PROVOCATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES: RETHINKING ' DISCOURSE

MEGAN SWEENEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

During the late 1960s—at the height of California's radical 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 , 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of the television now pervades what little common space exists, and "library" some- times refers to a dozen cast-off, outdated, silverfish-laden books.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 " 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 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.

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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 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 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 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.

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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, , 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 (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 , 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.

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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 '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 cognitive praxis. He issues an urgent call for contemporary critical studies of prisons to further the crucial work that impris- oned radicals perform in illuminating the constitutively coercive elements of the social formation, and in "disarticulating state practices of punishment, repres- sion, and incarceration from commonplace notions of justice, peace, and the good society." Rodriguez's call to disarticulate punishment practices from notions of jus- tice and safety sets the stage for subsequent essays' contributions. Doug Taylor, Jason Haslam, and Barry Maxwell re-read Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century literary works through the lens of the prison, illuminating how these works vari- ously critique and/or buttress the foundational logic of imprisonment. As a con- tribution to the project of mapping a more race-conscious genealogy of punish- ment in the U. S., Doug Taylor's essay, "From Slavery to Prison: Benjamin Rush, Harriet Jacobs, and the Ideology of Reformative Incarceration," illuminates how Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl revises some of the central

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tropes in the founding text of the modern penitentiary: Benjamin Rush's "An Inquiry into the Effects of Public upon Criminals and upon Soci- ety." While Rush presents his tenets of reformative incarceration from an allegedly race-neutral perspective, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl recontextualizes these tenets within the historically specific circumstances of slavery and forced concubinage in the Southern U.S. In so doing, Taylor argues, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl demonstrates how Rush's argument for refor- mative incarceration bolsters the ideological underpinnings of slavery, an institu- tion to which Rush was adamantly opposed. Taylor concludes that Jacobs's cri- tique of Rush's color-blind racism seems even more timely now, as allegedly race-neutral social policies threaten to decrease people of color's presence in institutions of higher learning while increasing their gross overrepresentation within criminal justice institutions. In " 'They locked the door on my meditations': Thoreau and the Prison House of Identity," Jason Haslam grapples with the contradiction between Thoreau's transcendental individualism and his more communal political impulses. Specifically, by examining Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" in relation to Nineteenth-Century penological and punitive discourses, Haslam concludes that the essay actually reproduces—even as it attempts to critique—the ontologi- cal foundations of what Foucault calls the "carceral city." During the time in which Thoreau was writing, Haslam explains, the power of the single person rapidly degenerated into the uniform treatment of "the people" as a civic body, which meant that each member of the civic body was subject to discipline by the universally applicable rulings of the State. Thoreau attempts to evade the disci- pline of the State, Haslam argues, by constructing an interior subjectivity which simply denies the State access to the individual. In "Civil Disobedience," for instance, Thoreau reverses the prison's reformatory rhetoric by constructing the as an idealized space of freedom, and by implying that the State enables the exercise of freedom by "stripping" the prisoner of all but the barest necessities. Rather than fostering his communal impulses, Thoreau's imprison- ment thus facilitates a transcendental rediscovery of his conscience and prompts him to construct a moral wall between himself and his neighbors. In Haslam's view, "Civil Disobedience" illustrates the difficulty that prison writers routinely face, of trying to construct an account of rebellion from within prison which does not reproduce the hierarchical ontology and alienating power of the prison.

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The role that imprisonment has played in policing interracial contact is an overarching theme of Barry Maxwell's essay, "Jazz in Jail: The Supplement of the Musicians' Narratives." Maxwell argues that narratives of urban professional jazz musicians who have been incarcerated on narcotics charges merit further exami- nation as a sub-category of prison literature. In this spirit, his essay explores Raise Up Off Me, the 1974 life story of African American pianist Hampton Hawes, and Straight Life, the 1979 narrative of white alto saxophone player Art Pepper. Maxwell notes that authors of jazz autobiographies almost always link the repression of narcotics to state agents' alleged hatred for the pleasure- premised interracial association characteristic of the jazz scene. According to these authors, race-mixing constitutes the first order "crime," while narcotics use functions as a secondary matter that helps to justify state repression. In contem- plating how imprisonment affects Hawes' and Pepper's attitudes about race, Maxwell asks whether "the racist and essentially exterminationist logic of prison"—the separation, hatred, and fear it inculcates—"is stronger, that is to say more determinative in its social effects, than the jazz in and through which so many social subjects played, heard and experienced a relatively emancipated community?" He concludes that Hawes' and Pepper's narratives ultimately express loyalty to the premises of free association and communal expressiveness embodied in jazz. The remaining essays in the collection explore prison culture from the per- spective of incarcerated men and women. Featuring some well-known and some lesser-known writers, these essays help to flesh out some of the daily realities of imprisonment, as well as the historical and ongoing ways in which race, class, and gender shape punishment practices and conceptions of crime. Furthermore, the essays foreground the complex ways in which incarcerated writers and read- ers use available narrative frameworks in carving out new forms of literacy for reading the impact of carceral logic on both sides of prison walls. In "Writers with Convictions: Doing Time at Century's End," Bell Gale Chevigny features some of the best stories, poems, plays, and nonfiction submit- ted to the PEN literature competition since 1990. "Deluged with news of crime, the war on drugs, and prison-building," Chevigny writes, "we hear next to noth- ing from the prisoners themselves. It is as if, while we slept, a nation has bur- geoned in our midst, and we have forgotten that we share a common life and language with its citizens." In an effort to bridge this distance and to save our incarcerated citizens from erasure, Chevigny's essay inducts us into a world that

