The purpose of this introduction is to give a larger social, historical, and political context to the works and authors in this collection. This book is not about “prison literature”; that is a different category of writing. To understand the works here, some background and a few points of clarification may help. The books discussed are arranged in chronological order to place them easily in time and space, and to give a clearer view of the relationship between each work and its historical context. Many similar themes and questions emerge from the texts: justice, love, power, social obligation, and morality, to name a few of the more common and prominent. This creates a philosophical dialogue between the different authors, and between the authors and the reader—a discussion that spans the millennia. The conditions under which most of these works were written also sets them apart from other Great Books, and ties them together as a very distinct category of writing. The majority of the authors here were well aware of history and knew the risks they might be running with their words and actions—but they continued to write nonetheless. Each essay contains biographical and historical information and an analysis of the chosen text, as well as an examination of the authors’ and the books’ legacies.
What makes a book a Great Book? And in regard to the authors here, what gets you sent to prison? In this collection, the answers are often related. The first point to clarify is that a work is not “great” simply because it is popular or because we (personally) like it. “Great” in the literary and historical context means a text with unusual artistic or literary merit, daring political or philosophical insight, or cultural significance and historical impact—and often has more than one of these qualities.
The collection of Great Books continues to grow, becoming an ongoing record of the development of human culture. Part of what makes many of the works in this collection “great” is that they were written while the author was incarcerated or on the run, or both. Some of the writers did not survive the experience, and so their work arrived as an echo of their life and ideas. In other cases, the authors did survive and continued on to varying degrees of success, renown, or infamy. They were not all necessarily “good” people, in the simple understanding of the word; the status of their work is a reflection of its historical effect or extraordinary qualities. The works here are only a sampling of a large body of Great Books; they have been included partly because of their already acknowledged status and their special relationship to each other.
Throughout time, there have been many different systems of imprisonment and punishment; consequently it needs to be clarified what is meant historically by “prison.” For much of the past, as The Oxford History of the Prison points out, the use of prisons and imprisonment was much less frequent; prison as an organized system of incarceration was a relatively loosely-run affair in most places. That does not mean that there were no laws or criminal punishments. But prior to the modern era, physical punishment (branding, scarring, whipping, etc.) and execution—as well as slavery and exile—were much more common punishments, and were not associated with long-term detention. Prison as we think of it has only recently come into being. This change coincides with the rise of what Michel Foucault calls the “carceral system” of social surveillance and control. At the same time, governments were creating permanent military infrastructures as part of their national purpose and identity.
Over almost all of the past two and a half centuries, starting in the West—specifically the Anglo-American areas, and then spreading all over the world—a new mode of criminal punishment and judicial institutions was established, and has been steadily evolving. This is what we know as the “penal system”—typified by domestic incarceration with varying degrees of security; and loss of freedom of movement in proportion to the perceived severity of the crime committed. “The debate on whether to build or not to build prisons, and then simultaneously on how to reform them once they’ve been built, has been going on since the Quakers tried to redesign a wing of the first correctional institution in America, the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia in 1790” (Bencivenga). This carceral system helps shape the political and ideological mechanisms in a society that are necessary to keep the system functioning. The prison system has continued to grow even though the rates of interpersonal violence have been on a steady decline for centuries. “The findings again coincided with the long-term decline [in interpersonal violence] anticipated by Gurr, showing a drop from about fifty per 100,000 population in the fifteenth century to about one per 100,000 in the nineteenth century” (Eisner). At the same time, death from organized state violence has risen dramatically; eighty million people died in World War II alone.
The developmental trajectory of the prison and penal systems, like Western civilization and technology in general, has been one of specialization. Until the early modern period, prisons and jails were essentially large buildings, a world where men, women, families, lunatics, criminals, and debtors all lived in a semi-monitored state (think of La Force Prison as depicted by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities). Today, prisons have developed all the way into the “supermax” institutions in the United States. The supermax or “control unit” prison is where inmates can be in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours of the day, with one hour for exercise and extremely limited contact with the outside world. The United States currently houses 80,000 prisoners in these conditions (Kurshan). The power of the state, and its unquestioned position of ascendency, is nowhere more evident than in the supermax, perhaps even more than in the power to execute. In these prisons, there is absolute control of daily life functions, and total observation: a solitary confinement that never leaves you alone, forever. The modern prison system—from outcome-based strategies to the physical spaces of penal-intuitional architecture—has also evolved in tandem with modern industrial global capitalism, into a system that requires compliance and uses institutionally established means of dominance.
