American Prison Writing Archive

 I was not aware of this until I read A Shadow to the Visible Canon: A Conversation with Doran Larson. 

JEFFERY J. WILLIAMS: For the past 20 years, you’ve taught in prisons, organized teaching programs, collected writing, and written about it. How would you encapsulate your project?

DORAN LARSON: My work aims at bringing incarcerated people into the conversation about incarceration. They have been writing about the experience of incarceration for as long as we’ve had penitentiaries and prisons, but their work has been censored or destroyed or marginalized when it does hit print. Now, in the era of mass incarceration, there’s just too large a population to keep out of the conversation!

So, through the American Prison Writing Archive, book collections, and my own writing, I’m trying to convince people that incarcerated people have to be part of that conversation. They are the vanguard of understanding the most extreme form of state and police violence, short of execution, and one that’s legally sanctioned. Prisons are designed to keep us out as well as keep the incarcerated in, and without the voices of incarcerated people, we really don’t have a sense of the human cost of the current legal order. How much suffering do we require or tolerate in the name of public safety?

What does the archive entail?

It’s a continuation of the history of American prison writing, but with more people incarcerated than ever before, there is much more writing. Before the digital age, gatekeepers—publishers, agents, contest judges—created a bottleneck through which just a few writers would get their work out to a global readership, but with support from the Mellon Foundation, APWA is becoming the archive of record for direct prison witness in the United States.

How much have you gathered so far?

About 4,000 pieces, but our goal is to get to 10,000 by June 2025, which is the end of the grant period. We have work posted from every state except Hawaiʻi, and we’re working on that.

And I think what he says below about the importance of the voices of the incarcerated cannot be underestimated:

If you look at the patterns of criminalization, we are locking up whole demographic categories. But the issue is not why people are there. These are people who have been convicted and are doing their time, but now they are resources for understanding the actual experience, right?

You will find yourself sympathetic, but you have to understand that the vast majority of people who are in prison did the things that they have been accused of. You may think that their punishment is not appropriate, or that they are there for too long, but they are an important resource for understanding how prisons work or do not work. And we should care about the actual human effects of incarceration.

The following link will take you to the American Prison Writing Archive.

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