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few know and most shun, and it illuminates how "coming to own language, own (up to) the past, and reclaim bonds with the present is a single process" for many writers in prison. At the same time, Chevigny argues, the works featured in "Writers with Convictions" invite us to recognize ourselves in "the harsh and grotesque mirror" of the incarcerated writers' work. Furthermore, these works expose us to—and implicate us in—the vengeance sweeping the country. If regressive penal policies are "a runaway train," prisoners' words are "a sign waved at the window, pleading for help to avert catastrophe." Chevigny insists, therefore, that it is our own humanity, not that of prisoners, which these read- ings call into question. Jaqueline Smith's "Fighting for Parental Rights in Prison" brings much- needed attention to the challenges that many incarcerated women face in trying to retain custody of their children. Because the circumstances of imprisonment often prevent women from maintaining regular contact with their children, social workers, lawyers, and judges often use the length of women's prison sen- tences as proof of permanent neglect and as justification for terminating their parental rights. Smith illuminates this legal catch-22 by chronicling her own struggle to preserve her relationship with her daughter, who was placed in foster care during Smith's incarceration for a drug offense. Although the social worker supervising the foster care placement aggressively fought to terminate Smith's parental rights, Smith educated herself about incarcerated mothers' rights and the court ultimately dismissed the case for termination. Offering powerful testi- mony about the need to fight against the assumption that incarcerated women are permanently unfit to care for their children, Smith notes that her lawyer judged her solely on her status as a prisoner. "In her eyes, I had already lost," she explains, but "she underestimated my strength and the love I had for my child." In "The Cupola," Frederic Berthoff offers a first-person description of a prisoner's transit to the facility where he will serve a twenty-year sentence for conspiracy drug charges. The narrator juxtaposes his fond reminiscences about his involvement in the drug trade—which provided intrigue, a sense of promise, and opportunities for fine dining—with descriptions of what it feels like to be shackled and handcuffed, to withstand condescending treatment from self- important U.S. marshals, and to sustain the humiliation of a strip search. In describing his own experiences, the narrator also provides snapshots of a wide range of prisoners: a wizened old white man who has already spent 17 years in prison, a brazen young skinhead who plans to learn germ warfare in the service

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of white supremacy, an African American man who views the War on Drugs as a ploy to rid the streets of "blacks and Spanish," and a 32 year-old man already greatly aged and racked by diseases, the names of which he cannot read on a medical questionnaire without the narrator's help. With these portraits, the nar- rator calls us to remember men who, "born of the same mother earth as all of us, sit for eternity, staring at vacant whitewashed walls" (14). Sylvia Kleinert's "Passage Through Prison: Reframing Aboriginal Art" and Deena Rymhs' "Discursive Delinquency in Leonard Peltier's Prison Writings" provide productive possibilities for a cross-cultural comparison of the roles that racialized incarceration practices have played in delimiting citizenship privileges. While art historians, critics, and curators have traditionally viewed Aboriginal art within the universalizing frame of western aesthetics, Kleinert foregrounds the colonial context of Aboriginal art and situates it in relation to Aboriginal peo- ple's 200 years of collective experience with incarceration. Prisons have been part of a cultural continuum of colonial discipline and socialization in Australia, Kleinert explains. "Indigenous incarceration has been used as a means of teach- ing 'civilization,' a means of controlling and managing a modern democracy." Discussions of indigenous art nonetheless routinely ignore the primacy of incar- ceration in Aboriginal people's colonial experiences. "What is the relationship," Kleinert asks, "between the well-established ethnographic frames for the primi- tive noble savage that sustain idealized constructions of Aboriginality within the nation state, and these absent representations of Aboriginality as an abject, crim- inal other?" She insists that a study of Indigenous prison art which acknowledges the prison's prominent place in the historical consciousness of Aboriginal people, and which recognizes Aboriginal prison art as a significant factor in struggles against colonialism, can help to clarify the ethical and moral stakes of current efforts to atone for historical and ongoing abuses of Aboriginal people's human rights.