From the early modern era onward, only the highly regimented, regulated, almost industrialized carceral system was able to handle the increasing number of people drawn into that system: its existence seemed to necessitate its utilization. This coincides with the physical manifestations of the judicial process and punishment being increasingly removed from public view, and from direct public participation. The spectacles of trial and punishment, including government-sanctioned executions, were now going on inside the new prison, police, and court infrastructure. The task of physically enforcing order and law and the flow of money moved under the purview of a rising private entity that has come to be known as the “state.” This “state,” in all of its historical-cultural manifestations, accrued to itself the power to enforce compliance with its needs as a ruling class.
Ideas can be dangerous, especially ideas and authors that question or challenge the ruling power structure. Historically, the amount of time, resources, and violence that authorities devote to quashing unwelcome ideas, and eliminating the messenger, have varied. But the ruling institutions and the people who populate them have never been reluctant to wield the authority they control in order to protect themselves.
Several authors discussed in this book come from European countries, while a number of other authors come from the Anglo-American or English Colonial world, which includes the United States, United Kingdom, India, and Egypt. At least some colonial resistance was the result of claims to the rule of law by the colonial government, which ran a system that did not treat people equally. There is a direct relationship between political events and alignments in a given country and the coercive force applied by the state—as well as the resistance by the population to that force. The unfolding of this large-scale dynamic interplay between the governed and the governing is what makes history.
The authors in this book come not from the ranks of the criminal class—except perhaps Jean Genet, whose best-known novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written during one of his stints in jail. Some were specifically targeted for what they said or did, usually something political. As for the prisoners of war, such as Cervantes, they were seen as part of a specifically defined enemy group, and thereby automatically categorized as a threat. In many instances the authors here were singled out for what could reasonably be described as extrajudicial treatment.
The death of the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is one of the most famous state executions in history, and certainly the first recorded in such philosophical depth.
Eight hundred years later the philosopher Boethius sought to console himself, while a political prisoner, by turning to his classical philosophical education and his Christian faith. Both thinkers were victims of a government they had served faithfully, but later found disfavor with.
Thomas Paine, a famous author during the American Revolution, was under a death sentence from the British government and imprisoned in France by the revolutionaries when he wrote The Age of Reason. He was well acquainted with the aggressive actions of the state to persecute political activity.
Even though it is a story of unjust state persecution, Oscar Wilde’s experience—his imprisonment and writing of De Profundis—was different from that of many of the authors in this book. His crime was not political; it was social. Conversely, Sir Thomas Malory was held in the Tower of London—where he wrote Le Morte Darthur during the last two years of his life—because of the political alignments he chose in the War of the Roses. And Antonio Gramsci’s imprisonment and writing of The Prison Notebooks is a story of political repression backfiring. He was sent to jail by the Fascist government of Italy in the hopes that it would shut him up—it didn’t.
These authors were sent to prison for all sorts of reasons: supporting war, not supporting war, violence against the state and nonviolence against the state, campaigning for equal legal status, etc. To put it simply, the powers that be wanted them out of the way.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” written while he was in prison for parading without a permit during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, became a rallying cry in the fight against injustice, and for human dignity and rights everywhere.
Sayyid Qutb is probably the least known of the authors in this volume, but two of his works written while he was in an Egyptian prison, In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones, have become immensely influential for twentieth-century Islamist movements, with significant historical implications.
Discovery of India, possibly Jawaharlal Nehru’s most important work, was written while he was being held in prison by the British, in India. Along with many others, Nehru spent a great deal of time in prisons as punishment for his fight for India’s independence. Gandhi, who during one of his many jail stays in India while fighting for the nation’s independence, wrote Satyagraha in South Africa. In it, he recounts his time fighting for political equality in British South Africa. Also taking on the English government was the famous English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was sent to jail for his antiwar activism during World War I. While in prison he wrote his influential Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.
Tragically or thankfully (take your pick), considering the punitive treatment they received for their activities during their lives, history has vindicated almost all of the figures in this book. Ironically, the person treated best while in prison—and even let out early—has been judged one of history’s great villains: Adolf Hitler. He was imprisoned in 1923 for attempting to overthrow the German government. The other authors were kept in conditions that ranged from austere but safe, to horrendous—where they were subject to torture and execution. Historically speaking, no country, people, or system can claim to be innocent of the abuse of its power to imprison or execute for political gain. This makes Henry David Thoreau’s famous quote, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison,” all the more imposing. Thoreau’s essay Resistance to Civil Government is one of the most famous and influential pieces written on how a citizen should respond to the immoral or unjust laws and actions of their own government.
