Writing to Survive Behind Prison Walls

This exploration of prison literature reveals a profound paradox: within society's harshest sites of physical confinement, the human mind often achieves its greatest expansion. The discussion traces this genre from its origins in 6th-century Rome with Boethius, who, awaiting execution, wrote "The Consolation of Philosophy" by transforming his cell into a laboratory proving the mind's freedom despite bodily captivity. This template persisted through figures like John Bunyan, whose 17th-century "Pilgrim's Progress" turned imprisonment into an act of religious dissent, and Oscar Wilde, whose "De Profundis" and "Ballad of Reading Jail" evolved from personal anguish to systemic critique.

The survey spans Dostoevsky's Siberian labor camp observations in "The House of the Dead" to modern American writers like Daniel Genis and Reginald Dwayne Betts, who document prison's sensory assault—the constant noise, the smell, the cyclic time that warps human experience. Crucially, the conversation examines how writing functions as survival technology: Malcolm X copying the dictionary to acquire the language of power, Shaka Senghor using letters from his son to confront inherited trauma, and incarcerated women documenting medical neglect and the shackling of childbirth.

Yet the discussion confronts contemporary threats to this literary tradition: systematic book bans targeting reform literature, the digitization of mail that severs tactile family connection, and "Son of Sam" laws that silence whistleblowers. Ultimately, the genre poses an uncomfortable question to free society: If prisons reveal a civilization's true nature, as Dostoevsky argued, what do our current practices—censorship, profit-driven surveillance, the erasure of human dignity—say about us? The literature insists that writing is evidence of indomitable spirit; the remaining question is whether we're listening.

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Welcome back to the deep dive. We are doing something today that I've

Unknown Speaker  0:04  
been looking forward to for a long time. Me too, this one's a bit different for us. It is usually we take a topic, you know, maybe it's a tech trend or a historical event, and we really drill down into the facts, the figures. That's hard data, exactly. But today, we are doing a survey of literature, and not just any literature. We're looking at a specific, intense and frankly, kind of terrifying slice of the human experience. We're talking about prison literature. We are and it's a genre that, you know, it sounds niche until you start piling up the books. Oh, absolutely. And then you realize you're looking at what is really a foundational pillar of global culture. It's huge. It really is. And we aren't just talking about like modern crime memoirs here, not at all. We're talking about a lineage of writing that stretches from sixth century Rome, which is just wild to think about, all the way to 19th century Siberia, and then right up to the Modern American penitentiary as a continuous, unbroken thread. And as I was reading through this stack, and it is a massive stack of source material, there was this central paradox that just kept hitting me over and over again. What's that we think of prison as a place of stopping? It's a hard stop. The state puts you in a box to stop you from doing whatever you were doing. Right? It's defined by restraint, by walls, by the deprivation of sensory input of freedom,

Unknown Speaker  1:24  
and yet historically, these exact conditions of extreme physical confinement often yield the most expansive, the most boundless mental and creative output. That is the core tension, isn't it? It's the pressure cooker effect when you strip away a person's freedom of movement, their autonomy, their very name, in some cases, what is left the mind, the mind and the mind trapped in that box, it really has two choices. It can collapse in on itself, or it can expand. It can go inward and upward, right? And so our mission for this deep dive is to trace that expansion. We want to understand how writing functions in that space. Is it just a way to pass the time, which is part of it for sure, of course. But is it a survival tool? Is it a weapon?