Kleinert's essay concludes with a discussion of the integrated art programs now offered in contemporary Australian prisons as part of an effort to reduce recidivism. While Kleinert argues that these programs provide Aboriginal people with opportunities for sharing their experiences, for discussing problems they face in their communities, and for developing practical skills that will serve them after release, Rodriguez's essay reminds us of the complicated status of cultural productions that are both enabled and coerced by the prison. Echoing Kleinert's analysis of prisons in the Australian colonial context, Deena Rymhs begins her discussion of Leonard Peltier's Prison Writings: My Life

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is My Sun Dance by arguing that, in the Native American context, the prison is not just an apparatus of detention and punishment but rather a metonymic structure signifying the colonization, criminalization, and containment of an entire people. Rymhs situates incarceration within a network of punitive mea- sures designed to diminish the sovereignty of Native people, from the prohibi- tion of tribal practices and the theft of land bases, to the forceful placement of Native children in residential schools and foster homes. In turning her attention to Peltier's writing, Rymhs explores how "out-law" texts re-inscribe the generic codes and master-narratives underlying the Western literary tradition. While Prison Writings seems to adopt standard features of the prison autobiography, including its apologetic stance and its theology of the afterlife, Rymhs argues that Peltier's apology is actually a defense of his people's actions, and that his theolo- gy overturns Judeo-Christian concepts in favor of his own Anishnabe and Lakota cosmologies. In Peltier's handling, the prison autobiography thus becomes a site of resistance—a medium for developing his consciousness in prison and for dis- rupting the authority of legal and Christian discourse. According to Rymhs, Peltier practices a form of "discursive delinquency," intervening in systems of representation where his agency has been denied by official history, the law, and the tyranny of genre.

Paula Bruno makes a related argument about Jimmy Santiago Baca's poetry in her essay, "Ni miedo de la pinta, ni miedo de la muerte: Jimmy Santiago Baca's Prison Poems." Bruno opens her essay by noting that the Latino/a prison inmate remains virtually absent in borderlands discourse, book-length studies of Chicano/a literature, and interdisciplinary studies of the prison system, while popular culture and the media regularly propagate facile, sensationalized stereo- types of Latinos as "vato locos." Conceptualizing the prison as a very real territo- ry within a Latino/a border space, Bruno argues for a reconsideration of the early poetry of Jimmy Santiago Baca, whose work demonstrates a deep personal and political engagement with the landscape of the prison. Bruno's essay provides a biographical sketch of Baca, discusses the development of the prison system in relation to minority inmates—particularly Chicano male prisoners, and offers detailed readings of Baca's poems, focusing on Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979). Bruno argues that Baca's poetry articulates both resistance and accom- modation to the hegemony imposed by the prison, thereby constructing a "bor- der interspace" within the prison system itself.

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In my own essay, "Legally Blind: Seeking Alternative Literacies from Prison," I seek to extend the scope of prison writing by exploring prisoners' reading practices as a crucial locus of alternative theorization. In discussing the forms of literacy that emerge in seventeen incarcerated women's engagements with paperback "true crime" books, I seek to shift the focus from conceptions of reading as the cure for what ails prisoners, to a focus on incarcerated women's reading practices as a potential resource for curing what ails us as a society. While discussions of prisoners' discourse tend to focus on radical writings of political prisoners and incarcerated intellectuals, I argue that we have much to learn from attending to the theoretical insights that emerge in imprisoned women's everyday reading practices. The notion of literacy that I propose is two-fold. First, I call for recognition of the insights that imprisoned women generate which might help to interrupt current punishment practices. For instance, their readings help to theorize the relationship between sustaining and perpetrating violence, and they illuminate how individual traumas signal trouble at the level of the system. Second, I call for the development of more nuanced methods for reading the complex, sometimes contradictory nature of incarcerated women's reflections. Rather than dismissing as false consciousness women's embrace of discourses that seem to disavow their own experiences, I argue that we need a conception of literacy which recognizes how cultural actors make strategic use of available narrative frameworks even as they struggle to carve out new ways of reading their own and others' experiences.

***

As guest editor of this collection, I occupy a unique position because I replaced the original guest editor well after she issued the call for submissions and selected the essays for publication. Because I did not participate in the for- mative stages of the project, I have found myself in the potentially problematic and potentially productive position of critically assessing what the collection does and does not offer. For example, I have found myself questioning why the collection includes only two contributions from currently incarcerated individu- als, why it focuses more on male than female prisoners' experiences, and why it features prisoners' discourse almost exclusively from the U.S. In a two-fold attempt to address these concerns, I would first like to acknowledge the material and political challenges involved in trying to include incarcerated writers in a project of this kind. I learned from corresponding with

