The assault was necessary because hostages were having their throats slashed—or so state officials told the media. But the next day, autopsies revealed that all had died of state-inflicted bullet wounds. This discovery, as well as the guards’ brutal beatings of the recaptured prisoners, created a generation of prison activists and a storm of litigation. The official prison-system misuse of power was dramatically curtailed as court orders reformed prison conditions across the country, while new statutes and regulations expanded prisoners’ constitutional rights. As a class, prisoners could challenge “cruel and unusual” conditions of confinement, and, as individuals, they won rights to be given due process, and to receive literature and practice the religion of their choice while incarcerated.
“A prison renaissance,” as prison poet William Aberg characterized it, flourished in the seventies. Prisoners organized to form unions, fight for humane treatment, and bring educational, cultural, and religious programs inside the walls. The fruit of their efforts and outside pressures—prison college programs, arts workshops, and other rehabilitative programs— sprang up everywhere.
But in the same decade, forces were mounting that made penal policy swing back from treatment to custody, and from a rehabilitative to a retributive approach. Penologists Andrew von Hirsch (1976) and Robert Martinson (1974) assailed the rehabilitative ideal. Martinson’s saying that “nothing works” to reduce recidivism provided a soundbite for politicians who began to find “get-tough-on-crime” rhetoric indispensable to their success. Indeterminate sentencing practices that permitted prisoners to earn early release through good behavior came under attack.
In 1971, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “America’s public enemy No. 1,” and asked Congress to fund an all-out international war. Two years later, New York’s governor Nelson Rockefeller scrapped a whole system of drug treatment, and replaced it with the most punitive drug laws in the United States.
In the eighties, much of the country followed New York’s lead on drug laws. Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty was displaced—and its effects reversed—by the war on drugs. While cutting back on social welfare, conservatives won votes by nurturing a culture of fear and vowing to be tougher than their rivals. Even liberal politicians could not afford to appear “soft” on crime. The prisons were flooded, especially as more and more of the poor were drawn into the drug trade. Law enforcement persecuted communities plagued by crack cocaine, which was and is primarily used in inner cities, with far greater force than they did those using the powder form of cocaine, favored by white, middle-class communities.
This aggressive war on drugs worked hand in glove with prison construction, which became a major growth industry. It encouraged enormous federal and state investment, private prison development, and associated businesses. As Oklahoma ex-warden Jack Cowley put it, “The war on drugs is a miserable failure because it has not stopped drug use in this country. It’s a great success [for prisons] because it’s the best economic boom we’ve ever seen.”
Corporations lobbied legislatures for contracts to build prisons, confidently guaranteeing to fill a certain number of beds. In turn, heavily-subsidized local law enforcement was happy to oblige by providing residents. What came to be called the Prison-Industrial Complex manufactured its own symbiotic cycle.
Life Without Parole: Living in Prison Today (1996, 2011) by prize-winning author Victor Hassine details the transformation in the 1980s of Graterford State Prison, warehouse for Pennsylvania’s most violent felons. A typical 1930s “Big House” (holding fifteen hundred people or more, all sharing common facilities), Graterford kept military-style order when Hassine arrived in 1981. By mid-decade, the influx of homeless, mentally ill, juvenile offenders, seasoned gang members, drug addicts, and dealers had changed everything. According to Hassine, the population explosion made Graterford “a predatory institution where nothing worked right and everything was for sale.” Bathroom-size cells designed for one inmate had to accommodate two; rape became a common occurrence. Overworked guards’ dependence on informants divided inmates, raised the level of violence, and facilitated the entry of drugs. “Old heads” recalled bygone days of honor, quiet, solitude, and routine. Hassine wrote, those days existed when “the outside world was kept outside, when inmates’ natural enemies were the guards.” Now other inmates posed the greatest threat, especially “young bucks” for whom robbery and assault became addictive. Instead of trying to control gangs, the administration played one against the other. “Anger and hatred are a prison’s cash crop,” a lifer explained, “they produce “more money, more guards, more overtime.”
Women in prison have suddenly become the fastest growing sector of the prison population; they now represent 7 percent of prisoners. Harsh sentencing for minor drug offenses has made the incarceration rate of women almost double that of men. Ten times more women are imprisoned in the U.S. than in Western Europe. About 87 percent of women report physical or sexual abuse prior to their arrest (roughly double the percentage of men). Little violence occurs between women prisoners, but they experience more instances of sexual violence and humiliation from the guards on average than male prisoners do. “Being in prison is like being in a domestic violence relationship,” says writer Barbara Saunders. “You never know when the rules will change and you will get ‘beaten’ again psychologically or emotionally by anyone who has power over you.”
In many states, pregnant women are still shackled while in labor. Roughly 75 percent of incarcerated women are single mothers. They carry an extra burden of distress and anxiety over the wellbeing of the children, in combination with their focus on surviving, rehabilitating themselves, and reuniting with their children.