Unknown Speaker  2:08  
And I think for me, the most interesting question is, how do people use writing to reconstruct an identity when the entire system is designed to erase it, and we're going to see that writing in prison is, I mean, it's rarely just a hobby. It's an existential act. It's about proving you still exist. I write, therefore I am, in the most literal sense, exactly. And to do this justice, we have to cast a very wide net. So we're looking at philosophy, poetry, journalism, and, of course, fiction. And before we jump into the history, I think we need to clarify the scope here, because when people hear prison lit, they might think of true crime or maybe a celebrity memoir about a short stint somewhere. Sure, the more sensational stuff, but the sources we have today are pointing to something much, much deeper. One of the sources we looked at from five books actually traces the roots of this genre in the American context all the way back to the oral narratives of freed slaves. This is such a crucial distinction to make right at the top. If we look at the post Civil War era, specifically the Jim Crow laws, what you had was a system that was explicitly designed to re enslave black Americans, but this time through the legal system for things like convict leasing, exactly men who were theoretically free were arrested for things like vagrancy, which could mean anything, and then leased out by the state to work in mines and on plantations. It was Slavery by Another Name and their saris, which were recorded much later by things like the Works Progress Administration. They formed this bedrock of oral prison literature. That's the perfect way to put it. An interviewer would show up, maybe with a microphone, and ask, I thought you were free after the war, and the person would have to narrate this absolutely harrowing journey of being stripped of that freedom all over again. So that core narrative, the I was free, and then the state took me. That's really the heartbeat of the genre. It is. But to see the literary architecture of how a prisoner writes, how they structure their thoughts on paper. We actually have to go back much further, much, much further. We have to go back to the ruins of the Roman Empire. Okay, this is where the timeline really blew my mind. We are starting with Boethius. The year is 524, AD, the grandfather of the genre, anicius, Manlius, severinus, Boethius. That is a name that commands respect. It is and he was a man who commanded respect. In his time. He was, for all intents and purposes, the prime minister of Rome under the ostrogoth king Theodoric. So he's not some common criminal. Oh, not at all. He was wealthy, brilliant, a philosopher, a translator of Aristotle. He was at the absolute pinnacle of his society, and then, as it so often does in autocracies, the wind changed, gets accused of treason, right? Treason, and this part is delightful, magic. He was accused of using sorcery to plot against the king. You know, it's funny how often magic gets thrown in there when the political charges are a bit thin. It's a clap.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
Classic move. It was a setup, largely, but the result was that he was stripped of his titles, his wealth and his freedom. He was exiled to a remote prison near Pavia in Italy, and he was sentenced to death. So he's sitting in a cell waiting to be bludgeoned to death, which I think was the method of execution back then, just brutal, horrific. And he decides to write, but he doesn't write a woe is me diary. He doesn't write an angry manifesto. He writes the Consolation of Philosophy, which became one of the most influential books of the entire middle ages. It was a best seller for 1000 years, and the structure of it is what's so fascinating. It's not a monolog, no, it's a dialog. It's a dialog. He imagines a woman, an allegorical figure. He calls lady philosophy appearing in his cell, she sees him weeping and feeling sorry for himself, and she basically tells him to pull it together. She's the original tough love coach. There's no sympathy there at first, none at all. She engages him in this rigorous debate. Boethius is complaining that he lost his fortune, his status, his good name. He's asking the eternal question, why do bad things happen to good people? And what's her answer? She walks him through this incredibly logical argument. She introduces the concept of the Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel of Fortune, we think of the game show, but this is the original, much more serious metaphor, right? And it's a powerful one. She says, Boethius, you climbed onto the wheel of fortune. You happily wrote it to the top. But the nature of a wheel is that it turns. You can't enjoy the ride up and then complain when it inevitably goes down. That is simply the mechanics of the world. That is a brutal kind of comfort. It's basically you knew the rules of the game when you started playing. But then she pivots, and this is the key. She argues that true happiness cannot be found in things that can be taken away from you. If the king can take your money, then the money wasn't the source of true happiness. If he can take your title, the title wasn't it either. So what's left? What can't be taken your mind and your virtue, the internal world. So he uses the prison cell as a kind of laboratory, a space to prove that the mind is untouchable even when the body is about to be destroyed. Exactly. He establishes the cell as a crucible. He argues that while his body is confined by King Theodoric, his mind is free to roam the universe, to discuss providence and God and the nature of good itself. He set the template for all prison writing to come. The body is the captive, the mind is the free agent. It's the ultimate act of dissociation. Really. You separate the self from the horrifying situation you're in. And that template, that model, it