There are untold hundreds of millions outside the annals of history who have suffered at the hands of oppressive governments. Most were silenced through fear, incarceration, or death. What makes the subjects of this book different is that the attempts failed. Some got out of prison and went on to continue to be politically active and write more, while others were executed—but all of them live on in their words and the historical memory.
The authors here were directly confronted by the “carceral network,” as Foucault describes it, of their respective governments. In many instances the legal process was designed to make the charges against them stick: trials were rigged and verdicts predetermined. Significantly, most of these authors were not targeted by specific individuals, but by a system designed and created to enforce general inequality, rooted in political power. From the personal level all the way up to the state, as far back as settled human history goes, people seem to have accepted organized collective violence as a means of maintaining order. The rituals and symbols surrounding collectively sanctioned violence are important in creating the experience of justice (as culturally understood by the participants). The public displays of seeking out and punishing actions and actors perceived as socially dangerous (prosecuting someone for witchcraft, for example) may be more important for people than capturing and punishing the guilty (many innocents have been executed over the millennia). There were always at least a few people in the societies of these writers, starting with Socrates, who were happy to see them put out of action; even dictators don’t do it all on their own. Large segments of the U.S. population were not concerned that people like Martin Luther King, Jr., got sent to jail. Even though most societies claim to eschew the use of collective coercive force, it is a historical reality. Unfortunately, the rituals surrounding law and justice can be used toward unjust ends.
The next question that arises is: Why is physical and mental violence so consistently used by society to control criminal, political, and moral behavior—violence that is collectively sanctioned and institutionalized? (It’s the unsanctioned violence that gets punished.) The institutionalization of violence legitimizes and authorizes its appointed purveyors. This apparatus can then be deployed against individuals or groups considered dangerous by whoever holds the hegemonic reins.
The habitus of punishment, specifically physical punishment, is cross-cultural and deeply embedded in human history. The use of coercive violence for social and political control is one of the few constants in human political systems. The modern nation state has refined and enhanced the carceral system into one of its most prominent features. It has been pointed out by historian Charles Tilly that the pursuit of the ability to successfully wage war is a driving force behind the creation of an internal protection system, which in turn provides the institutional means to enforce compliance with the needs of the new war state: taxation, forced military enlistment, and a stable apparatus to make the system work.
There are at least two types of collective coercion and violence that can be considered overtly oppressive. First, going after specific individuals or groups of people with certain characteristics (race, religion, politics, etc.) that are used to justify curtailing their rights and protections. There is also a more general level of control that preemptively limits the social and political freedoms of the whole population. As Ervin Staub has pointed out, these different actions can have varying amounts of acceptance, depending on the social and historical context. Both types are in evidence in the treatment of the authors in this book. In recent history, groups have often come to power with popular support, only to exhibit dictatorial and repressive tendencies later as a result of some “crisis,” or as they attempt to hold on to power. In other instances, the existing apparatus of church and state are used as tools of oppression. The actions of these institutions are always “legal,” and yet it seems that on some level the population is aware of the repressive reality—but has few options for changing it.
Over time, generalized mechanisms of control can develop that are also more or less supported, at least tacitly, by large enough segments of the population to keep them going. These sorts of mechanisms are often called “tradition,” and their mere existence is used as the argument for their continued existence. The conglomeration of these traditions is referred to as “society.” The European aristocratic system of the fifteenth to twentieth centuries depended on both popular support and violence to maintain itself. In England at the time of Thomas Paine’s birth (1737), people were routinely executed for minor offenses such as theft; yet many rallied to support the monocracy. This system of “justice” was carried out on and by a largely willing or cowed populace, both up and—surprisingly—down the social scale, many of whom could easily, in the right (or wrong) circumstances, find themselves in the dock or on the hangman’s scaffold instead of in the generally exuberant crowd. Aristocratic and theocratic societies seem especially inclined to develop harsh legal systems and punishments in their efforts to motivate compliance and maintain power. This is just as true for the actions of the seventeenth-century Puritans as it is today with the Taliban, as well as among the former and current monarchies of the world.