The number of children with a parent under criminal supervision is high: an estimated 7 million. Communities of color are especially decimated by the loss of human capital.
In 2008 the number of people in our prisons and jails was 2.3 million. This figure exceeds that of any other country (China, for example, locks up 1.6 million, although it is four times more populous than the U.S.) Our incarceration rate, relatively stable between 1925 and 1972, has since grown sixfold. The U.S. holds one quarter of the world’s prisoners, while the country only represents five percent of the world’s population. This nation is deemed a “rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach,” according to Vivien Stern, research fellow at the International Prison Studies Centre in London.
Although the decreasing use of the death penalty is certainly good news—there are now sixteen states without the death penalty and fewer executions—there is a downside. The costliness of the elaborate legal procedures associated with capital punishment cases encourages prosecutors to aim for life without parole instead of the death penalty. Consequently, the idea of life without parole is normalized for non-capital crimes. A few decades ago, a life sentence implied harsh punishment, but amounted to ten to twenty years actual time incarcerated. Now, 10 percent of prisoners will leave their prison in a coffin. We have created a punishment previously unknown in the world. We are inventing a geriatric gulag. And juveniles are also serving life without parole.
Our prisons have also become more cruel, influenced perhaps by this century’s war on terror. During the 1980s and 1990s “supermax” security prisons were built across the country, designed for “the worst of the worst.” Other prisons set apart solitary sections, variously called secure housing units (SHUs), adjustment centers, and administrative segregation (ad seg). At these locations, confinement is solitary, with at most one hour a day for exercise (also often completed in solitude). The UN Convention against Torture states that torture is treatment that causes “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental” when it is inflicted by officials for purposes of punishment or coercion. Isolation can cause or exacerbate mental illness. Our domestic use of solitary is not far removed from the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, though it has not received as much attention. Moreover, the America
n public was shocked by photos from Abu Ghraib revealing the humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers. Yet little was made of the fact that four men in charge of revamping Iraq’s prisons had committed serious human rights abuses in Arizona, Utah, Texas, and Connecticut prisons.
In addition to official and systematic punishment, sexual violence in prisons has not been wholly eliminated. Although Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, the Justice Department failed to implement many of the demands proposed by the Commission to protect victims.
The United States has the shameful distinction not only of locking up the most men and the most women, the most old people and the most juveniles, for the longest time and for the harshest punishments, but also for holding the highest proportion of racial minorities in the world. To many, mass incarceration appears to be a war on people of color, a substitution of social control for social services. As the ACLU put it, “despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is ten times greater than that of whites.” For Michele Alexander, mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow. Just as segregation was devised in response to Reconstruction, so, she suggests, has the mass incarceration of black people been generated as a response to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. History repeats itself: one form of racial domination breaks and another rises to replace it.
By entering the criminal justice system, many people become permanent members of an inferior caste. Their rights upon release are eviscerated. In many states, they are excluded from public housing, employment, education, voting, and benefits. They become non-citizens. With all these odds against them, many will return to prison. Theirs is a cycle of relentless marginalization.
On the other hand, the twenty-first century has offered many positive developments. A few examples:
• George Soros’ Open Society Foundation has funded influential projects that promote a better understanding of the human cost of our criminal justice system and explore alternatives to mass incarceration.
• In 2011, forty years after Nixon’s call for an all-out offensive on drugs, the prestigious Global Commission on Drug Policy called the international war on drugs a failure and urged the U.S. to consider decriminalizing drugs.
• Some policy makers and politicians shun “tough on crime,” and substitute it with “smart on crime” and “right on crime.”
• Mandatory minimum sentences are increasingly less common.
• Some states have begun to release hundreds of prisoners and to find community-based alternatives to incarceration.
• The disparity between the high sentences for crack cocaine (used mostly by people of color) and the relatively low for powder cocaine (used mostly by white people) is being eliminated.
• Re-entry has become in the last several years the most challenging issue in criminal justice policy as the public realizes that almost all people return from prison to the community and need help in preparing to reintegrate successfully.
• In 1998, a group called Critical Resistance launched the first major coalition-building conferences for prison activists concerned about checking what they called the Prison Industrial Complex and strengthening communities at risk; coalition building has since become the norm.
• Formerly incarcerated men and women are increasingly designing and staffing programs for people returning from prison. (See the afterword, especially the first two sections.)
Most important, public awareness has grown, and many citizens work with local organizations. Michele Alexander’s powerful metaphor—mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow—may startle readers out of their indifference and fire the conscience of the country to engage in a refreshed human rights movement. Such struggles are never simply for the persons deprived of their rights, but rather for all of us. We are all diminished by an unjust society. We are all implicated in this monstrous carceral society whose tentacles reach everywhere. For the good of us all, we must try to understand it and change our approach to crime and criminals.
