Prison Writer
as Witness: Can DH Read for Social Justice?Doran LarsonHamilton Collegedlarson@hamilton.edu
Walcott-Bartlett Professor of Literature and Creative WritingDirector of
The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA)Hamilton College.Founding
Organizer: The Attica-Genesee Teaching Project (2011), and The Mohawk
Consortium College-in-Prison Program (2014);Editor: The Beautiful
Prison, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (2014);Editor: Fourth
City: Essays from the Prison in America (Michigan State UP, 2014);
Writer: "Incarceration’s Witnesses: American Prison Writing,” a free
MOOC on the edX platform (March, 2015).Author: Witness in the Era of
Mass Incarceration (2017).
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities0005710153October 15, 2021article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyrevised to pass encoding validation
Drawing from a largest and first fully-searchable digital archive of non-fiction
essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside US prisons
and jail, the article proposes that there exists a broad, well established, but
underappreciated mid-range manner of reading that stands between traditional
close reading and computer-aided distant reading of first-person witness
testimony. This mid-range or “cellular” reading method attends both to the
singularity of each text, and ventures widely enough to grasp that each text
gains credence and expository authority as one among aggregates of witness
testimony; it is, moreover, in facilitating such mid-range reading that DH can
provide readers with the foundation for moving from secondary witness and into
acting for social change.
This article proposes that there exists a broad, well established, but
underappreciated mid-range manner of reading that stands between traditional
close reading and computer-aided distant reading of first-person witness
testimony.
At 2.23 million, the inhabitants of US prisons and jails constitute a population
larger than Houston’s and just behind Chicago’s — a larger population than
sixteen American states.These states are represented by nearly one third
of the members of the senate; incarcerated people can vote only in Maine and
Vermont. Post-release re-enfranchisement policies make up a patchwork across
the other states . The collection,
archiving, and dissemination of prison witness described below is in part an
effort to raise the voices of incarcerated people from de facto civil death.
Nearly one quarter of the earth’s incarcerated human beings, and close
to one third of the earth’s incarcerated women, are drawn from the less than 5%
of people residing inside the US. . A notoriously race-driven system, poor people of
color live these numbers , while over 6,000-US confinement facilities, as well as the police,
courtrooms and prisons stand virtual lightyears away from moneyed white living
rooms where they appear as subjects of uncounted television dramas (and regular
humor) . As long as incarcerated people remain either
data points without faces or voices, or the criminal habitués of fearful popular
imagination, they are easily dismissed as 2.23M units of a type, rather than
being perceived as the nation’s fourth largest city of fathers and mothers,
brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren, wives and husbands.
The aim of this essay is to describe one instance of digital humanities practices
working not only in contradistinction from retro-humanism — the replication of traditional canons on line —
but as an irruptive, discursive intervention into the dis-equalizing social
practices from which retro-humanism might be counted as one distraction. It
describes an instance in which DH’s signature ability to close spaces between
people and archives seeks to close the social distance
between those populations that determine criminal punishment and those upon whom
punishments land, a distance that has been shown to mark nations where penal
practice is most harsh . The essay will
describe the organic emergence and growth of The American Prison Writing
Archive, an archive of first-person non-fiction essays by incarcerated people
that continues a 231-year history of American literary resistance to a
dis-equalizing institution that over the past forty years has grown into the
unprecedented American penal state. While the regular calls for DH to engage with
inequality, social injustice, and cultural critique assume DH as an extant
practice that needs to reassess its premises and methods , this paper describes an instance of marginalized
voices forcing a break out of prisons and into DH, and of their driving the
metadata behind the search facets availed to archive visitors. Roopika Risam
notes that Without attention to the omissions that exist
within digital humanities scholarship, the field risks replicating the
exclusions of a dominant culture that already relegates difference to its
margins. Here I describe a project that grew not from a
decision to address such DH omissions but that evolved into the digital in the
effort simply to keep up with the insistent will of those omitted by state
confinement to press their case for inclusion in, and thus expansion of public
discussion of US carceral practice. The APWA evolved from the labor of actors
among the very populations that have historically been marginalized by criminal
justice involvement — a testimonial action that, like other witness literatures,
demands its own manner of reading. Amid debates surrounding traditional close
and computation-enabled distant reading , this essay documents the inception and rapid
growth of a literary corpus that demands what I will describe as mid-range or
cellular reading — a position that not only has a well-established history as a
means of intervention in dis-equalizing social practices, but that is the apt
response to what incarcerated writers do: write for 2.23 million others while
making singular statements. The essay suggests that DH's definitive work of
closing material distances is the work to which incarcerated and otherwise
confined writers have always aspired: to broach walls (material, social,
cultural, of prisons, plantations, death camps) and thus to expose life inside
to readers outside, creating public interfaces in resistance to the prison’s
founding purpose in legal quarantine from the public sphere’s discursive life
. My claim is that whenever DH engages directly with
social injustice — let alone when those whose inequality has been socially and
legally sanctioned demand a place on digital platforms — DH is best assessed by
what it does or aspires to enable among social agents; and such enabling cannot
come solely through text analysis, text mining, or close reading, but must come,
if it seeks to affect change in practice, through a mid-range reading that
receives texts and affects readers as these texts are intended by documentary
witnesses: as singular statements that assume and offer context-dependent
representative testimony for a collective body. Witness literatures are by
nature representative in this way , even where
the witnessed event is not one seated in collectively sanctioned practice.
See, for example, Our Marathon [2013] at https://marathon.library.northeastern.edu/. When
witness-based, text-driven DH projects venture into social justice work, they
step onto a well-warn path behind those who have helped to disseminate slave,
Holocaust, and other witness literatures, whose reception incurs concrete social
effects. These effects have in the past been achieved without the benefits of
data mining or enlisting close reading techniques. They have, rather, come about
with acknowledgment of the singular human dignity of each witness, at the same
time that these witnesses have joined into a testamentary chorus of those on the
receiving end of dis-equalizing and dehumanizing practices . It is this mid-range reading that DH can aspire
to enable and accelerate as a social justice project. Computational methods can
help us to decide where to look and help us to look deeper and wider in the
archive; they cannot reveal to us how to feel, react, or take action in the face
of direct testimony to what the law looks like from the ends of fists and batons
inside walled and razor-wired institutions; and it is the moral choice to act
that is the beginning of changed practice. Computation can, however, atomize the
foundation in human witness that the archive can provide for action. Our primary
trust must and can confidently reside in the incarcerated (and the
detained, the enslaved…); the voices from inside generously usher us forward
into America’s Fourth City. These are teachers who want us to learn everything
we can about closed spaces where the law’s violence is always on open display.
The archive thus makes possible text analysis that will be of most concrete
value when, beyond mining the words of incarcerated people, it is guided by the
intentions of those inside. From the start, the APWA has prioritized respectful
and non-discriminating posting of incarcerated people’s first-person witness to
carceral experience; its faceted search capacities have been built exclusively
upon metadata provided by incarcerated people, who complete a questionnaire that
welcomes unprogrammed responses. (The questionnaire is linked at the APWA site.
