Notebook: (2) Prison Writing, Prison Reading

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

First issue of The Prison Mirror, the country’s oldest continuously published prison newspaper, founded by members of the Jesse James gang and still run out of the Minnesota Correctional Facility–Stillwater. Its current associate editor, Jeffrey L. Young, is a contributor to the PEN volume, The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison.

Read Part One of this post here!
The writers’ organization PEN has been a pioneer in the support of reading and writing rights for the incarcerated. Their Prison and Justice Writing Program was founded in 1971 after the Attica riots, and their 2022 volume The Sentences That Create Us, a handbook on establishing writing communities and opportunities in prison that is mailed for free to any imprisoned person who asks for it, is an update of a manual they first published way back in 2006, just as a broader understanding of the harms of the American carceral system was emerging from the aftermath of the 1994 Crime Bill—see studies (banned from some prisons) like Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate (1999), Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010).  A signature contemporary PEN program provides guidance and curricula for volunteers who want to create writing groups in the (many) prisons whose remoteness puts them beyond the reach of universities, which sponsor some of the most robust programs.