From Witness to Archive: Prisoners Writing the American Gulag

• In Event: Convict Criminology Session 3: Reflections on the Role, Significance and Practice of Prison Writing

Abstract

This paper will discuss efforts to place prisoner writing at the center of representation and understanding of mass incarceration in the US. Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America is the largest collection to date of first-person witness to how the US prison is experienced by those living inside it. Like the writers inside it, Fourth City presents prisoners as a community living under hostile supervision, and for this reason experiencing a life more cohesive, across an archipelago of facilities, than that experienced by residents of New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Fourth City is the first single volume to present incarcerated Americans as the constituency best positioned to witness what is wrong with current prison practice. Writing from the US prison today constitutes a witness literature larger than that which emerged from American slavery and will quickly overmatch that produced by the Holocaust—both in sheer volume and in its importance to our hopes of imagining a post-carceral world. The paper will also discuss ongoing work on The American Prison Writing Archive, an open-source, digital archive of non-fiction, American prison writing.

Author

• Doran Larson, Hamilton College