See https://apw.dhinitiative.org/collection-description.) Other than a
signature granting one-time publication rights and contact information, all
information is voluntary. The archive accepts this compromise regarding
identifying information in face of the need for contributors to protect
themselves and to be given full control over their representation. Writers can
publish anonymously or under pen names. As described below, search terms for
text analysis are now in development with a consultant who has served
thirty-eight years in prison and who is helping to build a team of incarcerated
and formerly incarcerated advisors. Every step taken outside prison walls has
been and will continue to be guided by those inside.In this spirit, the
preliminary list of search terms has been drawn from the index of Fourth City, described below. Early planning for
and work on text analysis has been conducted at DePaul University, whose
mission is to serve marginalized populations and whose library has a history of thoughtful handling of prison-born
texts
Enlisting DH platforms for concrete social interventions is now vigorous
practice, See, for example, Cong-Huyen 2013, the Ferguson Syllabus at
https://sociologistsforjustice.org/ferguson-syllabus/in, and the
Mellon-supported April 2018 Our (Digital) Humanities
Conference at Le High University, a three-day meeting of social justice
organizations working through (or substantially supplemented by) digital
platforms http://wordpress.lehigh.edu/odh2018/about/. and such work
requires ongoing theoretical revision and questioning. Yet it may also be
under-explicated. Martha Nell Smith asks regarding DH projects, How have these items of knowledge and the organizations and
working groups who made them come into being?. This question should invite theoretical
consideration; here the question is addressed as literally as possible, as a
question about inception, sources, aspirations, outcomes, and potentials; and I
suggest that it is in historicizing the trajectory of DH social practice that we
set the grounds for the questions that theory might ask and address, thus
extracting theory from practice.
As Barbara Christian reminds us, theory not based in practice is bound to remain
elitist . In describing the analog birth and
into-digital growth of the APWA, I present an instance of DH serving not simply
as a means to expose and study a dis-equalizing institution, but to provide a
platform where incarcerated and free people can meet to begin setting the
grounds to generate new terms for critical legal and penal theory, and for
planning (or conceiving an end to) new penal practice. When theory grows out of
practice, it not only avoids elitism; it sets the stage for intervention. In
helping broach the walls of prisons (or detention centers, or other
state-sponsored lines of confinement), DH practice can constitute a
transformative, political action, thus shift[ing] the focus
of DH from technical processes to political ones. The need for expository action
regarding prisons is particularly acute when traditional journalism has been
largely barred from such work . This
essay suggests that DH can — as methodology — not only host witness born from
the lived experiences of difference in the U.S. , but can also, if read as the dis-equalized direct
us, facilitate moving the incarcerated to the front lines of efforts to uncloak
the work of an institution built to enforce all manner of inequalities and to
censor the dis-equalized. The distant v. close reading debate in DH replicates questions around how to balance addressing
mass incarceration as a statistical fact — as a data set — and/or as a human and
humanly articulated condition experienced and documented by discrete individuals
. I want to argue for a plenum of reading
proximities by advocating for the neglected middle-range of reading as more than
a space of transition between close and distant reading. Franco Moretti
himself writes in support of the radical diversity of
intellectual positions What I will call cellular reading is the most apt manner of reception of
what incarcerated writers — like other literary witnesses — do day by day,
decade by decade, over millions of cumulative human years: create paths for
readers to follow on the way to precipitating change in practice. Distant
reading can aid in mapping the landscape of testament to law’s violence so that
we know where to begin in tracking particular, and potentially class-actionable
paths through the daily violations of human, constitutional, and civil rights
and human decency inside the earth’s largest prison state; it remains in
mid-range reading, however, that we will see outside hearts and minds moved to
act.
In the spirit of drawing theory from practice, I build my argument upon the back
of a biography of the project in point.
The Distance from Here to There
In the winter of 2006, I initiated a creative writing workshop inside Attica
Correctional Facility. The class was entirely voluntary. It offered no college
credit. It would not bolster anyone’s appeals for parole. Only the will to learn
to write had brought thirteen men serving twenty to twenty-five-to-life
sentences to the room. Over the ensuing ten years, the stories I read and heard
painted an unrolling panorama of urban battlegrounds, rural poverty, and the
occasional scene of suburban desperation — nearly all marked by some form of
addiction or mental illness — as the backdrops to the booby-trapped road that
runs from arrest, plea bargains or the very rare occurrence of a jury trial, to
incarceration in a place built to produce pain, suffering, and rural employment
. Their stories regularly reinforced and echoed each
other, at the same time that each story was seated in an individual biography.
In turn, I could not avoid hearing their reports both closely and at some
distance: from the details of life in a home on a particular Bronx or Rochester
city block, to the public pretenders nearly all had hardly
spoken with before arriving in court. Over these ten years, dozens of men passed
through that workshop. No two were much alike. Yet they held many things in
common. A core group of six men attended for most or all of ten years.
Such groups are never a random sampling. Prisons screen those permitted into
such classes, by behavior record and mental condition (inside what have
become America’s default mental institutions , and writers are always a subset of any
population. Thus began to appear a testimonial corpus seemingly
pre-staged for text analysis: denial of freedom denies unlimited randomness in
experience. The men who joined the class were Black, Latino, Native-American,
Asian, and White, from large and small cities, and came from poor,
working-class, and, in one instance, from an affluent background. Together, they
offered stories of institutionalized degradation, of coping, and of unimaginable
resilience. But these, of course, are not the impressions one gains from
outside.
From its inception in 1790, the aim of the American penitentiary was less to cut
off lawbreakers from the public than the reverse . In his
Enquiry into the
Effect of Public Punishment Upon Criminals and Upon Society, Dr.
Benjamin Rush addressed the dangerous effects of letting the condemned speak to
or even be seen by the public This was not an unfounded fear. Gallows and other criminal confessions,
biographies, and autobiographies turned a healthy trade in colonial America.
