Okay, let me say I do not think I was the typical inmate. Not that I was rare, but I fit within a certain type. Middle-class and educated and searching to get back on the track of a lucid life I would say describe the people I knew who writing and reading in prison; even if they might have written “a lucid life”.
However, many more inmates were readers. Some sought education and some sought entertainment. It was all a thing to do with the vacuum of time given us by the federal government.
The writer of LitHub's Sacred Space: Why Libraries Are Essential to Incarcerated Writers is a convict. I recognize the outlines of his story, even if his details vary far from mine. Do I need to say the whole piece needs to be read, even by those skimming this post?
You’d think a library in a small-“t” town Southern jail would be a quite threadbare affair, and for the most part, you’d be right. The bigger jails in the larger communities had slim pickings and much use, but in this whistle-stop of a County Seat, there were twenty four beds and a couple hundred books.
The concrete walls and steel-barred cell faces made no distinction between public and private conversations, and on holiday weekends the population would swell to as many as fifty, sixty people, any over the maximum rated capacity sprawled out on their well-worn shelter mats on whatever floor space they could occupy and not get stepped on.
***
You’d think libraries in prison would be pretty dismal places, the sacred overwhelmed by such unrelenting profane that they would shrivel and dissipate to leave only the sticky-slick pages of Black’s Law and State Statutes abstracts, and you’d be mostly right.
The closed-in spaces of jail became open dorms and endless corridors of “real” prison, where men with long sentences and little hope vied daily for their own sense of “sacred,” their own solace, almost exclusively at the expense of another’s. Most times what is portrayed on TV only touches the surface, cuts a glimpse, of the lengths some inmates will go to achieve the ever-elusive “status.”
I would peruse the library—small, as it was an afterthought—in those first years and feel the new tensions of my life bleed away, if only for that moment. Very few books were complete, even fewer had ever been “new,” and some old-timers had collections of their own books as impressive as any in that prison’s library. But still, just that minuscule sense of my own solace was enough.
***
My last transfer in North Carolina landed me in another Mayberry—this one a 500-bed working camp that was mostly open dorms, bunkbeds with just under thirty two inches between them, one airport-locker “secure space” per inmate, and a cast of characters who came and went at least as fast as they did when I was in jail, but were profitable for the State as low-cost road-maintenance crews, so at least the food was better.
I never went on a road crew, but because of this prison’s significance as a working camp I had access to not only a dentist, but a thousand-volume library that supplied free copies of crosswords that dated from the 1960s to the 1980s.
***
The prison library at MCF-Stillwater is an iconic place founded—and partially funded—by Messrs. James and Younger long before the “New” prison complex was built in the village of Bayport, MN in the 1930s. The theater /chapel building had been renovated as the Education Complex just before I arrived, and the library was, literally, the first room you passed as you exited the Security sally-port, and contained over eleven thousand books, as many—or more—as my school library.
***
I again visited with Tolkien, McCaffrey, Weiss, Heinlein; heard the call of The Odyssey, the Foundation, The Silmarillion; explored Pern, Two Rivers; and found a quiet place—irrespective of the range of tyranny or kindness of the various librarians—where worlds overlapped, a scent of the sacred in the dank, unwashed profane of prison life. Even though the overall stress levels I endured compared with my time in North Carolina were greatly reduced, I would still feel my shoulders settle, my whole being relax ever so slightly in the sanctuary that was in, not necessarily of, a State prison anywhere.
***
I now hold Associate’s and Bachelor’s Degrees, Microsoft Office Specialist certification, Toolroom Machinist Diploma, American Welding Society certification, over two dozen related vocational certificates, all earned in prison. I attribute those achievements to the patience, persistence, and open-mindedness it took for a quiet, awkward child to expand his world far beyond the small school library he first fell in love with.
That library no longer exists, its contents emptied into the community when the school closed, its bit of sacred space, the launchpad for so many hundreds of kids like me, rent asunder by the consolidation of resources referred to as Progress. I shed tears when I found out the school had been shuttered, the heartbeat of another small community lost, another sacred space I’ll never be able to rest in, to take shelter in, again.
One less gossamer thread to bind my soul to what is Real.
Although, not an American story, or an American writer, Imprisoned for His Writing, Ahmed Naji Found Freedom in Literature, his reaction to imprisonment was the same as the writers I knew at Fort Dix FCI. Think about that: Americans reacting to imprisonment in the same fashion as a man imprisoned in a Third World prison. So much for MAGA.