With prison and prisoners an increasingly large, though still ignored, aspect of society, this collection of prison writings is more relevant than ever. Teachers seeking ways to integrate prison issues into American studies find it invaluable. Many are again prizing prison writing as an essential expression of our nation’s underclass and, with its own complex traditions, an important field of American literature.
Prisoners know that they dwell “behind the mirror’s face” (in Paul St. John’s telling phrase; see “Reading and Writing”), that prison reflects the state of society. This book aspires to dissolve the mercury and leave us face to face with our brothers and sisters. Our future is one. The evidence that this book offers of the complex humanity of people in prison and their very real aptitude for growth has a surprising part to play in our construction of the future.
Writing is my way of sledge-hammering these walls.
—Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez, Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Ossining, New York
My life was one of perpetual conflict. I held an apocalyptic view. I have spent most of my existence on this earth inside one prison or another, so my mindset toward the world was one of complete antipathy and alienation … I was reluctant to submit my story to the PEN contest I at no point thought I had a chance of winning. When I won the award, it gave me an overwhelming sense of acceptance. I now felt that I had something to offer humanity.
— Anthony Ross, Death Row, San Quentin Prison, California
Public reception of prison writing over the past twenty-five years parallels the plunging and rearing trajectory of attitudes toward prisoners we have seen: enthusiasm and broad-based support in the seventies, doubt growing in the eighties, cynicism dominating the nineties, and beginning to give way at century’s end* To some degree PEN’s engagement has followed these vicissitudes, but with an important distinction: Every year PEN has provided an outlet for these forgotten voices.
PEN’s involvement in this unique creative movement began in a curious way. Born in 1921, PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, and Novelists) is dedicated to consolidating world peace through a global association of writers. Since 1960 a Freedom-to-Write Committee within PEN’s American Center has defended the rights of writers in other countries who have been jailed for their beliefs. But concern for saints of free expression abroad did not translate into concern for ordinary domestic sinners. In fact, this committee’s chair in the late sixties, historian Tom Fleming, had taken a dim view of convicts (his father was a New Jersey sheriff and prison warden). But one day, he appeared on a talk show with an impressive ex-prisoner — a Fortune Society spokesman — who remarked that some of the best people he knew were behind bars. “I never forgot it,” Fleming said.
As PEN president in 1971, Fleming encouraged colleague Lucy Kavaler to investigate freedom to write in U.S. prisons. Her report spurred Fleming into intensive lobbying with corrections officials, resulting in reduced censorship, improved access to typewriters, courses, and better prison libraries. Then the revelations of Attica made a prison writing program. (PWP) seem a moral imperative to some PEN members. Convinced that writing is inherently rehabilitative, they persuaded other writers to read, teach, and mentor behind bars and publishers to send materials. “To be able to say what you mean, to put in words what you perceive as truth, to impose form on the formless — this is a way to reconstruct a life, to restore one’s sense of meaning, of responsibility to oneself and to others,” PWP chair Kathrin Perutz wrote. “But the others — at least some others — must be listening.”
And so in 1973 PEN launched its first annual literary competition for prisoners in federal institutions and extended it to state prisoners in 1974, soon engaging some fifteen hundred prisoners annually. Winning works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (drama was added later) were read at annual celebrations, and Fortune News (the Fortune Society’s paper for prisoners)
and other journals published them. The contest reinforced the seventies’ prison renaissance nationwide. As college programs grew behind the walls, so did creative writing workshops, some funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Journals devoted to inmate writing — with names like “Joint3’ Conference and Sentences — sprang up overnight. Some academics embraced this literature of the American dispossessed as part of their project of challenging, or enlarging, the canon. The bibliography of H. Bruce Franklin’s 1989 edition of Prison Literature in America: The Victim As Criminal and Artist lists 320 books by prisoners published from 1971 through 1981. Then everything changed.
The year 1981 saw the publication of In the Belly of the Beast, a volume of Jack Henry Abbott’s prison letters to Norman Mailer, describing the rage he cultivated through his lifelong institutionaliza-tion. Readers were more excited by the writing than mindful of its warning; the book went through five printings and Abbott was released with fanfare. David Rothenberg recently described Abbott on his second day at liberty, sweating through an appearance on Good Morning, America, in which Mailer answered Abbott’s questions for him. Rothenberg invited Abbott to drop by the Fortune Society for help with the deinstitutionalization process. Abbott was not interested. Within a month, he had killed a man in a fight. The romance between writers and convicts had run its course, and prisoners went out of fashion in the eighties.
Support for prison writing plummeted as well. Under Reagan, the NEA severely cut financial aid to fledgling magazines, and by 1984, every journal devoted to prison writing had gone under. Prison newspapers, a vital branch of this literature, began to lose support in this era. Now, with the notable exceptions of the distinguished Angolite in Louisiana and Prison Legal Notes in Washington State, most have been suppressed.
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