Introduction to Focus: Prison Writing

The recently killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers have reignited a national conversation about race and policing in the past year. Following the decisions of grand juries in New York and Missouri not to indict white officers for the deaths of unarmed black men, tens of thousands people have taken to the streets in protest. In New York; Washington D.C.; Boston; San Francisco; and Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrators have marched and carried signs with the messages “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe,” the final words spoken by Eric Garner before he was choked to death by police. Although bearing some resemblance to the civil rights movements of the past—including the sit-ins, marches, and other acts of civil disobedience—the recent protests have used such social media tools as Twitter and Facebook to mobilize, and they have retained a decentralized political leadership. While racism and police brutality are very old issues in America, current mass movements are employing new tactics, technologies, and methods of resistance in the hopes of affecting change.

Of course, the issue of police violence against minorities is connected to a much larger social crisis: the growth of the American prison system. In the past thirty-five years, the American prison population has grown from about 300,000 to roughly 2.3 million. The United States has the largest prison population on the planet; even though it has only 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. It also has nearly one-third of the world’s incarcerated women, dwarfing the female prison population of every other country in the world. Much of this growth can be attributed to the “War on Drugs” policies initiated by Richard Nixon and pursued by Ronald Reagan. According to “The Sentencing Project,” a full half of the federal prison population is now incarcerated for drug offenses, while the number of drug offenders at the state level has increased eleven fold in the past three decades.

Mandatory drug sentencing laws and the targeting of non-violent drug users has had particularly dramatic consequences on black communities. African Americans now comprise roughly one million of the 2.3 million people currently in prison, and they are six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. According to law professor Michelle Alexander, author of the bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), more black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850. Prisoners face a wide range of problems, both behind bars and when/ if they are freed: sexual abuse, mental illness, and medical issues, not to mention job discrimination and removal from the political process. With so many people affected negatively by the prison-industrial complex, it has hardly any wonder why activist Angela Davis titled her influential book Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).

Each of the following five manifestos/reviews attempts to make sense of the prison’s relationship to and influence on art, literature, film, and cultural theory. H. Bruce Franklin reflects on the legacy of his seminal study Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist, a book that was first published in 1978 at the very beginning of America’s aggressive imprisonment policies. Contextualizing prison literature’s rise within the political activist moment of the 1960s, Franklin goes on to lament the repression of prison writing that started in the 1970s. Among the insidious ways in which the state has silenced America’s voices from below, Franklin points out, are the elimination of prison creative writing courses and literary journals devoted to prison poetry and fiction, the outlawing of Pell grants for prisoners, and the enactment of laws prohibiting convict authors from making money from their writing. Notwithstanding these repressive strategies, many prisoners have found ways to create mass followings with their literature, including such influential “street literature” authors as Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim, and, more recently, Vickie Stringer.

Matthew Teutsch’s review of the fortieth anniversary of The Jones Men (1974) by Vern...