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Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration works from the premise that if the law establishes and maintains both its practical and symbolic authority on the basis of its monopoly on legally sanctioned violence and the suffering threatened and delivered by such violence, then we cannot know the full human cost or concrete moral status of any legal state without human witness to the depth and manner of suffering meted out by such violence. The prison writer stands in the position to offer such witness. The prison writer knows the law's violence in the flesh. For every other writer, reflection upon the degree and manner of suffering meted out under legal sanction—that is, reflection upon the full human cost of the contemporary legal order—is necessarily speculative. In close readings of first-person witness from prisons in the U.S., Ireland, and Africa, Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration discovers literary tropes that chart at once local, national, and transnational conditions of carceral experience—the extant conditions of legalized suffering. In exhibiting the labor required to move from institutionalized abjection to the minimum requirements of rights-bearing personhood, this witness offers the sole credible vision of the possibility of a post carceral understanding of freedom.
eBook
Prison Writer as Witness: Can DH Read for Social Justice?
Drawing from a largest and first fully-searchable digital archive of non-fiction essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside US prisons and jail, the article proposes that there exists a broad, well established, but underappreciated mid-range manner of reading that stands between traditional close reading and computer-aided distant reading of first-person witness testimony. This mid-range or “cellular” reading method attends both to the singularity of each text, and ventures widely enough to grasp that each text gains credence and expository authority as one among aggregates of witness testimony; it is, moreover, in facilitating such mid-range reading that DH can provide readers with the foundation for moving from secondary witness and into acting for social change.
Journal Article
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
The APWA site offers brief search guidelines for visitors, but it does not suggest what story visitors should find; it places trust in readers, and it hands first rights of explanation and advocacy over to those on the receiving end of carceral practices—writers who together comprehensively explicate, critique, and condemn the ideological, political, economic, legal, social, cultural, judicial, enforcement, and historical conditions that have made mass incarceration possible and continue to make it profitable. The US carceral state reflects, maintains, and enforces inequality, to the point of de facto class, race, and gendered apartheid. Because of the prison system's sheer size, recent public conversation (and much of academic debate) has been carried on largely by social scientists using quantitative methods.1 The voices of incarcerated people are often lost amid their very status as units inside a population that we conceive of en masse. Unlike print volumes, whose editors assign essays to fixed categories, the APWA allows visitors to curate their own collections based on prison location, author names, and on authors' voluntary self-identification by race, age at conviction, religion, and gender, and by the layering of such designations.
Journal Article
Fourth City
At 2.26 million, incarcerated Americans not only outnumber the nation’s fourth-largest city, they make up a national constituency bound by a shared condition. Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America presents more than seventy essays from twenty-seven states, written by incarcerated Americans chronicling their experience inside. In essays as moving as they are eloquent, the authors speak out against a national prison complex that fails so badly at the task of rehabilitation that 60% of the 650,000 Americans released each year return to prison. These essays document the authors’ efforts at self-help, the institutional resistance such efforts meet at nearly every turn, and the impact, in money and lives, that this resistance has on the public. Directly confronting the images of prisons and prisoners manufactured by popular media, so-called reality TV, and for-profit local and national news sources, Fourth City recognizes American prisoners as our primary, frontline witnesses to the dysfunction of the largest prison system on earth. Filled with deeply personal stories of coping, survival, resistance, and transformation, Fourth City should be read by every American who believes that law should achieve order in the cause of justice rather than at its cost.
eBook
Toward a Prison Poetics
The essay argues that prison writing bears not only a common subject but recurrent, formal traits, and that these generic traits emerge directly from prison writing's material links to the strategies of power exercised within prisons in general and to the particular conditions of each writer's incarceration. By analyzing tropic veins common to all prison texts, we discover a generically coherent body of literature as germane to discussions of justice generally as the body of law or penology. The essay offers close readings of passages from Martin Luther King, Jr's \"Letter from Birmingham Jail,\" Wole Soyinka's The Man Died, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and George Jackson's Soledad Brother. Situating these texts relative to one another, the essay demonstrates how a prison poetics can excavate the material conditions of incarceration specific to each writer even at it reads the prison testament as part of a genre of resistance literature.
Journal Article
Inside the Walls: An Interview with Doran Larson
Prison, for most Americans, is a myth. Most of us have little idea about what really happens behind the walls or concertina wire, or have skewed images from movies or TV. Doran Larson has worked for the past two decades to call attention to the experience of those incarcerated. As he reminds us, the total number of people in prison in the US adds up to more than the population of Phoenix and nearly as much as Houston, the fourth largest city. To gather firsthand testimony, he founded the Ameri can Prison Writing Archive (APWA) in 2012, which holds more than 3,000 entries. He has also taught and organized educational programs in prisons in New York State. And in his own writing, he has highlighted the history of prison writing, which testifies to the inhumanity of caging people.
Journal Article
Abolition From Within: Enabling the Citizen Convict
In this setting, I have witnessed inmates taking control of their lives not only as members of the workshop, but also, through writing, as critical citizens of the PIC. Since beginning, the workshop has convened from 6:30 to 8:45 p.m. every other Thursday evening. [...] prison environments transformed as described above might remain permanent parts of the civil landscape, as centers for community analysis, education, and support: places where restorative justice can be taught to men and women whom communities themselves deem destructive to community cohesiveness.
Journal Article