Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
The Prison Industrial Literary Complex
by Doran Larson | ns 70
In November of 2006 I began teaching a creative writing course inside a maximum-security state prison, which I will call Antioch. As a result of the federal and state dismantling of prison education programs under Bill Clinton, Antioch holds no regular classes other than those offered by volunteers (the vast majority of whom are Christian proselytizers) and the legally required slate of GED courses taught by badly-paid state employees. Teaching facilities are battered, broken, and primitive. Despite enthusiastic support from administrators for classes such as mine, the officers on duty on any particular night ultimately decide who does and who does not leave his cell. These obstacles are in addition to the daily work required by literate, ambitious inmates simply to survive among a population rife with gang politics, violent mental instability, and vendettas for real or perceived offenses to guards or other inmates. This is a system that calls itself correctional, reformatory, penitentiary, but which is in fact a system of unredeeming punishment, as politicians in the current political climate can boast.
And yet for over eighteen months a core of eight men has continued to attend and do all the reading, writing, workshopping, and revision required by a class that offers neither college credit nor merit toward parole. This determination to resist the disheartening and often debilitating conditions inside the prison system is testament to these men's will to speak, to continue their intellectual development and creative lives in the worst of conditions. It is this kind of determination that has made prison writing into the one truly global literary genre. But there is yet one more obstacle facing those American inmates who seek not only expression but publication.
When we think globally of prison writing, the names that come to mind are those of high-profile political prisoners: Mandela, Soyinka, Sands, Solzhenitsyn. Indeed, when one searches the literature one finds that the publication of prison writing by men and women who entered incarceration as "common" criminals and only there found the wherewithal to write and publish, although not an exclusively American phenomenon, is certainly more apparent and widespread here than in any other country. Several factors would seem to explain this. Though illiteracy is widespread inside American prisons, no country in the world has both educated and imprisoned so many of its citizens. And yet, when one reads American prison writing in commercial and other print, one finds a counterintuitively narrow range of moods and subjects.
In 1999 PEN published an invaluable collection titled Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing, edited by Bell Gale Chevigny. This collection is made up of winners of PEN's annual prison writing contest. This is an irreplaceable book; insightfully edited, it presents a rich sampling of the effects of, and artist's struggles against, the conditions of incarceration. At the same time, by its choice of works and stated intentions, the book also represents what American readers expect of prison writers. In it Chevigny writes that even the best prison writing about "the world" (outside prison), though "Not imprisoned...yet bears the mark of the journey the prisoner has taken" (245).
Around the core of men in my class, others have come and gone. Some have been transferred to other facilities, or sent to the hole; one has died. Some didn't find the class for them, or they could not, for various reasons, keep up with the work. But I have seen writing from every one of them, around twenty-three men in all, in addition to the regular contributions of that core group. I would estimate that amid all that writing, perhaps ten to fifteen percent has dealt directly with the experience of incarceration; a smaller percentage deals with life before or outside prison yet bears discernible marks of the writer's present circumstance. Men write about their lives before they were arrested; they imagine scenes from the lives they did not get to live; they create fictions that are as far removed from their experience as one could imagine. In the majority of cases, men write not in order to tell the world about their experience inside, but to escape for a while and thereby survive it. Or they write because they have literary ambitions that are like those of writers "in the world," and which do not include becoming journalists.
Doing Time is not made up exclusively of writing about prison experience. But it is clear throughout that the book privileges such work. In the introduction, Chevigny correctly notes that "By bearing witness to the secret world that has isolated and would silence them, these writers offer an incisive anatomy of the contemporary prison and an intimate view of men and women struggling to keep their humanity alive" (xiii). This is an important service to the general reader. But I have to wonder how many pieces of equally able work PEN received from men and women writing of amusing childhood memories, outright fantasies, or gangster stories. (Chevigny states that the readers did receive such work [245].) My concern is that those of us who are appalled by the prison system in this country have rather fixed tastes in and expectations of prison writing. At worst, I worry that the conservative punishers who have insisted upon "truth in sentencing" in order to satisfy a vengeful sense of justice have been followed by progressives who effectively expect the incarcerated to serve as unpaid journalists and documentarians of the institutional abuses of the right. (It is certainly no accident that the best-selling piece of prison writing in recent years, Jack Henry Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast [1981], was also an angry and brutal depiction of prison conditions.) By not fitting into this box, the four pieces that follow distinguish themselves from the (very little) prison writing that most Americans are likely to read, and in turn connect themselves to prison writers around the world.
Like Sri Aurobindo Ghose (India, 1974), Gerry Adams (Ireland, 1993), and Patrick "Terror" Mosiuoa Lekota (South Africa, 1991), Danner Darcleight infuses his narrative of "life inside" with a detached humor. Dean Faiello writes of a peaceful day that took place between his crime and his arrest, thus joining a tradition of prison writing that understands prison simply as one piece of a man's whole life and capacities, as we see in the work of Palestinian writer Izzat al-Ghazzawi (1991), Jean Genet (France, 1964), or Mohammad Jamali (Iraq, 1965). Emanuel Mitchell describes an incident from childhood, though one spent in an environment that certainly narrowed the chances of his escaping the fate of six out of ten poor, African-American high school dropouts—an episode that echoes the work of South African writer Moses Dlamini (1984), who peppers his story of life on apartheid's notorious Robben Island with scenes from his boy- and young manhood in the townships. And finally, Robert Piwowar, a former middle-school teacher, writes a short story that imagines the mid-life crisis he never had the chance to experience—a fantasy of the life missed that runs through prison writing across the globe.
Without question, there are no more important witnesses to how American prisons run, and to their real effects today, than the men and women who are condemned to live inside them. But this does not mean that these writers should expect public attention only when they write directly about prison conditions, and when they write in the dour mood that we demand to confirm even a well-placed disgust with the prison industrial complex; by imposing that expectation, we are in danger of only adding on a prison industrial literary complex. The work that follows cannot help but be marked in the reader's mind by its appearance in a cluster of prison work; but that is not a different reading condition than occurs when we know a writer is black, or female, or white and male; for every writer, writing is what s/he does in order to live in a way that s/he could not without writing.
Sri Ghose writes in Tales of Prison Life, "The solitary confinement at Alipore was a unique lesson in love" (37). Even after reading widely in prison writing, I have a hard time grasping this statement. The stretch, I think, is a measure of how far my experience as a white, middle-class academic stands from the capacities for survival and continued, burgeoning life that are to be found in those who have actually suffered incarceration. And perhaps it's the last, toughest inch that progressive thinkers need to go to begin to acknowledge the full humanity that incarcerated writers are indeed struggling to keep alive.
Works Cited
Abbott, Jack Henry. In the Belly of the Beast. New York: Random House, 1981.
Adams, Gerry. Falls Memories: A Belfast Life. Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart, 1993.
Chevigny, Bell Gale, ed. Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing. New York: Arcade, 1999.
Dlamini, Moses. Hell Hole, Robben Island. Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1984.
Genet, Jean. Thief's Journal. New York: Bantam, 1964.
Ghose, Sri Aurobindo. Tales of Prison Life. Trans. Sisirkumar Ghose. Calcutta: Satya Bose, 1974.
Jamali, Mohammad Fadhel. Letters on Islam: Written by a Father in Prison to His Son. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965.
Lekota, Patrick "Terror" Mosiuoa. Prison Letters to a Daughter. Mississauga, ON: Taurus, 1991.
|
