Week Five, Post Two (Synthesis & Connection)

In order to understand the writings of prisoners, we must first understand the fact that it is the environment that many eventual convicts are raised in. The childhood of the first prisoner that was looked into involved a paralyzed mother, who had been injured to his father’s rage issues and easy access to a gun. By the age of 29, he was serving a five-to-life sentence due to drug and alcohol addiction, and eventually, due to California’s three-strike rule, he was sentenced to life in prison. Furthermore, growing up, he and his siblings moved throughout foster homes. The first one was the house of their mother’s first son and his wife, which was a house in which he experienced more trauma and abuse then he cares to recount. It is crucial to understand that many people that are deemed “unfit” in our society were never given the tools to succeed, and the prison-system operating throughout the United States now does nothing to solve that or address larger, deeper-rooted issues.
This story provided a foundation for this week’s overview. In this week’s set of lectures and lessons, the class will read prisoner writing from 1900-1967, get a deeper look into inside practices in prison, and understand the foundation it provided leading up to the 40-year rise in mass-incarceration.
Prison songs were one of the first ways in which prison conditions and the emotions it coincided with were recorded and presented. This was a tradition that had been passed on from slavery, to convict leasing, and eventually prison labor.
Early modern American prisons hold many similarities to common day prison, including society viewing prison as a normal life experience and even expectation for poor people of color. That meant for white people, prison was a complete and total political and cultural shock. In reality, conditions in prison that black people had been vocalizing for decades had gone unbelieved by white people until they were forced to experience it themselves. A great example of this occurring was the prison experience of a man named Jack London, who wrote ‘Pinched’:  A Prison Experience and The Pen: Long Days in a county Penitentiary. He later explained that his jail experience was so poor that it is what turned him into a socialist. He was consistently denied his rights in court and he realized that police brutality was really real, even if he had never experienced it directly. In prison, those with specialized positions were forced to tyrannize over and exploit other inmates, and the actual staffing in the prison was consistently understaffed, undertrained, and worked actively to perpetuate a poor prison culture.
Political prisoners also made up a large portion of the prison population, especially those in the early 1900s that advocated for women’s and worker’s rights, peace, and many self-identified socialists. The government’s new tactic of jailing those who advocated against them directly lead to an increase in the overall prison population. Many activists took to writing about their jail time, including the book  Prison Memoirs, an over 500-page book and the best-sustained record of a prison sentence and the experiences that it entailed. It exposed corruption, debilitating condition,s arbitrary punishments, and the fact that many of the employees’ missions were for their own enrichment and sense of power. Furthermore, this whole process of jailing people had become even less effective due to the overall increase in mandatory sentencing that resulted in prison being less adaptive.
Lastly, during the early 19th century, there was an increase in the imprisonment of women. In her novel Cell Mates, Sanger advocates for women who had been arrested for poverty, sex work, self-defense, and political work. Kitty Marion is a prime example for this, who was imprisoned for handing out a birth control pamphlet, and said that prison only invigorated her further and that she had “came in a spark, and would go out a flame”. She wrote that women were forced to live without basic sanitation, and used her voice to contrast the popular image of adequate prison conditions that society had been led to believe.
It was during this time period where prison writing truly began to boom, and publishers and outlets began to truly take it seriously. For example, Jack London, mentioned earlier, had his work published by Cosmopolitan. Robert Elliot Burns, another prisoner around the same time period wrote the book, I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, which exposed brutal conditions throughout the system, and contributed heavily to Georgia prison reform that took place shortly after. While Burns himself was racist, he also used his voice to offer genuine insight into the even worse conditions that black prisoners faced. This can be directly compared to modern-day media, such as the hit TV show Orange Is the New Black, which is based on the prison experiences and inequalities that the producer had witnessed and experienced.
This connects back to the way that early 19th-century prison writing was used to expose horrid conditions in a way that people had never understood or had known about before if they hadn’t experienced it themselves. In order to advocate for true justice in our modern-day communities, we must first understand the issues at hand and the problems that we have ingrained into our everyday lives and into our systems.