Cultures of Detention

More than one out of every two hundred U.S. residents (by far the highest rate in the developed world) currently live in a state or federal prison. Counting those held in local jails, on parole, or on probation, the number rises to one out of every thirty-one adults in the nation. The total number of “detainees” held in U.S. prisons located at Guantánamo Bay, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at various secret sites around the world has never been disclosed by the government.

The explosion in U.S. prison populations that commenced in the early 1980s and more recently the “war on terror” that has caused the American prison to metastasize across national borders have led an increasing number of cultural and literary critics to grapple with the incarceration crisis: its historical roots, its current unprecedented magnitude, and its grossly differential impact on individual lives, communities, and social groups. The essays in this special issue of TSLL explore some of the myriad ways in which penal detention shapes U.S. cultural forms, cultural settings, and cultural identities. All five contributors would concur with the “small but increasing number of Americanists” that H. Bruce Franklin cites in his essay who recognize that “teaching late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature without any contextualization in the matrix of the American prison is tantamount to teaching nineteenth-century American literature without any contextualization in the matrix of American slavery.”

Cultures of Detention opens with Franklin’s historical overview of literature created by U.S. prisoners and ex-prisoners. The next two essays, by Caleb Smith and Jason Haslam respectively, suggest that canonical nineteenth-century U.S. writing is also brought closer to its full meaning when read as part of an early national culture engaged in developing the modern penitentiary. Katy Ryan explores Malcolm Braly’s 1967 novel On the Yard to reveal that, even as prisons set harsh limits (which they themselves routinely violate), prison life can also render visible the blurring, at times the fictionality, of other supposedly natural boundaries, including those between historical epochs, between inside and outside, and between sexual identities. Finally, Megan Sweeney’s research into reading practices in a contemporary women’s prison illuminates possibilities for creative, even redemptive agency in interactions between prisoners and the written word.