An artful dialogue with state inmates

Peaches Ramos was so afraid of the violence in her North Philadelphia neighborhood that she made her three boys ride bikes and play football inside the house - breaking six televisions in four years.

"We were all prisoners of our own homes," she said, remembering how her children would beg to go outside whenever an ice cream truck passed, and how she would always say no. "You would hear gunshots every five minutes. The kids wouldn't even duck."

Now in prison, the criminals who once terrorized her community say they want to help her restore it - with a three-story mural on a neighborhood wall.

The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is organizing the project, bringing together inmates, community members and crime victims to design a mural about healing.

Logistics of the project are tricky, because a third of the participants live at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, a maximum-security prison in Montgomery County. Graterford officials don't plan to let the inmates go back to their old neighborhood to paint. Instead, about a dozen inmates in Graterford's mural arts class will paint the image on five-foot squares of thin acrylic cloth. Mural artists will use acrylic gel to attach the finished sections to a wall on Germantown Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets in North Philadelphia.

"I think it's great," said Steven Barkley, who owns the building housing two apartments and a first-floor storefront behind the wall at 3049 Germantown Ave. He hopes the public art project will spur the cleanup of nearby vacant lots, which he would like to see turned into a community park.

If all goes as planned, the mural will be dedicated sometime this fall.

Program director Jane Golden said the idea came to her after working with inmates to paint a 20-by-16-foot mural in Graterford's auditorium last year.

Suddenly the "nameless, faceless enemy" behind the prison walls became somebody's uncle or father or cousin, she said. She saw how working with men inside the prison would help her find better ways to reach the at-risk youths in her after-school mural classes.

"I started to realize that this is the way to understand the criminal justice system from the inside out, not just the outside in," she said.

To design the mural, Golden is challenging three groups who usually never connect - inmates, victims and community members - to come face to face, reflect on their experiences, and find some common ground. The three groups will work together until they agree on one design.

"I want it to be a shared vision," Golden said.

Parris Stancell, who has been teaching mural arts to Graterford inmates, said it was too early to say what images the mural would include.

"I'd like it to be something that everybody's inspired by," he said. The challenge will be to find images meaningful to all three groups while avoiding "the trite stereotypes," he said. "It's kind of intimidating that there will be so many people involved."

But the groups do have something in common, said Victoria Greene, a victims' advocate involved in the project.

"We're all intertwined," said Greene, who lost her 20-year-old son, Emir, in a drug-related murder in 1997 and who now works to help families cope with the aftermath of violent crime.

"I know for a fact that when a homicide is committed, the [victim's] immediate family is affected, the offender's family is affected, the community is affected," Greene said. "We all need to be healed."

Greene was drawn to the mural project in part because her son helped paint a mural at Second and Callowhill Streets when he was 15. "If he had been allowed to live, who is to say what he might have done?" she said.

Greene said she hopes the mural will "show the tremendous long-reaching pain and life-changing effect" that violent crime has on its victims.

But she also hopes the project will make steps toward bringing the three groups together.

"If the offender understands what I've gone through and listens to my story, and if I understand his story, and . . . if the community is involved and understands, maybe they can be part of this person coming back into the community. These people come back and live with us. You can't act like they don't."

Victims groups and community leaders will hold meetings over the next several weeks to identify key themes that they want the mural to express.

Part of the idea exchange is taking place inside the prison, during a weekly discussion forum run by Temple University instructor Lori Pompa. The class brings university students into the prison to discuss criminal-justice issues with inmates.

For the mural project, Pompa has opened some of her classes to visits from the victims' advocates and community members.

After one brainstorming session, they discovered some of the things the three groups have in common: states of denial, the need to be heard, the complexity of forgiveness and healing.

Eventually, inmates from Graterford's mural arts class will come to the discussion forum to brainstorm about how to translate themes into visual images. Excerpts of class writings will also be incorporated into the mural design.

Ramos laughed as she recalled her encounter with the inmates during a visit to Pompa's class last month. "A lot of them know me because I've been fighting the corners for ten years," she said.

Only after visiting Graterford did she learn that they used to watch her through binoculars and warn each other with walkie-talkies whenever she marched down the street. The inmates, too, learned something.

"Peaches was always known as the lady who was always bitching and making trouble where it wasn't wanted," one inmate wrote after hearing Ramos' story. "I never realized the pain she felt or what she had to endure to survive in the neighborhood I assisted to terrorize."

After meeting Ramos and hearing her story, the essay continued, "I found the true hero of the streets."

Contact staff writer Leslie Pappas at 610-313-8125 or lpappas@phillynews.com.