Since 1922, PEN America has stood at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. Founded in 1971 in the wake of the Attica riots, PEN’s Prison and Justice Writing program encourages the use of the written word as a legitimate form of power. By delivering access to literary resources, skilled writing mentors, and audiences for their work, PEN embodies the preeminent humanitarian effort aligned to amplify and center the disenfranchised lived experience of the nation’s largest captive audience using literature. There isn’t another organization on the planet that does more to deliver literary agency to incarcerated thinkers.
Enduring prison usually means forfeiting civic engagement and tolerating censorship – authorities throttle and curate our sensory input volume by controlling the allowable reading material that travels into the institution, and coordinating an evil empire-style tag-team effort between the facility mailroom and the external publishing world that serves to limit what incarcerated creators might export and distribute for public consumption.
PEN pushes against that censorship by feeding the carceral citizen in two key ways: 1) via its Freewrite Project’s use of “The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life In Prison” writing guide, PEN teaches the craft’s many forms and gives several formerly incarcerated writers a practitioner’s voice therein; and 2) via its annual Prison Writing Awards Anthology, PEN centers incarcerated perspectives by publishing a printed volume of each year’s winners in literary categories that include fiction, nonfiction essay, nonfiction memoir, poetry, and drama, making those anthologies available by mail for free to any incarcerated reader who requests one.
Subject matter matters. Take suicide for example – it’s not a sexy topic, nor is the carceral condition of solitary confinement which gave rise to American Book Award-winning poet Regional Dwayne Betts writing about both in 2016 via his Yale Law Journal article ‘Only Once I Thought About Suicide.’ That said, writing about solitary confinement did garner an incarcerated writer a PEN America Writing Award some seven years later in 2023. Serving up the red meat that reveals the underbelly of the beast is compelling and deemed worthy of critical esteem, for good reason.
Examinations of the inhumane consequences of societal power structures become civil rights battle cries, particularly when hidden from public view. We owe it to stakeholders to amplify injustice and herald the primacy of human rights in the face of indignity.
Betts’ treatment of the issue in 2016 would later prompt Justice J. Sotomayor, herself the subject of a most cringe-worthy portrayal Betts wrote about in his 2019 American Magazine Award-winning piece for the New York Times Magazine ‘Getting Out,’ to comment on Betts’ 2016 article during the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 denial of a petition for certiorari. We could editorialize endlessly about all the dark and quiet cell-time moments made psychotic by design through the harrowing first-person testimonials of the many men who have emerged from the now-outlawed indeterminate Secure Housing Units (SHUs) in California, and give readers a truly brutal anthology of woe.
We choose not to, not just because the Mellon-funded American Prison Writing Archive maintained at Johns Hopkins University already performs that role with exquisite digital humanities skill, but because there is a greater absence of content that centers the stories of magic, wonderment, and triumph found within the confines of the nation’s most volatile settings. Stories of friendship, love, and community are the narratives most missing from the carceral canon.
When Angel E. Sanchez emerged from a thirty year prison sentence in Florida and matriculated from Valencia Community College to the University of Central Florida, and earned his way into the University of Miami School of Law, he wrote in his 2019 Harvard Law Review article “In Spite Of Prison” about how during a conversation with Betts, the poet told him that “writing about our experiences was important ethnographic work that needed to be done.” Describing a yearning to “empower and alleviate the inhumane treatment of the imprisoned,” Sanchez confessed how during his undergraduate work he “suppressed” his own voice and missed his chance to ground his work in “the material, aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual experiences of people of color.”
Having felt the sting of being labeled a “super predator” in 1996 while prosecuted at the age of 14, Sanchez would later parole to a shelter, earn a 4.0 GPA during his first year of college, and become the President of his community college’s Honor Society, only to be unfairly stripped of his position and regalia pursuant to an arcane policy that required a three-year waiting period following one’s sentence completion. Free on a ten year probation tail, that meant Sanchez wouldn’t be able to participate in the Honor Society for another thirteen years – an absurdity. He won a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation academic scholarship giving him the means to pay for college, and yet, another policy at his intended 4 year school prevented his enrollment due to him not having completed half of his probation term – it seemed he was too successful too quickly for the apparatus to embrace him. The judge who would later modify his probation in order to enable him to enroll also offered Sanchez a judicial internship in her chambers, and from there he ascended.
Inspiring stories like these that tether to dark topics like solitary confinement and suicide, we believe, have greater value to stakeholders than the depravity found on LEXIS.
Betts once told a Prison Journalism Project interviewer speaking to him for PJPxINSIDE, “We know very little about what it means to live in prison… we often focus on the violence – on the sorrow of incarceration. There’s very little work done on the glimpses of joy.” That sentiment caused us to hunt for material that has excavated carceral life through a different lens, perhaps one that might even offer affirmative images of prison.