As Jodi Schorb notes, Cotton Mather and (Rush’s friend) Ben Franklin both
profited by selling these texts (purely for moral edification, of course) to
colonials and to readers in England .; imprisonment would not only stanch such communication; it would
deter crime by allowing the images of penal suffering to expand to the limits of
public imagination . Prisons today have become
less a holding place for offenders than one relay in a closed circuit: we do not
need prisons in order to contain deviancy, Foucault notes; we need them to mark
a deviant class and thereby justify security apparatuses that both model and
enforce behavioral norms . Over the past forty
years, the abandonment of rehabilitation and embrace of punishment, or the
new penality, as the prison’s raison d’etre, has been built on the premise that
incarcerated people — these (black and brown) monsters and
animals — simply aren’t like us . The art of
punishing, Foucault reminds us, must rest on a
whole technology of representation. Prison walls, today
as in 1790, represent law’s monopoly on legitimate violence, they contain and
recycle criminalized demographics, they silence the condemned, and in turn they
allow fantastic images of the criminalized to be spread without intervention by
incarcerated people themselves. The ruse that this is about public safety
(incarceration has a marginal effect on crime rates ) can be maintained only as long as the public is not
apprised of the full, if often wounded humanity of those inside. At the end of a
forty-year US punishment wave, Rush’s fear of incarcerated people speaking to
those outside is warranted not only by fear of evoking public sympathy; it would
rip the screen upon which an eighty-billion-dollar prison industry and popular
media have cast all incarcerated people as not-fully-human . Their voices might dissolve public
moral pretense, revealing an industry built on the backs of caged and fully
human beings. The national prison strike staged from August 21 to
September 9, 2018, was largely about just such exposure, as reflected in
strike demands . Facilitating public
access to what goes on inside through the testimony of incarcerated people is
about shorting such closed circuits. It’s about revealing
monsters as the very able, primary witnesses to, and
most competent critics of the lie beneath claims of the threat that all
imprisoned people pose, as well as the lies of due process, judicial equity, and
respect for human rights. It’s about confronting and exposing the final, legally
sanctioned enforcer of institutionalized racism, classism, gender-ism, etc.
The bars to the public serving as secondary witnesses to the primary witnesses of
prison conditions are not only made of steel; they have been forged by the
courts , congress , and over two generations inside American minds. From the myth of the jury
trial promulgated by
Law and Order while only
2% US criminal cases ever goes to trial , to
the carceral soap operas of OZ and
Orange is the New Black, to the latest episode of
the human zoo carefully staged for Lockup, American
media have made fortunes selling misrepresentations of incarcerated people.
The critical literature on writing by incarcerated people is growing but is still
in its early phase . There is only one broad historical survey of US
prison writing, H. Bruce Franklin’s pioneering
Prison
Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist, which
offers decade-by-decade readings of this work from 1798 to 1989 . This book and the texts it explicates make
evident, however, that for as long as the US has presented itself as a bastion
of liberty, equal opportunity, and judicial fairness, prison witnesses have
documented the nation’s working state of intersecting penal apartheids. Prisons
isolate. They exile. They quarantine. Yet prison witness makes clear that these
messages have never been simply from in there. They unearth for us the
silent chambers beneath the nation Americans call here.
Computational work on the full canon of US prison writing is thus
overdue.
Franklin’s history ends in 1989, only a decade into the era of true mass-scale
incarceration (commonly dated from 1980). Important collections of essays by
political and politicized prisoners have appeared since then ; and Franklin himself has edited a survey of US
prison writing in the twentieth century, reaching to 1995 . But in summer 2009, as I found (again) in
searching out new texts for the second iteration of an undergraduate course on
US prison writing, there existed no broad national sampling of non-fiction
writing by people then living behind bars. In attending national and
international conferences for legal scholars and social scientists, I found that
even researchers who had conducted surveys or scripted interviews with
incarcerated people virtually all crunched this testimony into statistical
charts and graphs (which, for their purposes, were certainly of vital
importance). I heard no open ended, witness-driven testimony about carceral
life. I had not set out to become an editor of prison witness (let alone a
digital humanist), but the need — on campus and in the profession — became very
clear.
With the help of a research assistant, the first call for essays by imprisoned
people went out in fall of 2009. On February 1, 2014,
Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America was published,
including seventy-one essays from twenty-seven states . The title reflects the total population of US prisons and jails. More
importantly, as a first sampling of what a national gathering of contemporary
prison witness might reveal, the title indicates a collective experience as
cohesive as we might expect from citizens writing of their experience of New
York, LA, or Chicago.
From among the first forty-five essays received, eleven stable categories of
subject matter emerged and persisted into the final organization of the book.
This occurred despite the fact that incarcerated people have virtually no means
to communicate between facilities, let alone states, and often even between
cells blocks inside any one facility Facilities block communication in
order to thwart organization, such as that seen inside Attica in 1971 , and amid the recent prison strike, the latter
facilitated by contraband cell phones . ;
so the consistency of subjects was striking: autobiographical sketches of the
paths to prison, coping with prison life, slice-of-life examples of everyday
challenges inside, ways to seek peace, the damage incarceration does to
families, the injustices perpetrated inside, critiques of criminal justice
policy, the inadequacy of mental and physical health care, activism from inside,
prison reentry programs, and messages of warning or hope shouted out to kids on
the street or others inside. Take the state names off these essays and it is
impossible to tell they are not reporting from one institution committed to
vengeance and willful dehumanization, and where the residents struggle mightily,
day by day, to make lives worth the name. One broad division is that
incarcerated women (roughly one tenth of the prison population) face
gender-specific depredations and routinized sexual threats and assault from
male officers, as well as disproportionate discipline for petty offenses
among the fastest growing sector of the prison
population . These challenges also cross state
and regional lines. What the project revealed is that our Fourth City
is a metropolis of both willful debilitation and miraculous acts of human
resistance, not the least of which is the very act of bearing witness. These are
traits that anyone who has worked with incarcerated people might gather; one
could do so, however, without gaining the basis for attributing common struggles
and victories to a national population. But in gathering this work in a
relatively short period of time, from across the nation, the outline of
America’s carceral metropolis began to take shape. Several of the tropes
found in US prison witness are also transnational — crossing biographical,
local, national, continental, political, and criminal boundaries and
conditions .
In her 2012 essay,
Why are the Humanities so White?
Tara McPherson distinguishes a lenticular view, in which two discrete images can
be seen in one frame but never at the same time (her model for the
separate-but-equal divide between the histories of computing and social justice
activism since the 1960s); and a stereoscopic view, which layers distinct
viewpoints on the same subject to create a sense of depth . What I had experienced inside Attica
and what emerged from the Fourth City solicitation
was stereoscoping of deeply singular voices, each implicitly demanding — like
the human face for camp survivor Emmanuel Levinas, like Holocaust witness for critic
D.G. Myers — an ethical response to the witness borne by
individual human beings who are also all exemplars among a mass population; such
ethical response, moreover, is asked of a human listener or reader equally
implicated in the legal order that concretely and morally marks the distance
between the law-breaker and the law-abiding, the condemned and the protected,
and those subjected to or spared by the law. Here, stereoscopicism occurs in a
mirror: the layered depths of witness’ testimony to law’s violence reveal the
degree and manners in which those outside are either spared and protected by the
law (especially the white middle and upper classes) or co-objects of criminal
justice involvement (especially poor people of color). As in reading witness
texts from slavery, the Holocaust, or truth and reconciliation tribunals, it is
impossible to hear or read prison witness without hearing echoes across
biographies and texts, across razor-wired facility and state (and national)
boundaries. It is impossible to ignore abiding tropes generated from spaces that
hold those stripped of civil and basic human rights and effective citizenship
status — spaces the absence from which marks readers as those in the name of
whose security such quarantine exists, or as co-subjects of policing practices
outside (much as looking into original stereoscopes impresses us as much with a
view of a past, and with location of ourselves in a present, as with
the subject at hand). Readers are asked at once to bear secondary witness, and
to accept their own positions as either those in the name of whose protection
incarcerated people are forced to struggle to regain their discursive existence,
or as the similarly hyper-policed. The light cast by prison witness casts
silhouettes around readers outside — silhouettes deepened as readers are exposed
to each successive text, in contrast to the limited effects of close reading or
pixilated reading at distance.