For my millennial generation of Arabic writers, Ahmed Naji is a name we associate with play and risk. Naji is a practitioner of humor and sarcasm, profanity and sex positivity, all interwoven with a politics of despair. He is terrified of melancholia and nostalgia, but through this fear, a close reader can feel the warm presence of a vulnerable man. At the age of 40, his career consists of many chapters already: an anonymous blogger, a cultural journalist, a music and arts critic, a novelist, and now a memoirist as well.
coverIn February 2016, Naji was sentenced to two years in prison for “violating public decency” with his novel Using Life. In his new memoir Rotten Evidence, he recounts his experience of incarceration. In honor of PEN International’s annual Day of the Imprisoned Writer, I talked with Naji about life in prison, the many personas of memoir, and about the debates on incarceration and literature in Egypt.
***
Mona Kareem: There is a rich tradition of prison literature in Arabic. What made you decide to write about your prison experience in the memoir form instead of the novel? A reader can notice that your memoir, at a certain point, becomes more of a nonfiction book.
Ahmed Naji: When I was in prison at one of my family visits, my brother told me he had met the renowned Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim—a man who tasted the steel bars of prison for half a decade during the 1960s. Ibrahim wanted to give my brother an ink chamber tube to give to me so I could write while I was in prison. During Ibrahim’s time in prison, pens weren’t allowed, and so they had to be smuggled in so that political prisoners like Ibrahim could write. But it’s different now—I had no problem getting pens when I was in prison. This encounter summarizes my prison experience and how it differs from previous generations of writers.
Ibrahim and his contemporaries were politically incarcerated. Me? I wasn’t jailed for my political activism. I wasn’t a member of political party or revolution movement. And when I was arrested, I was alone, not surrounded by my party members in the cell. So, it felt almost as if the literature of Arabic prison life had duped me, offering narratives that bore no resemblance to my own lived experiences. This disconnect drove me to review my own story, independent of the framework set by the established Arabic prison literature.
The urge to articulate my ordeal was overwhelming, yet I couldn’t frame it in the confines of fiction or a novel. I tried by the way—I wrote more than 30,000 words in a novel project that was so bad and stinky. Authenticity was my only avenue. During my case, I was gagged by legal restraints, forced to navigate my words carefully to avoid jeopardizing my defense. So after I left the prison and the case ended, I needed to digest the whole experience. I needed to write freely about all that happened. I needed to dissect fragments of myself, laying them bare on paper. It’s one thing to examine yourself; it’s another to etch it into ink for the world to see. This self-scrutiny was a challenge far too intricate for the realm of fiction; it needed to be raw, real—flesh and bone on paper.
***
MK: You are a cultural journalist, novelist, and now memoirist. In fiction, almost everything is permissible, while in memoir, there is an ethics and a pursuit of articulations and mediations, a different vulnerability. How did you navigate this shift?
AN: I’ve noticed that many writers of prison literature tend to act as voyeurs, captivated by the diversity of people they find themselves with. Prisons and detention centers are spaces where people from different classes and backgrounds are forced to live together, so the writer meets the people he will usually never encounter.
But writers often tokenize these individuals, sharing their stories and secrets without their consent; this really bothers me. Often when political prisoners write about their experiences and label other inmates as “drug dealers” or “thieves,” just because authorities have given them these labels. It’s ironic because these same authorities might label the political prisoner as a “terrorist,” yet their fellow inmates wouldn’t call them that.
This is just one example of the ethical issues that can crop up in prison literature. I chose not to follow this path, not just because it conflicts with my own writing ethics but because it’s unfair to the people I lived with for over a year. More importantly, my goal went beyond simply writing a dramatic story or appealing to the reader, I wanted to create something that truly examines the concept of prison on a global scale, encouraging us to think of alternatives.
I entered prison thinking my COPD would put an end to me before I left. Actually, I hoped it would. This left me thinking more of what got me there — the depression and its attendant reckless behaviors — and the people I had known. CC put me onto the last idea by suggesting I write about Muncie and life here. I know Joel C wrote about prison, but has not published yet. I worked out a prison novel while there; it will wait until I get further along in digitizing what I have written.
Now, let us look at censorship in prison. I hope in light of the preceding, you will understand just how cruel it is.
I am chagrined at how long I have held onto Reading Between the Bars from Pen America.