just dominates for 1000 years. We see it pop up again and again. You get King James, the source of Scotland in the 15th century. He was a prisoner for 18 years, 18 years, I can't even fathom that. And he wrote a book called The King's queer, which is this long allegorical Dream Vision. He's physically locked in a tower. But in his book, in his mind, he's flying, he's exploring these fantastical landscapes. It's pure escapism, but a very intellectual kind of escapist, precisely. But then we hit the 17th century, and the vibe changes. The purpose of the writing starts to shift. We get to John Bunyan, and this feels less like a philosophical exercise and more like an act of protest. Yeah, this is a massive shift. John Bunyan was a tinker, a mender of pots and pans, and he was also a lay preacher, but he was a nonconformist, meaning he wasn't part of the official Church of England. Exactly. He wouldn't use their prayer book. He preached his own sermons. So he was arrested for preaching without a license, which, again, to our modern ears, sounds like a kind of zoning violation, but back then, it was sedition. It was a direct challenge to the state's power, a challenge to the king's authority over the soul, and for that, he spent 12 years in Bedford jail, and he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress. Now, unlike Boethius, who was writing to console himself, to find inner peace, Bunyan was writing to preach, he was writing to assert his spiritual authority against the state's legal authority. So it's resistance. It's an active tool of dissent. It is absolutely active resistance. He's saying, you can lock my body in this damp, miserable jail, and Bedford jail was a nightmare by all accounts, but you cannot stop my message from getting out. And the incredible irony, of course, is that because he was in prison, he had the uninterrupted time to write the book that would go on to become the second most read book in the English language. Right after the Bible, the prison actually amplified the very thing it was designed to suppress. The state inadvertently built the megaphone for its most articulate dissenter. You couldn't write a better story. It's perfect. So looking forward a bit into the 19th century, we see another evolution. We move from the religious descent of Bunyan to something more

Unknown Speaker  9:43  
personal and yet political in a completely different way. And we have to talk about Oscar Wilde. Ah, yes, this is one of the most tragic and fascinating arcs in all of literature. You have Oscar Wilde, the dandy, the wit, the celebrity, the man who said one should either.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
Be a work of art or wear a work of art. He was all about surfaces, beauty, pleasure and esthetics totally and then the crash 1895 he's convicted of gross indecency, and he gets two years of hard labor. And let's be really clear about what hard labor meant in Victorian England, this wasn't just sitting in a cell with a typewriter, not even close. This was the treadmill, a pointless, torturous device. This was picking oakum, which is tearing apart old tarred ropes until your fingers bled. It was a system designed to break the body and through the body the spirit. And out of this, this absolute degradation, we get De Profundis, deep Profundus, which means from the depths. And it is. It's a long, 50,000 word letter addressed to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, the man who was largely the catalyst for his downfall, the very same. But the physical reality of how this book was written is just as important as the words themselves. One of the sources mentions the paper. It was blue stamped, prison foolscap, yes, the prison governor, who was a slightly more humane man than the previous one, allowed him to write, but with very strict rules, he was allowed one sheet of paper at a time to get a new sheet. He had to turn in the old one. Wait, wait, think about the mechanics of that for a second. He's writing this incredibly long, complex emotional letter, and he can't read back what he wrote yesterday or last week, he has to hold the entire structure, the argument, the emotional arc, all of it in his head. That's, I mean, that's a feat of memory and discipline that is just mind boggling. It's astounding and the tone. It's not the witty epigrammatic Oscar Wilde of The Importance of Being Earnest, not at all. It's a man stripped of his armor, of his wit. He writes about realizing that sorrow, not pleasure, is the supreme emotion of which man is capable. He moves from an esthetic of beauty to an esthetic of suffering. There's that line where he says, I used to live on Honeycomb, and now he's eating the bitter bread of sorrow. He's forced to find meaning in the ugliest place imaginable. But he doesn't just wallow in it. After he gets out, he writes The Ballad of Reading jail, and this feels like he's turning the lens outward, away from himself. This is where he becomes a reformer. He enters the prison as a fallen celebrity, but he leaves as a witness. The Ballad of Reading jail is a piece of propaganda, and I mean that in the best possible way, he wanted to show the world the systematic cruelty of the system he had just endured. Everyone knows that one line and all men kill the thing they love, but the parts that hit me harder were the descriptions of the other prisoners, the day to day misery, the separate system, the enforced silence and isolation. He highlights the absolute brutality toward children, and yes, they imprison children as young as seven or eight in reading jail unthinkable, and he writes that haunting couplet that every prison that men build is built with bricks of shame. He is systematically dismantling the moral authority of the Victorian State. He's saying, you think you are civilized, but look at what you do to the weakest among you in the dark, that idea that the