Stereoscopism better approximates but is not, however, fundamentally adequate to
representing this situation, in which disparate and discrete biographies
intersect at singular angles with the enervating spaces of the prison and with
the legal positions of readers outside . Prison witness texts — in their non-interchangeability
and their clear linkages among themselves and in the minds of
readers — are best figured by a term that is at once literal and figurative, at
once metaphor and not, and that replicates the enunciatory moment of meeting
between witness and reader. This is a meeting that is not so much stereoscopic
as cellular, at-once literally of the body and of
architecture, of vulnerable flesh like the reader’s and of the stone and steel
that divide writer from writer and writer from reader, while each text carries
traces of the DNA of the next and yet remains distinct, as the condition of
identity and of life. Cellular reading is mid-range reading; it is reading at
proximal distance. No text is the whole, but the whole gains its status as
witness as an aggregate of each with each when each is read and held in the mind
as a singular whole, rather than as a mere yet-to-be-aggregated and mined data
vessel; authority lies in the “typical” moments across texts, while each text
remains absolutely authoritative regarding the experience, anger, aspirations,
hope, or hopelessness of its author — an author whose testimony, at the same
time, is shaped by widely experienced conditions: conditions implicating the
reader as part of the public in the public safety rationale for a city in cages.
Computation can accelerate location of common veins in this corpus; it can reach
reading communities at rates unimagined by previous witness writers in their
own time. DH can, in this way, facilitate a shift of authority from scholarship (or
state agencies) to the communities that any work can garner, as Kathleen
Fitzpatrick has observed . The APWA
also makes clear, however, the need to mind the ethical stakes here. As the
archive grows and computational methods are applied, the danger rises of
reducing back to data points the testimony of writers struggling to assert their
human dignity and singular integrity from among the data piles gathered by state
agencies and research. Computational analysis should complement and aid cellular reading; my claim is that, between academically inclined
close reading, and computationally enabled distant reading, it is from
mid-range, cellular reading that human readers will be moved to social action.
It is cellular reading that allows us to participate in the communities that can
complete the witness transaction, recognizing voices that never stand alone or
outside the legal matrix upon which we are all located; voices that are never
effective until embraced by others, and that work directly in the face of
organized authority that is often invisible to those outside.
Cellular reading is an irreversible process of revelation. Close reading one
piece of prison witness (or slave or Holocaust narrative) is qualitatively
distinct from reading five, and twenty, and a hundred; and while few readers can
commit to reading thousands of essays, cellular reading can set the ethical
context for data mining among much greater numbers.We need simply read enough to
see how our ability to doubt, to find excuses for testimony that reveals the
collective damage of collectively sanctioned and supported institutions thins
and vanishes as we read repeated reports on, for example, lethal medical
neglect, or feel the human toll paid by female victims of staff rape that
research shows occurs in numbers that rival reported instances of rape outside
. Amid multiple interfaces, some
readers will discover cellular links that surround and mark them as the
virtually law-immune or legally protected, while others will feel solidarity as
those living outside prison yet in subjection to the law’s pathologies.
Case in point: The media attention given to Henry Louis Gates’ arrest
for breaking into his own home, and later sharing a beer with the president
and the arresting officer, shows the social distance commonly assumed
between Harvard professors (as effectively enforcement immune) and Black men
(as the default objects of policing) .
Such cellular reading sets the grounds for what Jamie Skye
Bianco calls a relational ethics both between writers and between writers
and readers, where context, affect, and embodiment …remain
viably dynamic and collaborative. Johanna Drucker notes that situatedness and enunciation are intimately bound to each
other. Reading prison witness reveals a causal
exchange relation between these moments: when incarcerated writers write of
their situation, the reader — as a co-subject of policing systems, or their
beneficiary — sees revealed their own legal situation within the current order.
If cultural influence is indeed at play in every act of interpretation , the interpretation of prison witness is
irrevocably influenced by the position of the reader within legal culture.
Unveiling the complexities of a city in cages, each text retains its singularity
even as its uniqueness is dispersed across the whole. Close reading can
acknowledge any one text’s ethical demand; but as the numbers of exposures grows
an osmotic leak occurs; we hear the reverberations of beating on one steel wall,
pouring and echoing into the next across facilities, and state borders, and
across the affective interface of writers and readers. While we may then find
bracing patterns in data mining the archive, it is the base in cellular reading
that reveals that such witness is not like reading fiction or other literary
texts bound by time or subject. Here, writing is not representation; it is human
and (re)humanizing witness to the legal and extra-legal conditions that surround
and demark citizenship and fully human status inside a carceral regime that, as
Colin Dayan notes, metes out state-sanctioned degradation …
propelled by a focus on personal identity [and] the terms by which
personality is … threatened, or removed. Or, as a man from Texas writes, Ah to be a human being again! Worthy of respect and affection,
capable of dignity and contribution, to have a valuable life....
The following excerpts are offered as examples of how closely prison witnesses
speak to one another’s experience, of cellular testimony to
state-sanctioned degradation, and as practicum in
readerly response:
From Alabama:
In tiny surreptitious doses anesthesia is dripped into my heart — a formerly
complacent heart that is slowly beginning to resemble my dreadful
surroundings. An ache settles somewhere deep inside of me, pain linked to
the realization that something once deeply cherished has been stolen from me
during my outrageous two plus decades of incarceration. Years of sensory
deprivation has withered my ability to respond with anything resembling an
emotional reaction.
From Connecticut:
Lately I feel like I'm suffocating. Each minute of every day is a slow
asphyxiation. The worst death sentence in this country is being buried alive
in prison without hope…. I know that in me there must be a human being
beneath all this agony. It is a faith belief.
From Georgia:
After more than 10 years of continuous incarceration, I am slowly losing the
will to re-enter a society that has abandoned me. Contemplating this is a
symptom of institutionalization - I am cognizant of this fact while unable
to do anything to alleviate the downward spiral I'm currently experiencing.
From California:
Lately I’ve been seriously deteriorating… [A]t times I get this very primal
urge to attack the walls, attack my captors, and try to run free.… Sometimes
I’ll go days without leaving the cell, without eating or showering, just
paralyzed over the mattress and staring at the walls and having bad dreams.
Or I’ll go days unable to sleep, tackling ten projects at once, punching the
obscene walls, talking to myself and having hallucinations and wrecked with
anxiety. In desperate lapses I’ll hang from a sheet around my neck for a
moment, or cut a vein open.
