Reading and Reckoning in a Women’s Prison

Abstract

�� ��� It’s my time to come out of the wilderness now, and I saw all that in this book. —Denise, incarcerated in a Midwestern women’s prison Since the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the retributive justice framework of the 1980s and beyond, prisoners’ opportunities for reading, education, and rehabilitation have steadily declined. This decline bespeaks an increasing dehumanization of incarcerated men and women and a disavowal of their capacity for deep thought, growth, and transformation. Some critics argue that penal custody “is incompatible with real rehabilitation” (Sullivan, Prison Reform, 2) and that one should not expect prisons to provide genuine opportunities for change. Yet in conducting individual interviews and group discussions with incarcerated women, I have discovered that reading plays a central role in some imprisoned women’s efforts to begin freeing themselves from state-imposed, other-imposed, and self-imposed forces—including racism, poverty, abuse, and addiction—that have kept them in literal and figurative states of detention. 1 Despite significant limitations on the reading materials available to them, these women engage in reading practices that help them to come to terms with their pasts, contextualize their experiences in relation to larger frameworks, and gain inspiration from others as they learn to imagine—and create—new ways of being in the world. Because African American women constitute the fastest-growing population in the U.S. penal system, prisons merit particular attention as a site in which African American women’s literacy practices have flour ished. As Elizabeth McHenry argues in Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, scholarship about reading has tended to obscure the complex history of African Americans’ literacy and literary engagements (5), thereby contributing to the “historical invisibility of black readers” (4). Indeed, from Janice Radway’s groundbreaking Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984/1991) to Elizabeth Long’s Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (2003), studies typically feature white, middle-class women in exploring the