prison reveals the true, hidden nature of a society is a perfect segue to Russia, because if anyone understood that, it was Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky, you simply cannot talk about the genre without him and his story. Honestly, if you wrote it as fiction, people would say it's too dramatic, too over the top. The mock execution. Amok. Execution. It's 1849, Dostoevsky is a young man part of a radical intellectual circle. He's arrested for discussing banned books, which is a theme we will definitely come back to. It's a recurring theme. It is. He and his friends are sentenced to death by firing squad. They march them out into semyonov Square in St Petersburg. It's freezing cold. They put the death shrouds on the first three men. Dostoevsky is in the next group. He's watching his friends believing they're about to die. He calculates that he has maybe two minutes to live. I cannot even begin to process the terror of that moment. What goes through your mind? The drums roll for the execution, and then at the very last second, a messenger rides up from the Tsar stop. The Tsar, in his infinite mercy, has commuted the sentence to hard labor in Siberia. It was a setup, a piece of cruel theater. The Tsar never intended to kill him. He just wanted to traumatize him into submission. It was psychological torture of the highest order, and it worked. It completely changed Dostoevsky forever. So he's sent to a Siberian prison camp for four years, and out of that experience comes the House of the Dead, right? And this book is so interesting because it's published as a novel, but it's barely fiction. It's essentially a memoir of his time in the katorga, the labor camp, and he's not in there with other political prisoners. No, this is the key. He's with murderers, thieves, hardened criminals from the peasant class, and it's an anthropological study. He's observing them, listening to their stories, and realizing that these men who society has written off as monsters are complex human beings with souls, with talent, with a sense of honor. And there's one anecdote from the House of the Dead I want to dwell on because it connects the 19th century to the present day.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
In a way that just gave me goosebumps when I read it. I think I know what you're talking about, the chess set. The chess set, yes, in the book, Dostoevsky describes an inmate in this frozen Siberian hell hole who spends months painstakingly carving a chess set out of wood. He hides it in his boot. It's this precious, delicate, beautiful thing created in a place of utter brutality, a small piece of civilization, he made himself exactly now fast forward 150 years, we have a modern source, an American writer named Daniel genius. He served time in the New York state prison system in the 2000s and genus is reading the House of the Dead in his cell in New York. He reads that passage about the chess set. He looks up from the book, and he looks at the cell next to his and

Unknown Speaker  15:41  
what is the guy in the next cell doing? He's making a chess set out of paper mache and spit. It's just, it's like time collapses in that moment, Gina's called it a psychedelic moment, and it is. He realized that the prison experience is universal. It doesn't matter if it's 1850s Czarist Russia or 2010s America. When you lock human beings in cages, they have the same fundamental needs, the need to play, the need to create, the need to assert control over materials. The state changes. It can be a czar or a department of corrections, but the prisoner's response, that deep human impulse, is timeless. It's the physics of doing time. As one writer put it, the conditions reliably create the behavior. And another fundamental part of that physics is the battle for identity. You mentioned that the system tries to erase you. It starts with the name. It always starts with the name. In Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Jean Valjean ceases to be Jean Valjean. He becomes prisoner 24601, and Daniel genus talks about this exact thing he was prisoner vado, 483328,

Unknown Speaker  16:40  
he says the daily struggle is to remain Daniel, when everyone in a position of authority calls you o4, a, they take your clothes and give you a uniform. They shave your head. They dictate every moment of your day, when you eat, when you sleep, when you shower, you are reduced to a biological unit of management. And this brings up a really interesting point from the sources about tattoos. I've always thought of prison tattoos as, you know, gang markings or just something to do out of boredom. But genus frames it very differently. He frames it as a reclamation of the body. He poses the question, why do prisoners cover themselves in ink? And his answer is, because it is the one thing the guards cannot take away, right? They can strip search you. They can take your books, they can take your commissary food, but they cannot wash off the ink. It is a permanent way of saying, this skin is mine. I decide what it looks like. You do not have total control. Here. It's an assertion of ownership over the self, written on the self until they use a laser to remove it, which he also points out, is its own form of violence, of erasure, but the impulse is the same. I want to pivot now to the sensory experience of prison, because when we read these texts, whether it's gostoevsky or modern poets, the thing that really sticks with you isn't just the plot or the ideas, it's the feeling, the sound, the smell, the soundscape of incarceration is by all accounts, a nightmare. We have sources describing what they call the language of proximity. The language of proximity. That's a great phrase. Tell me more about that. It refers to the fact that you are never, ever alone. Yet you are profoundly lonely. You are living in a concrete and steel box with hundreds of other