In his autobiography, Malcolm X described teaching himself to read with understanding, which allowed him to “attack” his ignorance so that his previous life’s thinking pattern could slide away like snow off a roof. T. Gaddis’ “Birdman Of Alcatraz” (1955), B. Behan’s “Borstal Boy” (1959), and E. Wallach’s “Light At Midnight” (1967) each framed prison like an academy. Watergate convict Charles Colson likened his imprisonment to a complete shedding of his old life, akin to a rebirth. More than forty years later, Betts would describe how reading changed his world view and gave a scrawny teenager friendships and a sense of community in a prison situated in a state he wasn’t raised in.
In “Journey Into The Whirlwind,” (1967), Eugenia Ginzburg described how during her eighteen years of imprisonment under Stalin she found, “there are no more fervent friendships than those made in prison.” In Vera Figner’s “Memoir Of A Revolutionist,” (1968), she wrote about how losing the people with whom she was in close communion with while confined for twenty years by the Tsars was the worst part of being released. In James Blake’s “The Joint” (1974), he compared prison to a monastery.
Morton Sobell, who served fifteen years as a Rosenberg co-conspirator, described in “Doing Time” (1974), how in spite of the insufferable conditions, he and his wife were “happier than many couples in the free world.” Of course, Victor Frankyl used his concentration camp experiences to develop Logotherapy, which led to the post-traumatic growth theory of healing.
For those imprisoned by totalitarian regimes, dissidents like Nadezhda Mendelstam, who wrote about life under Stalin, and Bao Ruo-Wang, who wrote about being a prisoner under Mao, each described the friendships that blossomed in prison as being more authentic than those formed in the suspicion-riddled society outside. Psychoanalyst Dr. Edith Jacobson, who observed close to one hundred female political prisoners during her two years of confinement in the state prisons of Nazi Germany, found that prison set into motion constructive behaviors, artistic work, poetry writing, and study of the classics, due to a regression of the ego state.
In his book “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism” (1969), Robert Jay Litton confirmed Jacobson’s findings by interviewing Western subjects imprisoned for years in The People’s Republic of China, who, “consistently reported having become more sensitive to their own and others’ inner feelings,” echoing what we’d describe today as being mindful and empathic.
Though there will always be an institutionalized segment of the prison population made comfortable by the way, as Malcolm Braly wrote in his autobiography False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons (1976), the joint mothers its residents (“…Fed us, kept us warm, and treated our ailments”), true freedom beckons from beyond the fence line.
There is an awkward parallel universe of being whereby though physically confined, one tries to live like a person who is already free. This is the hardest part of having truly changed: having to still live amongst those who refuse to. It’s a duality calculus that can tax even the best of us who believe we’ve mastered the ability to do time, instead of allowing the time to do us. It requires an exceptional fortitude to abide the structural dictates of prison, avoid all of its vices, recalibrate one’s moral compass, dream of a life beyond what is, and embody that dream by practicing proper thoughts and actions under duress.
Feeling connected prevents lots of suicides. Family, friends, and comrades sharing the experience often form a safety net alliance that affirms that you are loved, valued, and remembered while confined. Inevitably, when these folks fade, die off, or clip you from their world, mail stops coming, and isolation pushes you into the void long enough that you invent your own personal Wilson (think Castaway), there will come a time when neither the TV nor the radio will sustain the craving for quality escapism or companionship.
In the end, when you’re in the hole, nobody answers your wall taps, all the digital stimuli is stripped away, and the only thing you can physically acquire is made of paper, the books will be the only things that speak to you. Their authors, their characters, and their lessons will become the silent messengers of your life’s inner dialogue. Perspective will build around you, tapestries will engulf your imagination, and over time, you will claim a role, a reason, and a purpose.
Depending upon where that book comes from or where you’re housed, there might be a Freedom Reads sticker on the inside of the book cover flap. If you find one of those, consider yourself fortunate, hunt down that Freedom Library book cart, and read absolutely every book in that joint. Those selections will open your mind.
Then take the next step, and start to write about your life. Observe your surroundings, take an inventory of your emotions, and describe what you see, how you feel, and what you desire. If you can handle it, dig into memory, wrestle with regret, and think about how to approach the trauma that lurks beneath what is hardest to face. Whatever the form, PEN America will be there to receive your submissions, evaluate your work, and perhaps publish it.
If you know somebody who is locked up, print this article out, and write these words on it in your own handwriting: “The world needs to read your story!” Then mail it to them.
You just might save a life.
