Prisoner Literature

Prison culture is primarily an oral one. Experience passes from mouth to mouth, and only the privileged, literate prisoner is able to write down prison tales and lore and fashion what is primarily a collective experience to his or her own situation. Convict authors seek to live in letters and escape from the obscurity to which the law has condemned them. Prisoner literature here is defined as writings by those convicted of felonies, not political crimes, and whose writing abilities were nurtured in prison. This entry is concerned primarily with American writers, although other nations with penitentiary experience—especially England, France, and Germany—have rich traditions of convict literature.

The great prison writers, most of whom were incarcerated for political or religious reasons, transcended their circumstances and have entered into the literary canon. They were writers and intellectuals before imprisonment. Writers such as Boethius, who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while awaiting execution under Theodoric the Ostrogoth in the sixth century; John Bunyan, who wrote his autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners while in jail in the seventeenth century; Antonio Gramsci, who developed his Marxist theory of hegemony while imprisoned for a number of years in Italy under the fascist regime; and the Russian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote The Gulag Archipelago while a political prisoner, all were authors before their prison experience.

Technically, the prison experience itself forms prisoner literature; it comes out of a life of confinement and punishment, and is usually written by literate felons who feel a need to pass the time or to express themselves. These are “common criminals,” and the vast majority of convicts fit into this category: those [Page 1245]who found themselves in prison because of drug offenses, murder, robbery, burglary, and other crimes. Because their books are outgrowths of their prison experience—an experience that to them is singular and often the product of culture shock—these convicts usually author only one book, largely autobiographical, of a quality that condemns it to one printing and quick public oblivion. But some convict or felon writers are exceptional. Most notable is one of the earliest, the fifteenth-century French robber and vagabond Francois Villon, who wrote some of the most striking poetry of the late Middle Ages and who escaped the executioner more than once because of the quality of mercy of the medieval criminal justice system. In the twentieth century, another French petty criminal, Jean Genet, achieved a minor place in the literary firmament.

The prisoner author usually writes about violence, because violence or the threat of violence is the common thread of the prison experience. The convict author is almost always the hero of the book, and the story is a search for personal fame and salvation. The prisoner attempts to transcend the violence of everyday life through the reassertion of his or her humanity and the search for a saving grace. Given the collective experience of prison life and culture since the inception of the penitentiary in the late eighteenth century, most prison tales take on similar characteristics and a few distinctive genres emerge.

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