The Prisoner Speaks

“When the prisoners began to speak,” Michel Foucault told Gilles Deleuze, “they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system and justice. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of prisoners and those we call delinquents.” ¹ To let those deemed monsters, psychopaths, and now superpredators speak for themselves indeed reverses the balance of power in popular discussions of criminal justice. However menacing their initial threats, once criminals are safely removed from the public eye, the public rarely hears from most of them again. Writing, though, is one of the few channels prisoners can use to make their own voices heard. Whether they indict their captors, document institutional life, or offer explanation for their actions, prison authors create a counter-discourse simply by reminding us that they, too, are human beings.

No intellectual has done more to define American prison writing than H. Bruce Franklin. Now in its third edition, Franklin’s 1979 work Prison Literature in America provided the first coherent treatment of the subject. The earliest type of prison writing was the eighteenth-century autobiographical confessional narrative, often printed just before execution day. By the mid-nineteenth century, these accounts began to read like picaresque novels, where daring criminal exploits were more prominent than a gallows confession. But it was nineteenth-century slave narratives and the oral traditions of emancipated African Americans that truly sparked the development of prison literature as an identifiable genre. In Franklin’s estimation, there is a clear lineage from the plantation to the modern penitentiary. First illustrated by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and the faceless creators of prison worksongs, the art forms of prison resistance originated in the American South. ²

In Prison Writing in 20th-Century America, Franklin terms the linkage “prison slavery.” Beginning with the “Autobiography of an Imprisoned Peon” and the lyrics of representative worksongs like “Midnight Special,” the collection shows how this theme has been a constant. Readers familiar with the early blues, or with the recent analyses of New South convict leasing by Alex Lichtenstein and David Oshinsky, would hardly dispute the existence of “prison slavery.” ³ By contrast, Franklin’s application of the term to the twentieth century North may raise a few eyebrows. Jim Tully’s 1930 description of the San Quentin jute (canvas) mill sketches an unremitting harshness, but one closely resembling the pre-New Deal factory. Later selections, such as Kim Wozencraft’s “Notes from the Country Club” (1993), make late twentieth-century prison work seem more like industrial drudgery than slavery. Yet when encountering Kate Richards O’Hare interchangeable use of terms like “scab shop” and “chattel slaves” in describing life for women convict workers in the Missouri State Prison of the 1920s, readers will be forced at least to acknowledge some common features of the two systems.

Likewise challenging is Franklin’s lack of differentiation between “common” and political criminals. In the earlier work, the author clarified his interest in “‘common criminals’ whose understanding of their own situation developed directly as a consequence of their crime and punishment.” ⁴ The introduction to Prison Writing does not address the issue, however. Instead, Franklin chooses works by any writer who has served time and whose efforts “explor[e] the meanings of imprisonment.” This strategy opens the door to a range of authors sentenced either for expressly political crimes, or whose activist reputations caused added hostility. Agnes Smedley, Kate Richards O’Hare, Robert Lowell, Assata Shakur, Kathy Boudin, and Mumia Abu-Jamal all came into prison with clearly established political beliefs. This does not reduce the power of these authors’ insights, but instead separates them from the rest of the writers in the present collection. The reader knows where the above prisoners stand politically and, however well-crafted their character sketches, poems, or exposés, their conclusions about prison come as little surprise. Moreover, what divides this sampling from other political prison writers like Alexander Berkman, Eugene Debs, Dorothy Day, or...