Memoirs from Behind Bars

George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother, with pen and paper

In a new essay called "Behind Bars," Jay Parini reflects on the power of memoirs written from American prisons over the course of the twentieth century:

"These books are about self-realization as well as self-justification. They describe a similar pattern: getting into trouble, confronting the claustrophobic and unforgiving world of prison, dealing with growing despair until something or somebody offers a crack in the wall, a little bit of daylight shining through. After a great deal of soul-searching, the writer/prisoner reaches a fresh sense of selfhood, coming to terms with the original sin, forgiving himself or herself. In the very best of these memoirs--especially with a prisoner of conscience or one unjustly jailed--there is often a redeeming social vision at work. The genre bleeds into that of spiritual autobiography...."

The Return of Prison Studies

An essay by Peter Monaghan in the Chronicle of Higher Education traces the rise of a new generation of scholars who are rebuilding the academic field of prison studies. Monaghan begins by discussing the dramatic escalation of the American prison system over the last few decades:

"Some 2.3-million people are incarcerated in the United States. From the 1920s to 1975, the imprisonment rate hovered around 110 per 100,000 U.S. residents; it has since rocketed to 760—proportionally five to 12 times as high as any other industrialized nations.

The annual bill: $64-billion.

Reacting to that scale and to increasingly harsh methods of imprisonment, scholars across the social sciences and humanities are energetically studying incarceration, reviving a research interest of the 1960s and 1970s that was inspired by prison-reform efforts."

Meanwhile a new article by David Cole in the New York Review of Books, taking its cue from three new books about the crisis of incarceration in the U.S. asks, "Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?"