Every day of her life, every day, Shaheen Pasha ponders the plight of people who are incarcerated.
She does more than think, though. She invests, plans and supports — a passion that was ignited nearly 20 years ago when her best friend from high school was sent to prison for murder.
As the result of ongoing weekly phone calls with him and her own appreciation for the power of education, Pasha’s professional life as a journalist and an eventual move to higher education led to the formation of the Prison Journalism Project, which helps empower people behind bars to tell their own stories.
“It’s about making sure that when people return to the fray they are not worse off than they were before,” said Pasha, an assistant teaching professor of journalism at Penn State.
Pasha’s work will be featured as part of the next episode of the Humin Focus, “Humanity Behind Bars: Incarceration in America,” which will premiere at 6 p.m. Feb. 6 on WPSU-TV.
Humin Focus, supported by the Penn State Humanities in the World initiative and by the College of the Liberal Arts and the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, examines ideas central to pressing timely issues. The Emmy-nominated series has previously focused on topics such as health care, the complexities of democracy, immigration, and monuments in public spaces.
The Feb. 6 episode focuses on the history of incarceration in America and ponders what locking up people who break the law does to them and to the society that imprisons them. The episode includes humanities scholars and legal experts from the Penn State community discussing how America became the largest carceral state in the world — with 2.3 million people in prison — and about how to make the system more humane.
In addition to weighing matters of correction and retribution, the show features some prisoners themselves, some of whom have found in education and writing a way to regain their humanity and share their experiences. While access to sources and traditional approaches to journalism about the prison system typically mean stories driven by people not behind bars, the Prison Journalism Project takes a different approach.
“What we want to do is provide incarcerated journalists with tools and training to tell their own those stories,” Pasha said.
Bellisario College faculty member Matt Jordan, an associate professor of media studies and head of the Department of Film Production and Media Studies, serves as an executive producer and consulting producer for Humin Focus. He also composed and performed the music for the Feb. 6 episode.
All previous episodes of Humin Focus may be found online.