Norfolk Prison Debate Team
Beats
Boston College Debating Society
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Recently the Norfolk Prison Debate Team defeated the Fulton Debating Society of Boston College in a debate here at the prison on the topic of whether a "carbon tax" should be levied upon businesses who emit greenhouse gasses.
The Norfolk Team won by a score of 86.7 to 86.2! A great victory!! I am pleased to report that two of the Norfolk Team members also serve on The Lifers' Group, Inc. Board of Directors with me. Sitting in the audience I was so proud to see these men represent the prison population in such a positive manner.
David Boeri from WBUR radio covered the event and there will be some stories in the written press as well.
What follows are two stories relating to prison debating and The Fulton Debate Society respectively. I hope you enjoy them and are encouraged to contact the folks involved in their development.
Congratulations to the Norfolk Prison Debate Team! Thank you for clearly displaying the voice of the informed and educated prisoner to the outside world who too often only hear the twisted viewpoint of the gulag official. May we never forget what Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain) said;
"If you want to see the scum of the earth and the dregs of humanity, go down to your local prison and watch the changing of the guard."
SUPPORT THE VOICE OF THE EDUCATED AND INFORMED PRISONER!!!

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email: emancipationinitiative@gmail.com
Facebook: @emancipationinitiative
tim.muise.63@gmail.com
facebook: @curearminc
www.georgenassar.com

The Classes

ADAM BRIGHT '05 AND NATASHA HAVERTY '08

Inmate Debate
Adam Bright '05 and Natasha Haverty '08 are collecting the history of one of the best debating teams of all time--a team made up entirely of prisoners.

IN 1951 THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY DEBATE TEAM, ONE OF THE best in the world, competed in a tournament against a group of inmates from the Norfolk Prison Colony in southeastern Massachusetts. The topic fo the evening: should the United States have a free national health service for all its citizens?
As far as debate teams go, the one at the Colony was surprisingly good. Formed in the early 1930s as a way of improving the prisoners' minds, the team had a key advantage over Oxford students. Undergraduates move on after four years, while these inmates were serving terms that often lasted decades, giving them ample opportunity to hone their skills. Over the years, the Norfolk team beat Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and many other elite colleges. They beat Oxford that day in 1951, too. "They're extraordinarily good, you know," one of the Oxonians had to admit.
The history of the debate team at the Norfolk Prison Colony,now known as the Massachusetts Correctional INstitution in Norfolk, has recently been unearthed by Adam Bright '05 and Natasha Haverty '08. In June 2010, the pair received $10,000 from Mass Humanities, which distributes money on behalf of the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and private donors. "The Scourge of New England: An Oral History of the Norfolk Prison Debate Team," as Bright and Haverty's project is called, will assemble interviews with former debaters, prison officials, and some competitors. The two researcers have so far compiled fifty-five hours of audio interviews, along with newspaper clippings, Norfolk Prison newsletters, and such memorabilia as the "certificate of parole" given to each college debater for "having superiorly and honorably acquitted himself in a debate between [his school] and the Norfolk Debaters."
The materials will be archived at the Harvard Law Library, the Boston Public Library, and the Emerson College Library. Bright and Haverty also hope to write an oral history book based on their research. "I wanted to get involved with the magic of people telling their own stories in their own voices," Bright says. He read about the Norfolk debate team in a biography of Leonard Cohen--the famed Canadian songwriter who competed at Norfolk while a member of McGill University's debate team--and then asked Haverty, a freelance writer in New York, to join him.
Haverty says her love of oral history and her interest in prisons started at Brown. Through the Swearer Center for Public Service, she was leading arts workshops for women at a Rhode Island prison and was simultaneously enrolled in an oral history class, The Political Economy of Punishment [illegible] economist [illegible]. Things sort of came together that semester, she says. AFter graduating, she enrolled at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, in Portland, Maine, where she created a radio feature about the only woman in the state serving in home confinement.