From South Carolina:
My life was as different from Laura's [a recent suicide] as it could possibly
be. Two years later I was proven wrong when an officer emptied a full can of
pepper spray through the flap in my lock up door while I stood on the sink
trying to cut my wrist on the fire sprinkler. I hadn't eaten or drank
anything in nine days. My own girlfriend was in the cell next door loudly
urging me to kill myself. I am proof and testimony that if you do enough
time and allow yourself to become lonely enough you will turn to whatever
outlet you can find to ease that loneliness a little. If you are addicted
and obsessive by nature, as I am, then that addiction and obsession, left
unaddressed, will transfer itself to whatever target is available. Be it
starving, bingeing, exercise, purging, sex, self mutilation, I've engaged in
them all obsessively during the past years.
Some readers may feel in these passages a seamless continuum with the accepted
legal and public safety aims of incarceration. For others, such witness
resituates the reader vis-a-vis the law’s magnetic center in state-sponsored
violence . As revealing as distant
reading might prove, it also risks atomizing such an existential moment. This is
a case in which, as Cuban digital activist Ernesto Orozo remarks, answers ooze from the circumstances, and Renewed answers will always come from the resistance.
Growing into Silicon; or, They Came, so We Built It.
The final deadline for
Fourth City passed in the
fall of 2012. But work never stopped coming. Cover letters apologized for
arriving late and offered thanks for our willingness to read pages the authors
assumed would never see print. The initial pool of 154 essays grew to two
hundred, three hundred, then five hundred… Incarcerated people, given the
slimmest chance, were willing to risk their safety in order to get word out.
Incarcerated people have limited first amendment and virtually no
privacy rights, and courts have traditionally handed prison oversight —
including decisions about constitutional rights — over to prison
administrators themselves . See also, Robert
Saleem Holbrook’s essay, From Public Enemy to Enemy of
the State [2014] in which he
documents how much harsher his treatment became after he gave up violent
behavior and turned to writing and activism from inside. Each day
that I walked from the college mail center to my office, I carried yet more
envelopes from California and Texas, from Alabama, Oregon and Maine.
Incarcerated people have no direct access to the internet; all CFEs appear
in hard copy print. But it was not easy finding a publisher for
Fourth City (which one agent called a book for people who can’t afford to buy it); in fact, I was still seeking that publisher. I had
tapped a vein that would not be stanched. Happily, colleagues had secured a
Mellon grant to start up and support digital humanities projects through
collaborations between Hamilton Library and Information Technology Services
(LITS), a newly minted Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), and national
collaborators . At the end of 2012, we began our
conversations.
Credit for building the platform, storage capacities, and the sustainability of
DHi-APWA lies with the funders and the DHi-APWA team and LITS in an ongoing,
layered Venn relationship; but its inception, the populating of its metadata
contents and resulting search facets, and the growth of its content are due to
the unrelenting will of those inside to bear witness. The APWA receives
continuing support from DHi, the Hamilton Dean of Faculty, and, from July 1
2017, until June 30 of 2021, a major grant from the NEH. The APWA
currently hosts 3,307 essays, the equivalent of over fourty-six volumes the
size of
Fourth City. It grows by approximately seven
additional volumes each year (500 essays); and that rate is largely the result
of a single, quarter-page solicitation in the pages of Prison Legal News, a monthly magazine dedicated to legal cases,
legislation, and investigative reporting of interest to incarcerated people.
That we receive this number of essays from a small ad is testament to the sheer
size of the prison population; it is that size and scale that has allowed the
statistical skills of the social sciences to lead the national discussion of
mass incarceration ; it is scale that also creates the
ethical dilemma that the APWA itself now poses.
Incarcerated people and the writers among them are the subjects of intersecting
statistical and documentary determinations: from so-called hot-spot policing, to
sentencing guidelines that determine years of punishment from a grid; from the
recording of their every demographic trait upon entering jail and prison, to
psychological profiling, to the marking of every violation they incur inside, to
prison, block, and cell assignment, to whether they recidivate upon release —
release decisions increasingly influenced by risk assessment algorithms . Such mapping and examination, Foucault writes,
engages [penal subjects] in a whole mass of documents
that capture and fix them. Incarcerated people are rightly wary of
becoming the subjects of yet further datafication.
At the same time that we can use computation to help map the carceral landscape,
socially responsible and responsive text analysis must align itself with, and
serve to further the struggle of incarcerated people to be heard and read on
their own terms, thus avoiding the danger of refracting and deflecting the work
of prison writers — who are themselves the select representatives for other
incarcerated people — through our own presumptions. In this vein, we might use
computational tools primarily to locate, amid a mass of essays, those subject
clusters that incarcerated writers make salient: such as the prison industry’s
financial exploitation of incarcerated people, staff assault, damage to family
ties, etc. Such indexing can help readers to see the pervasiveness of such
concerns across the nation, respect the integrity of individual writers, and
create the basis for focused advocacy. Text analysis can thus work for the kind
of social justice action that
incarcerated writers
seek to forward. Socially conscientious data mining must recognize that witness
texts are not mere data, they are not simulacra. They are the literary corpus of
bodies and minds struggling amid the “penal harm” that the carceral state and
the American public has embraced for nearly have a century as an explicit aim
. Text analysis can serve this corpus and
amplify its voices by maintaining to it less an analytical than an indexical
relationship.
At the other extreme from distant reading, meticulously close reading will also
not bring us to the understanding of prison texts and practice that prison
writers overwhelmingly intend. Incarcerated people know they are held inside a
mass-scale system. Even when they focus on their own situations, they clearly
understand and articulate those situations as examples, not isolated instances.
The image of a city in cages — while it reflects the cohesiveness of subjects
and themes among prison texts — moves in the direction of better focusing our
views of that mass into the diversity and distinctiveness of a major metropolis.
The APWA’s facetted and key word searches allow further granulation — by
demographic categories, locations, keywords, and layering of these factors.
Computational work, as Moretti observes, offers not an
obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a
sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations,
structures. From their beginning in 1790, as Michael
Meranze points out, prisons have been spatial answers to social problems . They are shapes and structures
that, as Dr. Rush intended, alienate human relations. What we should be seeking
from computer-aided text analysis are mappings of these shapes, structures, and
relations as they are reflected in their counter-discourse, in humanizing,
mass-scale literary resistance. This is a literature that turns the prison’s
shapes and structures inside out: a literary corpus that exposes the
denaturalizing angles, shapes, and structures of penal confinement; a corpus of
textualized bodies and minds and hearts, presenting for mutual exchange and
transformation, the shared, fluid, and ineradicably interactive humanity of
those whose freedom outside and unfreedom inside are built upon, and have been
warped by, over two hundred years of broken relationships.
My conviction is that this damage will not be repaired by analysis alone.
