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RETHINKING PRISONERS' DISCOURSE During the Late 1960S

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RETHINKING PRISONERS' DISCOURSE During the Late 1960S PROVOCATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES: RETHINKING PRISONERS' DISCOURSE MEGAN SWEENEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY During the late 1960s—at the height of California's radical prison move- ment—San Quentin prisoners circulated handwritten pages of The Communist Manifesto from cell to cell via clothesline.1 As I have learned from conducting fieldwork and book clubs in a variety of jails and prisons, such a vibrant literary atmosphere is largely a relic of the past in today's prisons. The constant drone of the television now pervades what little common space exists, and "library" some- times refers to a dozen cast-off, outdated, silverfish-laden books. In more well- stocked libraries in women's facilities, shelves of Harlequin romances, self-help books, "true crime" books, and "Cops & Crime" novels make it difficult to imag- ine prisoners reading Marx, Fanon, or Angela Davis. Indeed, incarcerated women are far more likely to circulate sensational true crime books than hand- written copies of The Communist Manifesto. The stark contrast between prisoners' reading practices in the late 1960s and in the contemporary era speaks to a radical shift in the conditions of possibility for intellectual life behind bars. The contemporary era can be characterized by the "dumbing down" of prisoners both at the level of prison administrations and in the wider culture, by the retreat from rehabilitation and the evisceration of prison education programs, by the use of prison televisions as a pacification tool, and by the censorship of prisoners' writings. I became acutely aware of the con- crete ways in which institutional conditions shape prisoners' intellectual lives 'In The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement, Eric Cummins provides a detailed account of the literary atmosphere in California prisons during the 1960s. GENRE XXXV - FALL/WINTER 2002 - 393-406. COPYRIGHT © 2003 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA. ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTION IN ANY FORM RESERVED. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-pdf/35/3-4/393/412894/0350393.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 394 GENRE while I was leading a book club in the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. As one example among many, a prison administrator attempted to maintain a clear distinction between a select group of book club participants and the majority of prison library patrons—"the regular population"—by locking the "book club" books in the correctional officers' station. These truncated possibilities for intellectual life in prison are symptoms, in turn, of the rise of the prison-industrial economy and the shift toward a law- and-order approach to social policy. Prisons occupy an increasingly central eco- nomic, political, and cultural role in the U.S. and around the world, as U.S. penal policies and supermax prisons become a major international export, as the exploitation of prison labor vies with the exploitation of foreign labor, as record numbers of men and women fall prey to the state's erratic death machine, as prisons and prisons-for-profit overflow with women of color charged with first- time drug offenses, as incarceration-style saloons and simulated electric chairs gain popularity as chic forms of entertainment, and as prisons revert to the use of striped uniforms, chain gangs, and 50,000 volt stun guns.2 In the wake of Sep- tember 11th, state-sponsored efforts to fight terrorism have further fueled the conditions of immiseration and racism—domestic forms of terror(ism)—which help to sustain prisons' current function as systems for "disappearing" the human evidence of profound social problems. While this bleak picture accurately portrays the state of crime and punish- ment in the U.S., one might also paint a picture of the present moment as a time which inspires hope, the hope that current imprisonment practices might give way to more humane policies for governing the social sphere. Indeed, this moment which has seen the rise of chain gangs and incarceration-style saloons has also seen the rise of the Critical Resistance movement, the birth of Incite: Women of Color Against Violence, the growth of a movement to end the death penalty, and the flowering of numerous youth campaigns to cease the construc- tion of new incarceration facilities—all of which draw on growing opposition to prisons' role in perpetrating and perpetuating structural inequalities in the U.S. and around the world.3 Yet whether one adopts a pessimistic or optimistic view 2Chain gangs have reappeared in Alabama, Arizona, and Florida, and striped prison uniforms have resurfaced in Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland. While Foucault argues in Dis- cipline and Punish that "we are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gib- bets, gallows, pillories" (307), today's chain gangs suggest that we are not, perhaps, so far from the days in which punishment recharged the power of the justice system by submitting the convict's body to public displays of force. 3For more information about these organizations, see the Appendix. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-pdf/35/3-4/393/412894/0350393.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 PROVOCATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES 395 of contemporary punishment trends, the cultural predominance of the prison suggests that now, more than ever, the time is ripe for foregrounding prisoners' historical and contemporary contributions—despite considerable material and political constraints—to the theoretical, political, and artistic life of the world community. It is in this spirit that this special issue of Genre takes up the ques- tion of prisoners' discourse. Beginning with the pioneering work of H. Bruce Franklin, author of The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (1978) and editor of Prison Writing in 20th-century America (1998), prisoners' writing has continued to gain recognition, during the last quarter century, as an important literary genre. Scholars increasingly call for making prisons and prison literature a focal point in studying American literature, U.S. ethnic literatures, slavery, American labor history, and American Studies. The PEN literary competition for prisoners, established in 1973,4 has cultivated the talents of a wide variety of incarcerated writers; some of the best work from this competition is featured in Bell Gale Chevigny's collection, Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (1999). Important collections of writings by political prisoners have also appeared, including Barbara Harlowe's Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1993), Chinosole's Schooling the Generations in the Politics of Prison (1996), and Joy James' new collection, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (2003). While most prison newspapers have been suppressed, two prison publica- tions—The Angolite, from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and Prison Legal News, from the Washington State Penitentiary—continue to serve as invaluable venues for incarcerated men and women to voice their concerns. In 1992, Ango- lite editors Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg published a collection called Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars, and in 1998, Prison Legal News editors Pens and Wright (with the assistance of Daniel Burton-Rose) published an edit- ed collection called The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry. In addition to these excellent volumes of prisoners' discourse, works have emerged which feature prisoners' testimony more obliquely, such as Rena Fraden's Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (2001) and Jean Trounstine's Shakespeare Behind Bars (2001). 4PEN is an acronym for Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, and Novelists. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-pdf/35/3-4/393/412894/0350393.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 396 GENRE The essays in this special issue of Genre build on these foundations of prison discourse even as they interrogate the definitional parameters of the genre "prison writing." The opening essay of the collection, Dylan Rodriguez's "Against the Discipline of 'Prison Writing': Toward a Theoretical Conception of Contemporary Radical Prison Praxis," questions the generic classification of prisoners' discourse as "prison writing" and explores the conditions of possibili- ty for counterhegemonic cognitive praxis. Rodriguez theorizes prison writing as a cultural production "that is both enabled and coerced by state captivity, a dynamic condition that preempts and punishes some forms of writing, while encouraging and even forcing others." Given that prisons benefit from the exis- tence of a literary genre which foregrounds the prison's pedagogical capacities, Rodriguez reads one prisoner's rejection of the label "prison writer" as a critique of the ways in which "prison writing" reifies the prison as such, solidifying its role in defining civic freedom against juridical unfreedom, and securing social peace through legitimated state violence. Rodriguez then theorizes prison praxis as a contradictory modality of cri- tique and political dissent which "critically reinscribes... the condition of cap- tivity while violating the social logic of incarceration." Because the realm of mass information has become a site for the manufacture of consent, and because pop- ular modes of political organizing manifest substantial "interference" of state and capital, Rodriguez argues that imprisoned radicals are uniquely well-posi- tioned to enact counterhegemonic
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