the program for the event. 

Bringing TEDx Talks to prisons can be difficult work, Cohen said on a 2023 podcast episode, where she explained how she got her start organizing these events.

She met two incarcerated men on one of her first visits to an Ohio prison who were friendly, welcoming and helpful. She left feeling optimistic, but she was devastated later when she learned about the horrific crimes they had committed. 

Cohen said she remembered thinking: “What’s to stop everybody in the audience from having these same reactions? Why should we care about people who’ve done such monstrous things?”

As she continued to work with these men, talking to them about the event as well as their crimes, they were humanized to her, she said.

“I got to know them as colleagues, and although I never did fully understand exactly how they came to commit their crimes, that became much less important to me,” she said on the podcast. “The working relationships that I had with them as who they were today were much more important to me, and the question about them 20 years before became less and less pressing.”

A similar idea informs the theme of the Green Rock event. 

Including both incarcerated and outside people in the audience follows the call to advance justice through proximity, made popular by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. 

This idea was further emphasized by the two emcees: Harris, who is incarcerated, and a correctional officer who works at Green Rock. It was Harris’ idea to split the job this way, Cohen said.

“Bridging the Gap” could refer to any gap, Cohen said. “But the gap that they’re most concerned about of course is the gap between them and society when they return.”

‘Bridging the Gap’ through sharing stories 

This was the first time that some of the incarcerated speakers had shared their stories.

Afterwards, inmates who were in the audience said that even though they knew the speakers, they hadn’t known the details of their lives before prison. It helped them understand each other better, they said.

Many of the incarcerated speakers talked about the education and programming they’ve received while they’ve been inside. 

Dwayne Bolling said he entered prison with a seventh-grade education and now has his GED diploma. Armando Sosa, who is now one subject away from earning a diploma, said he couldn’t read or write when he was first incarcerated. 

While these opportunities have made a huge difference for many inmates, they can also be inaccessible to inmates who are serving very long sentences. 

“People feel like it’s a waste, if there are limited resources, to give people who are never getting out the benefits of an education, which I feel is completely wrong,” Cohen said on the podcast episode.

Other issues with the prison system were mentioned by several speakers, including Del. Rae Cousins, D-Richmond. Cousins supports Second Look legislation, which would allow people who have proven they are not a threat to society to petition for reduced sentences after they have served at least 10 years.

This legislation passed in the Senate with bipartisan support before dying in the House during both the 2022 and 2023 General Assembly sessions.

Cousins talked about how poverty and lack of resources can contribute to crime, and about harsh sentencing and racial prejudice. 

“It’s easier to make better choices when you have the resources or are surrounded by people with the resources to take care of you,” she said. She’s not making excuses for people who commit crimes, she said, but it’s important to understand why and how it happens. 

This was consistent with many of the stories the speakers shared about difficult childhoods: poverty, drug-addicted family members, abuse, and having to provide for their families at a very young age.

Many of the incarcerated speakers also talked about what they’d like to do when they return. Several, like Tony Foster, aspire to start programming that will reduce crime. 

“If I ever get home, I want to help at-risk youth,” Foster said during his speech. “I just want to help other kids not make the same mistakes I did.”

The ending of the event was emotional, as several of the men thanked Cohen and another organizer of the event, Anne Rice, for their work at Green Rock. 

One of them, Linwood Copeland, tearfully shared that he just learned he will be released later this month. 

And Michael Hill, one of the inmate speakers, thanked Cohen and Rice for “giving a sense of humanity to every man in here.”

“To have women come in here and see you not for your mistakes, but see you as a human being, as a person,” Hill said. “Y’all have no idea how hard it is to keep from hugging this woman whenever we’re together.”

He added that once he is released, he looks forward to finally giving Cohen a hug to say thank you.