stressed, traumatized men. The noise is constant, the clanging, the constant clanging of steel gates. That sound is designed to be intimidating, the jangling of keys, the shouting from cell to cell, but also the shocking intimacy of it. You hear the man next to you using the toilet. You hear him crying in his sleep. You hear his nightmares. There's no Sonic privacy, no barrier, none whatsoever. And then the smell. One writer describes it as an olfactory assault. It's this horrible mix of industrial cleaners that burning bleach and Pine Sol smell layered over the smell of unwashed bodies, bad food and sweat. It's the smell of fear in institutions all rolled into one, exactly. And then there's the experience of time itself. This was the concept that really stopped me in my tracks. You're talking about Reginald Duane Betts, yes, Reginald Duane Betts, he's a MacArthur Genius fellow, now a Yale educated lawyer, a celebrated poet, but he went to prison at 16 for carjacking. He spent his entire young adulthood inside, and he has this theory about time that involves the hip hop group, the roots. This is fascinating. He calls it the roots theory of time. He tracked his eight year sentence, not by calendars or seasons, but by album releases walk us through that. How did it work? So he's in there, a teenager, and the roots drop their album. Things Fall Apart. A few years later, phrenology comes out. Then the tipping point, and he says he and his friends would be waiting for these albums like they were life refs from the outside world, connection to culture, a connection to the passage of time. But he realized that while the world was moving forward, music was evolving, styles were changing. He was static. He was stuck in the same place, wearing the same clothes, eating the same food. That's the time distortion of prison for us on the outside.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
Time is generally linear. We move through careers, relationships, locations, in prison, especially in solitary, time is cyclic. It's the same routine every single day for years and years. It loses all shape. Betts has this quote that just floored me. He says, You keep getting older and the percentage of the time spent in prison keeps shrinking, but the fucking weight of it doesn't Wow. That destroys the entire logic of doing your time. We tell ourselves that once you serve your sentence, you pay your debt, and you move on, the slate is clean, but Betts is saying the weight doesn't follow the math. Yeah, the trauma of those years of missing your youth, of living in that concrete box, it creates a kind of gravity well that you can never fully escape, no matter how successful you become, the past is never really past. It's always present. And part of that gravity is the deprivation. But it's not just deprivation of freedom, it's deprivation of basic human dignity. And for that, we have to talk about shantara. Gregory David Roberts, his account of an Indian prison is visceral. Is the only word for it, the water. The description of the water, yeah, he describes the communal water bucket having transparent worms swimming in it. That detail, I was gagged reading it. The image is so powerful. And the horrifying realization that follows is that in that context, you drink the water anyway, because you have to survive. And that really puts the American prison experience as bad as it is in a global perspective, right? We have brutal prisons in the US, absolutely. But Shantaram reminds us that the first world prison with a toilet that flushes and water that doesn't have worms, is a relative luxury in the global history of incarceration. It's a matter of degrees of horror, but even in the quote, unquote, luxury of a US supermax prison, there are things that are designed to break the mind. We have to talk about solitary confinement. We looked at the anthology. Hell is a very small place. This is the deepest circle of hell in the modern system. We are talking about Boethius in a tower with a window and a philosophical visitor. We are talking about a sealed concrete box, 23 hours a day, no human contact for years, sometimes decades. And the writers in that book describe the specters of madness. The brain is a social organ. It evolved to interact. It needs input. When you cut that off completely, the brain starts to eat itself. People hallucinate. They become catatonic. They lose the ability to form coherent thoughts. The paradox they describe is that you are more isolated than any human being should ever be, but you are also never truly alone because of the constant surveillance. You are watched but not seen. You are an object. And yet, despite all this, or maybe in some strange way, because of it, the 20th century, turned the prison into a university for revolution. This is the great boomerang effect of political imprisonment. A state locks up a dissident to silence them, but they inadvertently put them in a place where they have nothing to do but read, think, write and organize with other dissidents. You create a revolutionary incubator. Exactly We see this with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island with his writings, it became conversations with myself. We see it with Martin Luther King Jr's letter from Birmingham jail, one of the most important documents of the civil rights movement, written on scraps of paper. But the archetype for me is Malcolm X. Malcolm Little, right. He goes into prison as Detroit Red, a street hustler, a burglar, a criminal, and he comes out as Malcolm x1, of the most formidable intellectuals and orators in the 20th century, and the primary mechanism of that transformation was literacy. It was There's that famous story of him in his cell, copying the entire dictionary, word by word onto a tablet, which sounds incredibly tedious, but think about what he was actually doing. He was downloading the language of power. He