Writings from the Pen
Archived article from Nov 6, 1998
By Douglas Frank
American prisons, with their stone walls and barbed-wire fences, metal gates and gun towers, have a dual function: to keep us out as well as them in." So states journalist and author Tom Wicker in a foreword to what he calls a "harrowing book" edited by Rutgers Professor H. Bruce Franklin.
"Prison Writing in 20th-Century America," published this year by Penguin Books, is an anthology of writings by American inmates offering, in the editor's words, a "vision of America from the bottom."
Franklin, the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers-Newark, is regarded as the leading authority on American prison literature. This volume complements his 1978 landmark book, "Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist."
Wicker notes that prison authorities often sought to stop the kind of writing collected by Franklin: "Writers scribbling away in their cells ... tell us most of what we know about these dark fortresses of gloom and terror [and describe] a life the authorities would rather we not know about."
Franklin argues that modern American prison writings "constitute a coherent body of literature with a unique historical significance and cultural influence" and should not be ignored because of periodic efforts to suppress the authors for voicing anti-establishment views.
"One of the most extraordinary achievements of twentieth-century American culture is the literature that has come out of the nation's prisons," he writes in his historical and critical introduction to the anthology.
"My own experience lecturing in prison, which is similar to that of others who have taught there, is that you encounter people who are extremely well read and have thought about a lot of things," Franklin recalled in a recent interview.
The book gathers more than 60 selections written in the last 100 years -- including memoirs, stories, essays and poems. Among familiar authors are Nelson Algren, Chester Himes, Jack London, Robert Lowell, Malcolm X and Piri Thomas.
Franklin had a tough time selecting some works while eliminating others. "I was discarding so much great literature it was painful, but I wanted to get some variety and show the range of the writing," he says, noting that some of the best writers of fiction were behind bars.
"Obviously a lot of people who are put in prison are in an environment that is doing a lot of stressful things to them psychologically. Some people respond by turning off their brain, and others respond by turning on their brain," he observes.
"Prison is an important institution in our society. Prisoners have a lot to say, and it is important to us to be able to learn about their situations, what got them there, what prison is like and what its function in society is."
The incarcerated writers pull no punches in providing answers that range from the horrific to the hopeful.
Kate Richards O'Hare, serving time in Missouri for speaking out against American participation in World War I, was ordered to enter a communal bathtub immediately after it was used by a syphilitic woman covered with sores. Threatened with a trip to the "black hole" by the matron, O'Hare acquiesced: "I was not ready to die, so I stepped into the bathroom, turned on the taps and splashed the water -- but I DID NOT BATHE." Her report on such atrocious conditions became a major text on prison reform, and she later became an official in the California prison system.
In his famous autobiography, Malcolm X tells of an "enlightened" experimental rehabilitation jail in Massachusetts where he learned to read and write effectively: "At Norfolk [Prison Colony] we could actually go into the library, with permission -- walk up and down the shelves, pick books. There were hundreds of old volumes, some of them probably quite rare. I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose."
Franklin presents a compelling argument that the American prison system, which now incarcerates African-Americans at a rate eight times that of whites, was an outgrowth of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
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