Reading and Reckoning in a Women’s Prison

It’s my time to come out of the wilderness now, and I saw all that in this book.

—Denise, incarcerated in a Midwestern women’s prison

Since the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the retributive justice framework of the 1980s and beyond, prisoners’ opportunities for reading, education, and rehabilitation have steadily declined. This decline bespeaks an increasing dehumanization of incarcerated men and women and a disavowal of their capacity for deep thought, growth, and transformation. Some critics argue that penal custody “is incompatible with real rehabilitation” (Sullivan, Prison Reform, 2) and that one should not expect prisons to provide genuine opportunities for change. Yet in conducting individual interviews and group discussions with incarcerated women, I have discovered that reading plays a central role in some imprisoned women’s efforts to begin freeing themselves from state-imposed, other-imposed, and self-imposed forces—including racism, poverty, abuse, and addiction—that have kept them in literal and figurative states of detention.¹ Despite significant limitations on the reading materials available to them, these women engage in reading practices that help them to come to terms with their pasts, contextualize their experiences in relation to larger frameworks, and gain inspiration from others as they learn to imagine—and create—new ways of being in the world.

Because African American women constitute the fastest-growing population in the U.S. penal system, prisons merit particular attention as a site in which African American women’s literacy practices have flourished. As Elizabeth McHenry argues in Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, scholarship about reading has tended to obscure the complex history of African Americans’ literacy and literary engagements (5), thereby contributing to the “historical invisibility of black readers” (4). Indeed, from Janice Radway’s groundbreaking Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984/1991) to Elizabeth Long’s Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (2003), studies typically feature white, middle-class women in exploring the roles that reading can play in women’s efforts to understand their subject positions and fashion an empowered sense of self.

Long’s Book Clubs nonetheless offers fruitful starting points for elucidating incarcerated women’s reading practices. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s memorable phrase, Long argues that book club participants often use literature as “equipment for living” (131). Reading “enables women not merely to reflect on identities they already have, but also to bring new aspects of subjectivity into being” (22). Through reading and discussing books, women create “new connections, new meanings, and new relationships— to the characters in the books or their authors, to themselves, to the other members of the group, to the society and culture in which they live” (22). Their reading practices offer “the deliberative spaces, the companions, and the resources” for women “to creatively remake themselves and their world, even if in circumstances not of their own making” (223).

In fact, Long compares women’s reading groups to therapy groups and consciousness-raising groups because readers often pursue their “own dilemmas of selfhood” (170) and make “excursions into personal life” that “leave the book far behind” (111). Frequently, readers explore the meaning of their own life situations by associating characters with people and situations in their lives; as one reader explains, “Some people read to escape from life; we read to deal with life” (qtd. in Long, 188). Many women increase their self-confidence by participating in book discussions, and they develop their own sense of cultural authority in evaluating the worth of various texts. Long emphasizes that no necessary correspondence exists between the quality of a book discussion and “the level of difficulty or quality of the text” itself (126); for many readers, books seem most valuable when they provide “the pleasures of deep emotional involvement” or “illumination of their experience” (130).

Incarcerated women’s reading practices resemble those featured in Long’s study, yet women in prison often exhibit a greater sense of intensity and exigency as they use reading to foster self-discovery, create a sense of community, and develop a...