Prison Life Writing: Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U.S. Prison System by Simon Rolston

Abstract

Reviewed by: Prison Life Writing: Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U.S. Prison System by Simon Rolston D. Quentin Miller (bio) Prison Life Writing: Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U.S. Prison System Simon Rolston Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2021, ix+316 pp. ISBN 9781771125178, $34.99 paperback. Despite marked political and cultural changes in the United States over the past century, the practice of mass incarceration has grown in a steady upward trajectory. The history of incarceration, especially since the publication of Michel Foucault's treatise Discipline and Punish (1975), has provided a context for analyzing what has [End Page 100] been an unfortunate growth field within American letters, namely prison literature, and especially autobiographical accounts of the prison experience. Simon Rolston's Prison Life Writing: Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U.S. Prison System claims to be the "first full-length study" of this genre. There has been an upsurge in critical studies of prison literature in the twenty-first century, but what distinguishes Rolston's argument is the context of the conversion narrative that has its origins in seventeenth-century Puritan literature. The study thus acts as a hinge between two lifewriting subfields that have been considered separately: the conversion narrative and prison literature. A key critical question emerges over the course of the argument that Rolston applies to his selected primary texts: does a work of prison life writing based on the conversion narrative challenge or uphold the institutional structure of the prison? As Rolston demonstrates, the answer varies widely. Here is a summary from his conclusion: "Although prison life writings consistently use the prison conversion narrative, they do so with surprising aesthetic and ideological range" (228). This range enables Rolston to celebrate narratives that both challenge the status quo of the prison industrial complex and build community, and to critique those that (consciously or unconsciously) uphold the assumptions that justify incarceration and aggrandize the individual at the expense of civic connections. He also develops the idea advanced in Foucault's work and elsewhere that the express purpose and intent of incarceration has changed over time. The conversion narrative is rooted in a spiritual journey in which a narrator is brought to a low point, sees the light of an upright moral path, and becomes a heaven-bound believer. Rolston argues that the very project of nationhood in America in the eighteenth century was linked to this narrative structure: "the nation had itself undergone a kind of conversion: the American Revolution had created an entirely new nation: colonial Britons had become Americans" (48). This emphasis on a new self replacing an old self is also crucial to the prison conversion narrative. Conversion in prison is frequently linked to literacy or to self-education. The blueprint for this story is The Autobiography of Malcolm X, in which the author-subject famously copies the dictionary while in solitary confinement en route to replacing his old selves (Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Satan) with his enlightened new selves (Malcolm X, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz). Rolston acknowledges The Autobiography of Malcolm X as the most important text in the tradition he examines, especially as it explicitly influenced a large number of later texts. Yet he doesn't spend as much time on it as one might expect, even as he identifies it as a troublesome text, one that "points to the peculiar and unexpected ways that competing discourses merge uneasily in prison life writing, making it difficult to see the genre as solely on one side of a Manichaean divide between a powerless writer and a powerful institution" (12). The potentially problematic rhetoric of Malcolm X is examined indirectly, then, through the remainder of the tradition: presumably the reader would be familiar enough with this canonical work to follow the argument. [End Page 101] Having established the tradition through identifying its origins, Rolston moves forward from The Autobiography of Malcolm X through three eras—the Treatment Era (which he dates from 1945–1976), a transitional period he calls the Monster Factory (in the early 1970s), and our current period of mass incarceration beginning in the mid-1970s. He adds a fourth chapter on women's...