Prison Literature, Then and Now H. Bruce Franklin (bio) If the literature and other cultural creations by American convicts were the only remains of American society, imagine the history of the United States that future archaeologists might construct. Of course it would lack any overviews of American society from the top, but it would sure have deep visions of American realities from the bottom. Those future historians would have startling revelations of the roles of slavery, wealth, and war in an expanding nation that created the modern prison system as part of its God-given mission to reform the world. And when it came to trying to understand how the nation that claimed to be the world’s leading democracy transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration and surveillance, what better sources than the voices coming from the many millions of Americans imprisoned between the 1960s and the early decades of the twenty-first century? I was not as far removed from the actual history as those imaginary archaeologists when I began my work on the literature of the American prison in the early and mid-1970s. In fact, prison literature, my involvement with prison activism, and my own arrests with threatened long-term incarceration were all having a profound influence on my thinking and life. This was hardly a unique experience. Prison literature spoke to millions as our consciousness and lives were being transformed by the interrelated matrices of the prison, the “long hot summers” of 1964–1968, and Vietnam. For obvious examples, think of what the works of Malcolm X and George Jackson meant to the mass movements of what we call “the Sixties,” an era that actually began around 1963 and ended in the mid-1970s. This era of progressive upheaval seemed at the time to many of its participants, including myself, as a possibly pre-revolutionary period. Unfortunately, many of those sitting in the most powerful positions shared that view. Thus, it is not mere coincidence that in 1971 President Richard Nixon officially declared the “War on Drugs” that has provided the ideological and legal basis for the mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement of millions of people, drawn mainly from the black and brown populations who were rising up to demand the progressive if not downright revolutionary changes that our rulers feared. For the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century, the official count of the US State and Federal Prison Population (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics) never significantly went above 200,000. But by the time the first edition of The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison appeared in 1978, there were already close to 300,000 people incarcerated in America’s prisons and jails. The tumor of mass incarceration was just beginning its cancerous invasion. When the second edition came out in 1982 (retitled as Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist), there were almost 400,000. When the third edition arrived in 1989, there were almost 800,000. As I write this essay, seven million Americans are under the jurisdiction of the “correctional” system, including 4.8 million on parole or probation and 2.3 million actually locked up in prisons and jails. Almost six million citizens have been permanently stripped of their right to vote by felony disenfranchisement, thus shifting political power decisively into the hands of the right wing. For example, felony disenfranchisement in 2000 undeniably gave the White House to George W. Bush, who “won” Florida by 527 votes because more than 600,000 Florida citizens, overwhelmingly African American, had thereby been denied the right to vote. At first, mass incarceration only accelerated the explosive growth and influence of prison literature. Waves of words poured out from prisons into the American public in mass-market paperbacks, newspapers, literary journals, general magazines, and major motion pictures. But these waves were soon overwhelmed by a tsunami of repression in the late 1970s. New York’s 1977 “Son of Sam” law made it illegal for convict authors to earn money from their writing. Other states swiftly enacted copycat laws. The US Government adopted Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Section...
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Oct 30, 2020
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