Arlene Goldbard

A couple of weeks ago, Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported from the front lines of the U.S. prison-industrial complex:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of […]

Thousand Kites, the project started by artists to awaken our national conscience to the realities of our prison-industrial complex—the planet’s biggest and most costly, bar none—has launched a great new Web site where you can learn about and make use of theater, video, audio and other tools to involve your community. You can share stories, […]

It’s that time of year again: piped-in Christmas carols and tinsel thick on the ground, toy marketing at fever pitch, when the good people at Thousand Kites record their annual “Calls from Home” special, broadcasting messages from families on the outside to loved ones locked up. (Read on to learn how to take part.) And […]

This is the first part of the text of my keynote address offered at the Western Pennsylvania Arts in Education Partners Resident Artists Conference in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, 16-17 May 2007. There’s a link at the end you can use to download the whole text in PDF format.
I’m working on a community arts project that […]

The French have a saying I love: even a broken clock is right twice a day. Our court system is broken in so many ways, perhaps chiefly owing to judicial appointments’ use as political tools. But even so, sometimes they get it right and those times are worth noting with appreciation. Here are two of […]

I’ve been chewing on a thought for days: that nearly all the violence in our society is grounded in the perpetrators’ felt sense of powerlessness.
This speaks to an existential paradox: although our days are filled with choices and decisions, in an ultimate sense we are at the mercy of forces far larger than ourselves, […]

The last six months have been some of the most interesting of my life as a writer and speaker. Since New Creative Community was published in November, I’ve been visiting conferences and campuses, giving talks and workshops to artists, activists, funders, policy-makers and students. I’ve met hundreds of people, seen all kinds of work, had […]

I’m in Appalachia, watching snow fall on daffodil buds and the new green leaves of day lilies that will bloom, I am told, on the first day of summer. Once again, I’m working with the Thousand Kites project, artists and activists using theater, film and computer media to surface the emerging story of our nation’s […]

This morning’s New York Times reports protests from members of Congress over the FBI’s repeated abuses of the Patriot Act to spy illegally on citizens. Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general of the Justice Department, reported that the use of “national security letters,” authorizing warrentless spying, had escalated:
There were 8,500 in 2000, the year before […]

What does it take to heal social trauma?
Like a lot of Jews of her generation, my maternal grandmother (may she rest in peace) was so repelled by all things German that she refused even to ride in a Volkswagen. She’d emigrated to this country long before World War II, but when that war was over, […]