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the former guest editor that she solicited prisoners' writings through a mailing list compiled by "Teachers for a Democratic Culture." Of approximately fifty submissions from prisoners, only about three were written by women, and the vast majority were prisoners' appeals for assistance with legal aspects of their cases. Frederic Berthoff s piece, included in this collection, is the only work culled from this call for prisoners' submissions; the other incarcerated writer fea- tured in the collection, Jaqueline Smith, learned about the project through per- sonal contact with the former editor. Even my brief involvement with the final stages of the project clarified some of the challenges that can arise in efforts to bridge readers and writers on both sides of the prison wall, including the time- consuming nature of written correspondence with prisoners, and the difficulty of securing publication permission from anxious prison administrators. As the second aspect of my attempt to address the collection's underrepre- sentation of writings by incarcerated individuals, writings focusing on women, and writings stemming from or addressing non-U.S. contexts, I would like to issue a call for renewed efforts to attend to such absences in future scholarship because they remain symptomatic of larger tendencies in the field. Still far too often, the production of knowledge about crime, punishment, and justice pro- ceeds without the participation of incarcerated men and women—individuals who are most affected by, and who have much to contribute to, such knowledge. Furthermore, although women comprise the most rapidly growing group of prisoners, they remain greatly underrepresented in discussions of prisoners' dis- course. It seems particularly urgent to increase the visibility of women of color in discussions of imprisonment, because their experiences continue to be elided in studies of incarcerated women, and because they have been most drastically affected by the draconian drug laws of the 1990s. For instance, the U.S. incarcer- ation rate for African American women increased by 78% between 1990 and 1995, an increase that is more than double the increase for African American men and for white women, and more than nine times the increase for white men (Davis 268).5 Finally, studies of prisoners' discourse would benefit greatly from the inclusion of more non-U.S. perspectives, as points for cross-cultural compar- ison of punishment practices, and as potential sources for challenging U.S. penal policies and interrupting their increasing exportation around the globe.

5According to a study conducted by Amnesty International, the rate of imprisonment for black women is now more than eight times the rate of imprisonment for white women (Amnesty Interna- tional 19).

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While I have noted directions for future scholarship, I would like to con- clude by emphasizing what this rich collection does offer. From the essays that re-read familiar texts and genres through the lens of the prison, we learn how writers variously resist and reify the racist, individualizing, and isolating logic of incarceration. From the essays that read experiences of imprisonment from the perspective of incarcerated subjects, we learn how imprisoned writers and read- ers work with and against the narratives and artistic mediums available to them, as they struggle to carve out new forms of literacy for reading prisons' role in shaping life on both sides of prison walls. When I was speaking with Sakina, a 35-year-old African American woman imprisoned in the North Carolina Correc- tional Institution for Women, she argued that prisons serve as a means to keep African Americans disenfranchised. "They are settin' us up in here to make us naive, to not let us know what we got to look for when we go out there," Sakina contends. "They are trying to keep us in bondage because they tryin' to keep us blind. But I refuse! I refuse if this gonna happen to me." In rendering audible the historical and contemporary voices, concerns, and insights of incarcerated men and women, this special issue invites us to undertake a similar refusal—to refuse the role that racialized practices of imprisonment play in fostering the social death and disenfranchisement of huge portions of our citizenry, and to refuse the grip that law-and-order discourse has on our cultural, political, and legal imaginations. The essays in this collection issue an urgent call to take up the dif- ficult yet vital task of creating a world in which prisons no longer serve as the foundation of civic freedom and social peace.

WORKS CITED

Amnesty International. United States of America: "Not Part of My Sentence"— Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody. AI Index AMR 51/01/99. March 1999. Burton-Rose, Daniel, Dan Pens, and Paul Wright, eds. The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998. Chevigny, Bell Gale. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999. Chinosole, ed. Schooling the Generations in the Politics of Prison. Berkeley, CA: New Earth Publications, 1996. Davis, Angela. "Race and Criminalization." The House That Race Built. Ed. Wah- neema Lubiano. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. 264-279. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

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Fraden, Rena. Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Franklin, H. Bruce. The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the Ameri- can Prison. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. , ed. Prison Writing in 20th-century America. New York: Penguin, 1998. Harlow, Barbara. Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992. James, Joy, ed. Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003. Rideau, Wilbert and Ron Wikberg, eds. Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars. New York: Times Books, 1992. Trounstine, Jean. Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001.

APPENDIX Critical Resistance 1904 Franklin St., Suite 504 Oakland, CA 94612 phone: 510-444-0484 fax: 510-444-2177 email: crnational-AT-criticalresistance.org www.criticalresistance.org

Incite! Women of Color Against Violence P.O. Box 6861 Minneapolis, MN 55406 www.incite-national.org

Moratorium Campaign P.O. Box 13727 New Orleans, LA 70185-3727 phone: (504) 864 - 1071 [email protected]

Youth Force Coalition 1357 5th Street Oakland CA 94607 [email protected] www.youthec.org/youthforce

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