| Popis: |
Three decades ago, I wrote that the literature of the American prison is not "some peripheral cultural phenomenon but something close to the center of our historical experience as a nation-state."1 Back then, there were 300,000 people in U.S. domestic prisons and jails. Today there are 2.4 million. Since then, the United States has built an average of a prison a week inside our nation, globalized a vast prison-industrial complex, and normalized prison torture at home and around the world. The outcome of national elections as well as representation in Congress is now determined by felony disenfranchisement, which today deprives more than five million lower-class American citizens of the vote. One example: In the 2000 election Florida disenfranchised 827,000 former prisoners; if they had been allowed to vote, political scientists estimate that AI Gore would have won Florida by 80,000 votes, George W. Bush would never have gotten to reside in the White House, and the world we live in would be a very different place.2 To comprehend the American prison one must turn to the literature created by those who have experienced its secret world. For secrecy is part of the essence of the prison. Prior to the American Revolution, imprisonment was seldom used as a punishment for crime in England and was rarer still in its American colonies, most of which were being used as dumping grounds for British convicts. Here the main punishments were executions and various forms of physical torture whipping, the stocks, the pillory, branding, mutilation, castration, etc. all designed as spectacles to be witnessed by the public. The prison system depends on the opposite. It institutionalizes isolation and secrecy. The prison's walls are designed not only to keep the prisoners in but to keep the public out, unable to observe what is going on inside. Prison literature, therefore, is intrinsically subversive, revealing what is supposed to be concealed and what is often unimaginable. As ex-convict author Jim Tully put it back in 1928: "I'd rather read one page by a man who had been in Hell than all of Dante."3 |