was acquiring the tools of the oppressor so that he could use them to dismantle the oppression. He realized that his inability to articulate his thoughts was its own kind of cage. Learning new words was like finding the keys to unlock it. He writes about reading by the dim glow of the corridor light long after lights out was called and he said that he was more free in prison than he had ever been on the streets of Harlem because his mind was finally awake the prison walls basically disappeared for him. It's an incredible story of self creation, and that trajectory from criminal to intellectual, from a man defined by his actions to a man defined by his ideas, is still happening. Shaka Senghor, his book is called righting my wrongs. Shaka story is so powerful because it deals directly with violence. He was in for murder. He was a violent man in a violent system. He spent years in solitary confinement filled with rage. And the turning point for him wasn't a religious conversion or a sermon, it was a letter from his son, from his young son, and his son writes to him, and I'm paraphrasing here, mom says, I have to learn to control my anger, or I'll end up in prison like you. That is just a dagger to the heart for a father, it shattered him. He realized that his legacy, the thing he was passing down, was his own trauma. He was infecting his son with his anger, and he decided in that solitary cell that he had to break the cycle he had.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Incredible insight that his urge to kill a cellmate over some minor disrespect Wasn't a sign of strength, it was a symptom of his own unaddressed trauma from childhood. And that's a nuance that this whole genre gives us. It moves us away from a simple good versus evil binary and towards a more complicated and I think, more true understanding of trauma versus healing. Shaka didn't just need punishment. He needed to understand why he was so broken in the first place, and writing was the tool he used to perform that self analysis. We also need to shine a light on a part of the genre that often gets ignored, or at least gets less attention, and that's the literature written by women in prison. We looked at the collection inside this place, not of it. The male narrative definitely dominates the genre, Dostoevsky, wild Malcolm X, but the female experience of incarceration is distinct and in some specific ways, often more harrowing. The medical neglect is a huge theme, a huge theme, the forced sterilization that happened in some state prisons, often without proper consent, and the practice of shackling women during childbirth, I just I can't wrap my head around that, yeah, you are in labor, one of those vulnerable moments of your life, bringing a new life into the world, and you are chained to a bed. It's barbaric, it is. And while a book like Orange is the New Black, the original memoir by Piper Kerman became this huge pop culture TV show, the book itself served a really important function when it came out, it acted as a bridge for a mainstream audience. Exactly Piper Kerman was a middle class, well educated, white woman. She was, for many readers, the safe avatar to enter the world of a women's prison. And to her credit, she used that privilege to highlight the stories of the other women she met, the mothers, the drug addicts, the grandmothers from all different backgrounds, she showed the mundane reality of it, the boredom, the petty rules, but also the deep friendships and support systems that women build in those environments. It helped to normalize the incarcerated woman, which is always the first step toward building empathy, but, and there is always a but, as these voices from inside get louder and more articulate, the system itself starts to fight back. We are seeing a wave of censorship in prisons across the country that is truly alarming. It is The Empire Strikes Back to use your phrase. We have reports like reading between the bars and research from groups like the works of Justice Task Force that document how prisons are systematically banning books. And they aren't just banning books like how to make a bomb or something obviously dangerous. No, that would be understandable from a security perspective. They are banning books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, a book about the history of mass incarceration. They are banning books about prison reform. They are banning memoirs by formerly incarcerated people, they are banning books that critique the very system that is holding them, that is viewpoint discrimination. Plain and simple, it's unconstitutional, but they also use these sneaky content neutral bans to get around that. For example, a widespread rule is banning all used books. Explain the official logic there? Why would they ban a used book? The official line is always contraband. They claim people can hide drugs or messages in the spine of a used book. But think about the economic impact of that rule. A used paperback might cost two or $3 a new hardcover from an approved, state sanctioned vendor might cost 25 and prisoners make what pennies an hour for their labor? If that so, by banning used books, you are effectively banning reading for the vast majority of prisoners who are indigent. It's a tax on knowledge. It's a barrier to education and self improvement. And speaking of new barriers in technology, we have to talk about the digital threat. This is something I didn't know about until we dug into this research, and it is genuinely dystopian. The digitization of mail, this is a massive shift happening right now in prisons and jails all across the country. It used to be that if your daughter drew you a picture for your birthday, or your wife sprayed her perfume on a letter, you got that physical piece of paper in your cell. You could hold it. You could smell it. It was a tactile link to your family, to humanity, and now, now