Customer Reviews

Prison Writings in 20th Century America

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H. Bruce Franklin has done us a great service by providing us with insights into American society which most of us are too busy or too myopic to see clearly. Franklin's selection of works by America's prisoners from Melville to Malcolm X from O'Henry to Hogan provides a view of America from those who were marginalized by the dominent society. It is important that we as a people see and understand these observations and take them to heart. The introduction by Tom Wicker is as disturbing as some of the collected writings. Wicker, the noted journalist who covered the Attica Riots for the New York Times, lists the hard facts about the prisons of the 1990's. Crammed into warehouses, overcrowded, ignored by social services, the new prisoners are victims of a get tough drug policy which has quadrupled the number of inmates in the United States in the past twenty years, despite a decrease in the overall crime rate. America, the lagest consumer of drugs in the world, is also the largest incarcerator for drug users. Our unenlightened policy has resulted in the United States having more prisoners behind bars that any other nation in the world, including the former Soviet Union. It certainly explains our much bragged about low unemployment rate as well. With two million of our young men locked away in prison, the percentage around to be unemployed is drastically reduced. A boom economy. The unfortunate result of this domestic policy (discounting of course, the two million in prison) are our free young people who are denied adequate educational facilities because prison funds are a priority in the state budget. More and more, prisons are big business: good for construction, good for local employment, good for the politician's statistics, and good for the deep pockets of the correctional specialists. The damage our national prison policy is causing to the fabric of our nation is incalculable and will continue to cause damage for generations to come. Professor Franklin has done his country a great service. But, as previous reviews have shown, many of his fellow citizens would like to ignore this problem and put it out of sight, much like they have agreed to do with two million of their fellow citizens. Shades of the gulag. The delight of this book, however, is that the prisoners'writing shows that, despite being marginalized, despite being crowded, abused, and left to rot in a system of "indeterminate sentences," some men and women continue to not only preserve their souls, but actually create art and with it the power to move the rest of us to truly see and feel. We are not surprised that the caged bird can sing. We are surprised (to our shame) that it sings so well.

H. Bruce Franklin has assembled a remarkable collection of prose and poetry from America's most silenced corner. As a survey of prison literature (both poetry and prose), it educates and questions; as truth from America's most oppressed class of citizens, it is soul-shaking and heart-rending. The selections expose the ugly face of American justice, but also put human faces on its many victims. These days, it isn't popular to want to give prisoners anything, even credit for writing such powerful words. Yet their power cannot be denied. The men and women whose work appears in this book write to communicate their shattered lives with all the passion of any writer in the free world. Their words, sharp as razor wire, are hard to forget, and I commend Mr. Franklin for putting together such an unusual and revealing anthology. -Jeff Evans, Author of Undoing Time: American Prisoners in Their Own Words

The writings in this book gave me an insight into some of the most "real" experiences in our history. The writings are moving and are so deep you actually feel like you are living what they're writing. It helped me understand to not be so quick to judge people in prison and to remember that although they are in there, they are still human beings.

A great cross-section of prison literature in America. I especially appreciated the historical analysis, exploring how our modern penal system grew out of the post-Reconstruction backlash in the South. As more and more Americans are sent to prison, the culture of the prison becomes more and more relevant to us all.

As usual, Professor Franklin's interpretations are off-base due to his obsessive-compulsive readings of the texts. While many of the works collected herein are deserving of attention and can stand on their own, Franklin's one-note thought process and style ruins one's enjoyment of them. Apparently this is a problem for all of Franklin's works, and the courses he teaches, which often ignore the text and the human reality in favor of his (frequently cardboard leftist) theory du jour.

This is no way for a humanist to behave, and of course ultimately it hurts the causes he himself espouses. And most likely the humans he hopes to help. Criminals, after all, are not cartoon cut-outs who spout whatever it is Franklin wishes to hear.

A reader/professor based in Cambridge, Mass.