Instead, we might approach our work as that of curation, what I would term,
“thick curation” — or, in a more text friendly term thick
indexing. The attempt here is not to follow our
interests in the archive, but to learn to see, and engage computation to aid our
learning to see law and justice as imprisoned people see them — to see, for
example, the wreckage that furnishes the path to so-called justice, and the ways
in which the law and a broken civil society have created that wreckage. Thick
curation and indexing will us to follow the branches of subjects and concerns
among incarcerated people. One model for this work is Darwin’s sketch of
speciation, reproduced in Moretti’s
Graphs, Maps,
Trees (Figure 1; ).
Translated into a register of texts, this graph becomes an index. The following
lines are excerpted from a list — based on the experience of the archive’s
front-line readers of incoming essays, with the consultation of a formerly
incarcerated person — that will serve to seed further work in text analysis.
Autobiographical Paths to Prison: Social and
economic disadvantages; Absentee
parents/damaging parenting style;Abuse;Incarcerated parentsPeer group or gang conformity;Alcohol/drug abusePrison Damage to Family Relations: Exile from
family; Damaged parenting (of
children);Damaged partnerships;Abandonment by loved ones;Strained relationsAdverse visiting conditions;Resolve, steps and/or attempts to heal/maintain; Partnerships;Parenting;W/ mothers, fathers, siblings,
etc.
Text analysis can help to populate these tiers with whole essays. Rather than
atomizing prison witness, this indexing model recognizes each essay, as a whole,
as an organic element of any map of life inside, and capable of presenting its
own purposes. It is important to note that nowhere does the archive suggest that
its makers presume to speak for incarcerated people, or presume to suggest what
readers will or should find there. This may be why, as the archive grows, the
rate of submissions increases . The APWA’s
credibility deepens in the eyes of incarcerated people (with the aid of
internet-enabled allies outside) simply because it has been trusted by other
incarcerated people to treat their work in whole, without editing, and without
secondary purposes.
Amid a highly politicized, national debate on mass incarceration,This
debate involves, among others, prison abolitionists [e.g. Critical
Resistance], a bipartisan push to reduce prison populations and attendant
costs , a victim’s rights lobby largely
supported by prison guard unions [Page 2011], and a Trump era Department of
Justice seeking to restart the War on Drugs that helped bring incarceration
to mass scale . the archive is built on
trust in incarcerated people and archive visitors; it is not intended to make
new arguments — as Tom Scheinfeldt once claimed it may not yet be time for DH to
do — but to provide a meeting place
where new questions can be asked about the human effects and costs of the
current legal order. Incarcerated people have been spoken for (and objectified,
medicalized, and demonized) for too long, including by academics. A thick
indexing method seeks to disentangle branches of consensus that appear among
prison witnesses even while imprisoned writers are denied communication with
their peers. The APWA’s sole presumption is that it can present the cells of
those branches and, in future, using computational aids, offer readers places to
start on the path of extended cellular reading.
While DH work shrinks physical spaces, it does not necessarily change the
direction of Supply (campus scholarship) to Reception (by other scholars, students, and the broader public).
The APWA attempts to serve as the mediating facilitator of an ambi-valent,
carceral margins-mainstream meeting point and
conversation that, among other effects, sidesteps the hack v.
yack I use this binary here in its crudest sense, one
unraveled by Nowviskie . dyad at the moment
theory assumes a secondary role to — and indeed grows from — an extra-academic
dialogic. Sociologist Bruce Western observes that the public safety returns on
incarceration are now badly outweighed by the social damage it imposes . The APWA offers visitors (including
voters) the opportunity to measure the human breadth and depth of carceral
damage. The project does not pose arguments but allows us to ask by implication
what new materialist epistemologies might be possible if we resituate
incarcerated people from their current place in public discourse as a mass
deficit, to positions as our foremost authorities on what imprisoned people are,
what prisons actually do, the real effects of the politics and economics of the
criminal justice industry as a whole, and how we might proceed on the path
toward greater humanity in addressing all the social, civil, economic,
political, and ethical failures that surround crime and racialized punishment.
The archive allows us to consider what happens when we shift authority from
prison administrators, law-makers, judges, prosecutors, police, and outside
scholars, into the hands of the community of organic intellectuals among
incarcerated people. It suggests that DH social justice work is what DH/SJW
enables: demystification of historically dis-equalizing institutions, laying new
grounds for newly goaled public policy and growing consensus about the
practicality and moral imperative for a range of abolitions: from judicial
misconduct, to police violence, the knowing creation of employment deserts,
domestic violence, poverty, failing schools, to prisons themselves.
Continuing the literary legacy documented by Franklin, these writers are creating
what may well become one of the largest bodies of witness literature in human
history Since that first call for essays in 2009, the APWA has
accumulated approximately 41% of the word count that The University North
Carolina’s Wilson Library holds in North American Slave Narratives — narratives produced over more than a full
century — and at the current rate, it will double in around six years.
— a literary corpus only possible on a platform that can sidestep the
censors (market-sensitive agents, editors, and sales reps) of commercial and
academic analog publishing. Unlike the most salient on-line witness archives —
at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum [USHMM] and the University of North
Carolina’s Documenting the American South’s archive of slave narrative — the APWA is a repository of primary witness
that expands as you read this sentence, as incarcerated people bear testimony to
their experience. Though already the largest such archive, it is clearly in its
early growth. Yet even now, its promise is clear: These writers are not only
getting word out about what life is like inside; many write about their lives
from birth to arrest, as well as through cumulative millennia of incarceration.
What DH work has done in this case is to build a platform not only for those
outside to look inside, but for those outside to see, from inside, the contours
of US policing, judicial, and carceral practices, as well as from the interiors
of the homes and communities affected by poverty, untreated addiction and mental
illness, unemployment, crime, and the damaging feedback loop of mass-scale
punishment that criminalizes poor people of color, the gender non-conforming,
and the mentally ill — punishment that can exacerbate the very problems that
precipitate crime . That closed loop is only possible
as long as the prison’s walls are reinforced by political and cultural circuits
that remain unbroken, as long as the public sees its social distance from the
condemned as based in moral virtue (rather than the chances of birth) and thus
lives complacently with walls of concrete while consuming the salacious media
misrepresentations used by tough on crime prosecutors,
judges, and law makers to garner votes despite a steady, twenty-six-year decline
in rates of crime . Breaking such circuits and
dismantling such walls will not be achieved by close reading of a handful of
essays, nor by reading data hit lists and clusters (however useful such reading
methods clearly are to particular purposes and, again, to helping us determine
where to read at greater depth). These simply are not how incarcerated writers
conceive of their work or intend it to be read; and if incarcerated lives
matter, so should the intentions among their representatives.
Legal scholar Robert Cover famously noted that Legal
interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death: the law suppresses violence by casting
legal sanction over the acts of violence carried out by the police, courts, and
prisons. Since the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra
Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the
cost-benefit balance of this sanctioning (Black costs v. white benefits) have
been called into question. Cover did not live to see his claims brought home by
cell-phone videos, and he only tentatively pointed toward the corollary to his
own claim: Without understanding both the breadth and the depth of human
suffering experienced on the receiving end of legalized violence, we can never
understand the full human cost of, let alone understand our location within the
current legal order. This is a cost and location that prison witness, on a scale
that only a digital platform can provide, makes clear.