that letter goes to a third party processing center, often owned by a for profit company like smart communications or Securus. They scan it, they destroy the original, and the prisoner gets a low res digital scan on a tablet or a kiosk, so you never touch the paper your daughter touched. You never get to smell the perfume, never the tactile connection is completely severed, and again, the excuse they use is drugs paper soaked in fentanyl. But all the data shows that drugs primarily come into prisons through staff and other channels, not the mail. So what's the real reason surveillance and profit. When all mail is digital, it's searchable, it's trackable. It becomes part of a massive surveillance database, and often prisoners have to pay to use the tablet to read their mail or to reply to it. It's monetizing the most basic human desire for connection with your loved ones. It's turning love into a revenue stream.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
That is dark it is and it connects legally to the issue of Son of Sam laws. Right? These are the laws that are designed to stop criminals from profiting from their crimes. They're named after David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer. And on the surface, most people would agree with the principle a serial killer shouldn't get a million dollar book deal for writing a lurid account of his murders. That feels wrong, but the legal language of these laws is often very broad and tricky, because what counts as profiting from the crime Exactly. If a political prisoner writes a memoir about the injustice of their incarceration, are they not technically writing about their crime? If the state can then seize their royalties, it creates a massive disincentive for them to ever write that story. It creates a chilling effect on their speech. So it silences the whistleblower. It prevents the stories that we most need to hear from getting out. And that's the direct conflict with the First Amendment. We need these stories. We need to know what happens inside these hidden places. If we tax the storyteller into silence, we are actively choosing ignorance. So given all these barriers we've talked about, the censorship, the digitization, the psychological weight of it all, we have to ask the big question, does writing actually help? Is it worth the struggle? Is it rehabilitative? Well, the science says yes. We looked at a scope and review of dozens of studies called words within walls, and it found that creative writing programs in prison have massive memorable benefits, like what improved self esteem, reduced emotional stress and anxiety. But the most important finding for me was about identity, reframing the self. Yes, the act of writing allows a person to reframe their own narrative. When you write, you stop being inmate 0483328,

Unknown Speaker  31:44  
you become the writer. You become a creator, an artist. You reclaim your agency. And we're seeing this idea being recognized at the highest levels of literary world. Now you have things like the inside literary prize. This is my favorite development in the whole genre. It's a major American literary award, but the jury is composed exclusively of incarcerated people in prisons across the country. That is just brilliant. Who better to judge the truth and power of a story than people who have been stripped of everything but the truth Exactly? And look at the winners. Imani Perry for South to America, Nana Kwame, Ajay brenya For chain gang. All Stars. These are serious, heavy hitting, nationally acclaimed books, and the fact that prisoners are the judges sends a powerful message. Your intellect matters. Your opinion counts. You are part of this cultural conversation. It invites them back into society, in a way, it treats them as creators of knowledge, not just as objects of sociological study, and you have journalists now like John J Lennon, no relation to the Beatle, who is a contributing editor for Esquire and publishing investigative pieces in the New York Times, all from inside. Sing, sing, prison. He's not just writing prison diaries. He's doing real journalism. He's reporting on the beat that he lives in. He's turning the lens around. So we've traveled from the sixth century with Boethius arguing with Lady philosophy in a Roman tower, all the way to John Jay Lennon filing stories on a tablet in New York. We've seen how the cell can be a tomb, but also a womb for creativity and transformation. It's the paradox we started with, the extreme constraint forces the expansion. But I want to end with a question, not for you, but for the listener. We've talked a lot about how this literature sheds a disinfecting light on the prison. But what does the existence of the prison tell us about ourselves, about our society? Dostoevsky gave us the answer to that more than 150 years ago. He said the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. So if we enter our prisons today, if we look at the book bans, if we think about the worms and the water in some parts of the world, if we consider the digitization of family letters, what is the judgment on our civilization? What does it say about us? That's the uncomfortable question these books force us to ask. If we deny prisoners the right to read, to think, to connect with their families. Are we really protecting society, or are we just diminishing our own humanity in the process? Writing is the evidence that the human spirit survives even in the worst conditions. The question this literature leaves us with is, are we listening to what it's trying to tell us? If you want to dive deeper into this, don't just take our word for it. Read the source material. Pick up the House of the Dead. Read to Profundus. Read Reginald, Duane, Betts or Shaka Senghor. The text is there. You just have to open it. It's more than worth the time. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai