Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 by Jodi Schorb (review)

Incarceration presents us with a paradox: it is a system that is as shrouded in mystery and hidden from view as it is the subject of public fascination and exploitation. When I stepped behind the walls of a prison for the first time three years ago as a writing instructor, I quickly learned that penitentiaries generate a series of endlessly competing tensions. We simultaneously view prisons as a necessary and unavoidable feature of our cultural landscape, and yet remain largely ignorant of the realities that millions of men and women face behind bars. We accept arguments about rehabilitation and public safety and endlessly consume popular media about prisons (one need only look at the popularity of television shows like Orange Is the New Black), while at the same time ignoring the undeniable fact that we are, at a fundamental level, locking a large number of our fellow human beings—more than two million of them, by most accounts—in cages. For many Americans, the realities of prisons remain separate from our daily lives, but our rabid consumption of media that features prisons reveals our fascination with them.

In Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845, Jodi Schorb, associate professor of English at the University of Florida, illustrates how the history of literacy and the history of American punishment are deeply intertwined, and that the public fascination with and consumption of media produced by and about incarcerated people has deep historical roots. Drawing on a diverse collection of archival sources, this richly layered study traces the role of prisoner literacy and literature in the development of the modern penitentiary by bringing together scholarly work in early American punishment, the history of literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing. Beginning with the public punishment of the gallows and scaffold in colonial America and concluding with a close examination of early penitentiaries, Schorb demonstrates that studying the transformation of American punishment alongside the history of literacy instruction offers a vital historical perspective in the ongoing debates about education for incarcerated people. She illustrates that “prisoner perspectives were not always welcome or solicited, but inmates, too, perceiving a world of possibly sympathetic listeners, partnered with sponsors, printers, ministers, reformers, and authorities to create a complex literacy legacy” (16). In offering this analysis, this project revises two common assumptions about the history of early imprisonment: “first, before the development of the penitentiary in the 1790s there was little use for a literate prisoner; and second, the early American penitentiary considered education central to its rehabilitative mission” (7).

Schorb’s project goes beyond simply recovering the silenced voices of incarcerated people in American literary history. Rather, this study demonstrates why a mischaracterization of the connections between the parallel histories of literacy and American punishment matters for our understanding of the development of the modern penitentiary, an institution that has come to so permeate contemporary social life that it has been termed the “prison-industrial complex.” Schorb’s nuanced study enhances our understanding of the connections between literacy and incarceration by highlighting an institution where a number of social, political, and historical conditions and questions converge.

Beginning with the tradition of public punishment, the first section of the book (“Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century ‘Gaol’”) examines the reading and writing practices of incarcerated people in colonial America in order to challenge “the assumption that there is no story to tell about jailhouse literacy in the eighteenth century” (13). In chapter 1 (“Books Behind Bars: Reading Prisoners on the Scaffold”), Schorb examines the role that confession and execution literature played in the public spectacle of punishment, arguing that published criminal confessions were crucial literacy events. Schorb traces the figure of the “reading prisoner” whose role in the era’s print rituals that surrounded punishment transformed “public execution into an occasion for spiritual pedagogy and communal introspection” (20). Chapter 2 (“Crime...