As a social justice enterprise, new here are the technologies that offer rapid
dissemination, facetted searching, and the rich rewards (and temptations) of
distant reading that create the close v. distant, either/or dilemma. What is not
new is the cellular or mid-range reading that the APWA helps to make possible,
at an accelerated scale, for prison witness.
The History of the Present
A first major proof of the power of a peculiarly American literary corpus,
subjected to cellular reading, to foment social change came with the rise of
slave narratives. First-person testimony by former slaves would prove one of the
most effective weapons in the abolitionist arsenal .
While documenting previously unimaginable conditions of degradation, and thus
confronting southern propaganda, the witness borne by former slaves presented
depths of moral and intellectual acuity, emotional allegiance and social
alliances that few white readers had to practice in their own lives. For
print collections of slave narratives, see and ; for
comprehensive archives, see Like
incarcerated people today, former-slaves countered popular misrepresentation of
a dehumanizing institution, protesting their condition by bearing witness to the
dignity of the objects of popular invective. This was not achieved by close
reading of a handful of texts, nor, of course, with data sets, but by cellular
reading, in which every whipping taken by one author stood proxy for a thousand,
including those whose experience never saw print, and thus exposing the moral
culpability of passive compliance. All witnesses speak for the muted, for the
musselmanner, as the living called the walking dead inside
Auschwitz ; and all witness recipients are (at least
potentially) morally repositioned by such reception. The aim of the APWA, after
231 years, is to open precisely that public, affective
exchange that Benjamin Rush sought to block in fear that exposure
of human suffering would evoke sympathy and desire to relieve that suffering
; an exchange much like that which
slave narrative helped to precipitate war and the abolition of slavery. With
this aim, the argument here is, again, not against data analysis. It is for a
plenum and balance of reading proximities, from close, into cellular reading
(with its tried historical precedents), to those generated by computation, and
for an ethically responsible complementarity of reading proximities that never
loses sight of the primacy of whole statements by whole individuals. Stephen
Ramsey remarks that DH is strongest when it resists seeing data as
more valid than humanistic inquiry . My claim is that such a balance — and
embrace of the broad, deep, and morally engaging middle ground between the close
and the distant — is best suited to affect change in social practice. History
and prison witnesses themselves have rushed the gates of analog publication and
into DH; we must take care to avoid atomizing their testimony.
Witness literatures are resistance literatures, and The
literature of resistance sees itself…as immediately and directly involved in
a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural
production; they are grounded in concrete and whole
human experiences of the effects of these forms of productions — including the
production forms of digital computation used by state agencies — and they are
collectively dialogic: duty, propriety, right and wrong, justice, and equity
bear different denotations to a slave and to an incarcerated person than they do
to slave masters and prison guards. Acts of prison testimony document not only
how failures in public policy, civil services, mental and physical health care,
foster care, public education, policing and court and prison practices are
translated into broken lives; they instruct us in how to retain our humanity in
the face of legally organized suffering, which also includes retaining human
status in a world beset by datafication. As Jill Stauffer writes, …understanding what dehumanizes also helps us determine what
we take a human being to be. For even while prisons strip
incarcerated people of other means of attempting to make good of their pasts,
they are doing the work of restorative justice, offering up what they have
learned from their lives, their crimes, and from our punishments. This is the
reason why we must pick our steps carefully between the ironies that line the
path of (re)datafication of voices struggling to break free from the data piles
gathered by the administrators of state violence, and by researchers outside. As
noted, APWA writers provide the contents of the archive’s metadata; they can
also choose to withhold that information, not only for their own protection, but
as an exercise of freedom.
From Analog to Digital Witness
Commitment to individual witnesses starts with granting full discretion over the
metadata they provide. It continues with the hard-copy documents we receive, scanning
pages so that visitors can see (as far as flat screens are able to convey) the
material condition of individual texts. These include hand writing (in about
half of all submissions; Fig. 2); texts typed on manual typewriters and word
processors — the latter available to those few with access to computer stations
in classrooms or who have white collar jobs inside (Fig. 3 and 4); and, less
frequently, texts previously published in prison newsletters and newspapers (the
latter by third parties outside; Fig. 5, 6).
While the value of all prison witness is in principle equal, the conditions of
composition clearly are not. Prison-composed texts show evidence of
state-imposed resistance in the materials; but rather than
reveal[ing] opportunity, as Bethany Nowviskie
claims , this manner of resistance
shows the unequal distribution of opportunities inside. A text composed with a
ballpoint pen filler (the plastic cylinders prohibited since they can be turned
into tattoo guns, syringes, or weapons) and a library staff clerk’s
word-processor indicate different opportunities in the very act of composition.
A newspaper article necessarily indicates outside support. The graphic state of
texts offers one consistently distinguishing material indicator of what it is
for the writer at hand to write from inside. As Paul Fyfe claims (in another
context) the accidents are often essential. The accidents of prison-witness documents
announce their emergence from the unequal conditions of writers in willfully
low-to-no-tech environments.
This, of course, is lost amid big data, along with the voice of the individual,
and the distinct conditions inside each prison, prison block, and prison cell;
and such documentation is, after all, largely the point for these writers. Life
with an aggressive, schizophrenic cellmate in a grossly understaffed prison is
quite different from a tenth year in solitary confinement, and from life with a
cellmate with whom one shares interests in, say, Scrabble and historical
fiction. Only mid-range reading can account for such differences in the way that
these writes intend, and in the ways that can affect the ethical agents lighted
up inside witness readers — however well text analysis might supplement any such
effect.
The next level of individuation of these writers is, of course, the voices of the
texts, which range from desperate, semi-literate cries for help, fact-based
policy critiques, and hip-hop inflected shout outs, to structured legal briefs,
angry diatribes, wistful pleas, clinical treatment proposals, and everything
between. Like other research archives, the APWA does not discriminate.
All work is posted, unless it advocates violence, names names in ongoing
legal cases, or libels named individuals. (Such cases are rare since
incarcerated people know what they can and cannot say and remain safe.)