Carceral censorship is the most pervasive form of censorship in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the departments of corrections (DOCs) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia censor literature – and the rationales they employ for censoring books are vast and varied.2 In this report “Washington” will refer to the state and “District of Columbia” refer to the capital. Prisons ban specific titles, based on the alleged threat of their content – a tactic similar to that of book banners who have targeted public schools and libraries in the past two years.3Meehan, Kasey, and Jonathan Friedman. “2023 Banned Books Update: Banned in the USA.” PEN America. April 20, 2023, https://pen.org/report/banned-in-the-usa-state-laws-supercharge-book-suppression-in-schools/. Prison banned book lists in many states contain thousands of unique titles; any incarcerated individual in that state is barred from reading any title on the list.
In addition to content-based bans, there is a second, even more pervasive form of censorship unique to prisons: content-neutral restrictions, which categorically reject and restrict literature based not on its content but a host of other factors, including but not limited to the sender, a book or magazine’s appearance, or whether the incarcerated person obtained permission to receive it from a prison administrator. This content-neutral censorship is not what many first think of when they hear the phrase “book ban.” However, these policies have the effect of denying incarcerated people literature by limiting book deliveries per month per person, limiting the quantity of literature in a person’s cell or locker at a time, returning literature to senders if they’re not mailed in white paper or other specific packaging requirements, limiting literature purchases to a small list of state “approved” businesses, prohibiting the delivery of free books, used books … Prison censorship is distinguished not just by its targeting of specific titles or topics, but by the sheer number of tools in the censors’ toolbox.
Prison officials commonly justify censorship as necessary for rehabilitation and the maintenance of safety and security. The rationale that censorship should be used to accomplish these goals is specious—and yet often receives little scrutiny.
In a letter to PEN America, William Daniels Jr., incarcerated in Kentucky, wrote: “Within the Prison Industrial Complex, I am told that ‘SECURITY’ must be maintained at all costs, even at the cost of my education, of opportunities that could well lead to my betterment, potentially keeping me from returning to this side of the razor wire fences, or who knows, . . . perhaps even finding my own humanity.”4Letter sent from William Daniels Jr. at Northpoint Training Center (Kentucky) to PEN America, March 31, 2023.
Literary Activism has also picked up on this problem with Ending Censorship Applies to Prisons, Too: A Prison Banned Books Week 2023 roundup and call to action.
U.S. prisons remain the institutions where the most censorship occurs. This has not changed, even as school and public library book challenges have skyrocketed in numbers since 2021. Censorship thrives in prisons for several reasons, including the fact that the private, for-profit industry doesn't need to care about the rights of those housed within them. Indeed, it also thrives because the general public does not understand how bad the conditions are for those experiencing incarceration, does not understand how the prison industrial complex operates, and, frankly, the general public does not understand why they should care about those who are in prison.
This differs from schools and public libraries, which have generally positive perceptions in the public eye. Moreover, those who use schools and public libraries are those who are, by public perception, law-abiding citizens (and in schools, the perception is further bolstered by the fact these are children).
Recidivism goes down when individuals experiencing incarceration have access to books, but prisons limit access by not having libraries or only having old and out-of-date materials in those libraries; putting extreme limits on where and how books can be sent to those inside the facility; allowing mailroom employees to pick and choose what they determine to be "appropriate"; or a combination of these or other factors. If access to books decreases recidivism, then why would prisons limit it so much?
The answer is profit.
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One of the most important bills related to book bans floated on the national level this year is also one that has received little attention: The Prison Libraries Act. U.S. Representatives Emanuel Cleaver, II (D-MO), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), and Shontel Brown (D-OH) proposed the bill in April, which would authorize $60,000,000 over six years for state prisons to provide library resources and services — indeed, this isn’t just about dropping tons of books into the prisons and moving on. Trained professionals would be there to help people use the educational and entertainment resources. The Act would also help build powerful coalitions between prisons and the local libraries in their community.
The Prison Libraries Act bridges the gap between work being done on the ground for schools and libraries, and that is being done for prisons. Right now, it continues to sit in the House Judiciary Committee, but it is primed for the 2023-2024 legislative season.
If you believe in the rights of all to read, then that extends, too, to what continues to happen in prisons across the country. The same goes in the other direction: if you care about prison censorship, then you also care about what is (or is not!) happening in schools and public libraries.
If prison is to rehabilitate and not merely to brutalize and dehumanize our fellow citizens, then we need to allow prisoners to read and write without fear or censorship. Do we not understand education is a better deterrent than prison? If we do, and we continue to imprison as we have, then we are fools or hypocrites when we also talk about rehabilitation.
sch 11/18
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