These limits are imposed largely to protect incarcerated people from
retribution. Whenever possible, we simply redact identifying information. Beyond single voices, there is the subject matter of
these essays, which, as noted, narrows the range from all included voices to a
recognizable set of issues (though often multiple and mixed inside individual
essays) inside facilities whose basic mission is the same: to confine human
beings against their will and do them damage. While we mine for broad sets of
words, sentiments, syntactical patterns, etc., cellular reading reveals that
even when general subject matter may be similar, and the language similar enough
to fall together in text analysis, each writer brings their individual
biographies, conditions, and experience to these issues in distinct settings;
each writes at once to document and protest their particular conditions, and to
represent US incarceration en masse. (Even in the small sampling above
in figures 2 through 6, note how often writers assume the authority to address
the prison system as a whole.) Mass incarceration dehumanizes by treating
individuals as mere units of a mass. Data mining can no doubt reveal
important and telling patterns in such statements, and it can lead us to rich
sites for closer reading; but it can also — like state actors — reduce
imprisoned people and their discourse to types. We cannot undo mass
incarceration by the massification of prison witness; nor, even as it helps us
map, can we expect data points to evoke the affective responses needed to
motivate advocacy for changes in penal conditions, thinking, or policy. These
writers write at their risk, in order both to distinguish themselves from and to
witness for a mass population. The mid-range reading for which I’m advocating is
a practice that contributors assume. Lexical patterns and word frequencies can
reveal broad trends within a corpus; they are not what prison witnesses intend
to create, and it is with respect for and to seek guidance from the incarcerated
that the APWA was built, as a basis for policy critique and activism aimed at
concrete changes in practice. The other side of this project is, of course, in
the hands of readers using the search capacities availed to them by the site and
populated by information provided by incarcerated people.
Visitors will come to the archive with a range of motives and curiosities. It is
in the aggregate of visitor reading patterns and purposes and outcomes where
there unfolds the critical mirror effect, the
greater-than-individual/less-than-mass-scale balance point (>
<) that serves as a fulcrum for the demassifying of mass-scale
witness while fully cognizant (as are prison writers) of a mass-scale backdrop.
One can, for example, select out essays by writers who self-identify as African
American, as male, and as confined in Michigan, thus curating, for the first
time, a cellular network of men who can speak to racial and legal conditions in
that state. This is the point (both critical moment and purpose) of cellular or
proximal reading aided by search capacities. The many ways in and subjects about
which incarcerated people write become animated by the many ways of searching,
reading, and curating this work. Daniel J. Cohen notes that Curation becomes more important than publication once
publication ceases to be limited. Working with prison witness, curation
becomes inextricably political; it expands, into social and legal practice, Alan
Liu’s claim that DH can establish new communities between the humanities and the
public . One community that has been created
of necessity around the APWA — creating a new opportunity from the
resistance in the materials — is that of transcribers
of handwritten essays into internally searchable texts.
Transcribe-athons held at libraries, courses that offer
transcription as a requirement option, and people outside of academia
volunteering their time have joined in the work of making carceral witness
available to search. At their best, such projects refocus DH on the intersection of digital production and social
transformation. On the other, big-data side of this
meeting point, computational analysis is, as noted, now in progress, and it will
open a range of reading, research, and secondary witness methods to view and to
multiplication.
Conclusions
In the final chapter of Michelle Alexander’s 2010 best-selling
The New Jim Crow — a book that helped raise the
conversation about mass incarceration into a national debate — the author warns: Isolated
victories can be won — even a string of victories — but in the absence of a
fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain
intact. Political scientist Marie Gottschalk
echoes Alexander’s conclusion and (inadvertently) suggests where such a shift
might begin, modelled on an earlier literary revolution:
The slave narratives of the antebellum period, which graphically
rendered the physical pain that slaves suffered and made it widely visible,
helped to propel the abolitionist cause. Today, what happens in prison stays
mostly in prison, making it harder to draw connections in the public mind
between justice on the inside and justice on the outside. The ability to
identify with an offender — or not — is a key predictor of why people differ in
their levels of punitiveness. The invisibility of the millions of people behind
bars has made it extremely difficult to alter the negative portrait that members
of the general public have in their heads of people who have been convicted of a
crime. They are simply prisoners and criminals. As such, they often are denied
their humanity and any right to democratic accountability, much as slaves were
in the United States.
The aim of the APWA is to unveil the prison and imprisoned people from centuries
of intentional invisibility and willful misrepresentation, as well as to invite
humanists of all stripes — with their highly nuanced, diverse, and diversifying
manners of reading — back into the work of helping to understand what US prisons
actually do, what the full, rich range of imprisoned people encompasses, and to allow
and invite the general public, as well as lawmakers and the families of
incarcerated people, to meet those who are arguably our most incisive guides to
a world beyond prisons. My hope is that the APWA, as well as other DH workers
and especially those working with first-person witness corpora, will use the
powerful tools now at hand to amplify and arrange, as witness voices dictate,
rather than merely to datify the testimony of those on the receiving end of
collectively organized, silencing, and too often silently suffered institutions
of legal quarantine.
For every man, woman, or trans person recorded on video while dying at police
hands, thousands of Americans are quietly disappeared into US prisons. These
people are now speaking in mass because DH/SJW has allowed them to speak from
across state boundaries, from city and country, raising a chorus that sounds out
every pothole on the road of opportunity supposedly open to every American.
Reading of the suffering demanded for stumbling upon that road, we are forced to
reassess whether any concrete facts lie behind the language we use to discuss
rule of law, due process, and justice. No political representative, no social
scientist, and no one else speaking from outside can provide what direct witness
to legally sanctioned suffering offers. No other platform can open that witness
to a world that today needs to learn humility before the voices of those on the
receiving end of populist and demagogic rhetoric, which saw its recent
inception in the rhetoric of law and order.Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater started this trend in
1964, but Democrats quickly joined the drumbeat in a forty-year,
tougher-on-crime-than-you arms race that culminated under Bill Clinton (the
only president to toughen sanctions while crime rates were falling ). The fear-mongering politics of today have a
bipartisan lineage. Countering the dehumanizing, tribal nationalism
we see rising today, witness literatures offer the chance to strengthen as we
test the common terms we use to understand our humanity; and this is
understanding that we need in order to underwrite democratic institutions.
This is what empathic revolutions do: they open one lexicon in order to
recalibrate another, humbling unquestioned presumptions about what constitutes
the human. Prison witness has the potential to dismantle and reset the terms of
discussion of a nation that regularly claims itself a model to the world of
humane, democratic, and egalitarian practices, offering a new vision of how we
might proceed. It illuminates, as the testimony of former slaves once did, just
where and how civil life, its capital means, cultural and social assumptions,
and majoritarian tyrannies — once translated into legal enforcement — have
worked to sustain an American underclass. On its basis — gathered, archived,
disseminated, read, curated, as well as analyzed, and mined at scale — we might
be positioned to recalibrate how we theorize and practice law, punishment, and
even nationhood. Dylan Rodriguez (echoing ideas in ) notes that, rather than the prison being one
among other state practices, …it is the prison regime
that possesses and constitutes the state. This confluence was present at the
nation’s founding, such that [T]he history of the
United States and the history of incarceration have been joined in a
fundamental way ever since.
My conviction is that readers willing to read prison witness will find spread
before them not only a richly illustrated map of our failures to care for each
other — civic, political, ethical, economic, and social — but a map as well for
building a nation empathic at last to all of its members: citizens and
non-citizens of all races and ethnicities, all classes, genders, creeds,
abilities, and sexualities… In response to calls for DH to address inequality
and social injustice, digital humanists can seek to build platforms for activism
modeled on proven reading methods of the past while keeping their eyes on the
yet untouched horizon of a more humane and equitable future.
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