There are gradients of violence and coercion in any legal system, varying from monetary fines to the death penalty. Currently there are significant differences between nations in the level of physical violence visited on prisoners, and the lengths of incarceration. This variety of systems and orders of violence helps explain why some in prison are able to write, and others cannot. The production (and survival)—or lack thereof—of a prisoner’s text may have nothing to do with the individual character of the incarcerated person. Historically, social rank has played some role in determining the severity of charges brought, and the types of punishment received. (This sort of tiered treatment creates privileged classes and subservient ones. Given this reality, how else but by forms of coercion, mental and physical, could the majority of a population be made second-class citizens—and in some cases even property?) The first requirement for a Great Book Written in Prison is that its author not be killed directly upon arrest and detention.
Captors, victors, slave owners, warriors, and jailors can never understand why subjugated people don’t see how the world is and why resistance is futile. Many of the authors in this book found themselves in prison precisely because they challenged the unquestionable authority, actions, and morality of those in charge. They did so often enough, loudly enough, and successfully enough to have been targeted by the political establishment for silencing.
For the ruling elite, morality resides in submission to their orders and the satisfaction of their needs. Many an occupying army has justified its violence as necessary to maintaining safety and order. The question is, safety and order for whom? Certainly not the occupied population. It is always the ideas and actions that serve the ruling class which become codified as just, obvious, and moral.
The last part of the picture that must be filled in is that, in order to carry out the necessary actions of institutional collective violence, governments and what Lenin called “special bodies of armed men” are created. Charles Tilly has likened state formation in Europe to the development of organized crime. The military, police, and carceral infrastructure could not function without people up and down the chain of command following orders and working toward stated and unstated ideological and institutional goals. It is through the functioning of these “special bodies of armed men” that a society’s meta-narrative of violence, suppression of thought, and incarceration emerges. Its ideas and institutions become tools wielded against dissent by the ascendant classes to achieve political and economic goals. Tilly wrote:
Back to Machiavelli and Hobbes, nevertheless, political observers have recognized that, whatever else they do, governments organize and, wherever possible, monopolize violence. It matters little whether we take violence in a narrow sense, such as damage to persons and objects, or in a broad sense, such as violation of people’s desires and interests; by either criterion, governments stand out from other organizations by their tendency to monopolize the concentrated means of violence.
The increasing stability of the historical social order was accompanied by institutionalized forms of coercion, namely war and slavery. The further removed violence became from interpersonal motives, the more it became the job of certain specialized workers in the society—the coercive branches of government; the “special bodies of armed men.” In many ways, ever since its inception, human civilization has been pushed and pulled by religion and war. Two of the earliest institutional professions were priest and soldier. For the authors in this collection, the prison experience was a concrete manifestation of the power of the state—physically, ideologically, economically, and culturally.
Stable managerial societies, based initially on the oversight of agricultural practice, slowly created and institutionalized social and economic hierarchies. Much later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these structures were further strengthened by the development and diffusion of industrial society. Keeping the technologically advanced systems running required the work of highly skilled manual and intellectual workers, and a great deal of political and economic compliance.
The social and cultural rituals surrounding politics, religion, money, and law create an aura of legitimacy, and therefore authority; this gives the guise of order and permanence to the exercise of state power. Cultures and societies have distinguished themselves from one another by the different expressions their religious and political rituals took. In the twentieth century’s longest political struggle, the Cold War, national identity, as well as political and military alignments, was established through economic theory, and concepts of ownership of the means of production in industrial society. The definitions, forms, and practices of crime and punishment reinforce different types of social bonds and obligations. A primary characteristic of post-agrarian society is the use of institutionalized violence to grease the gears of political and economic systems.
Coercive violence is certainly not the sole purview of institutions such as church and state. Organized crime and street gangs, as well as unpredictable mob violence, are real and dangerous. Corrupt political machines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the de facto governments of some U.S. cities; they used coordinated violence similar to terrorism, and sometimes paramilitary organizations, to achieve their economic and political ends. The collusion of state institutions or individuals with other self-interested groups, and the willingness of social systems to sanction violence, make such actions more likely throughout the society. The use of violence by those in authority might encourage “outlaw” groups to believe that the path to legitimacy lies in violence (Staub). Violence in the name of the ruling class’s idea of law enforcement invites and instructs violent responses.
It can be difficult to perceive the unanimity of the various forms of sanctioned violence for social control, since every culture is different; and in the modern period, governments may seem to at first have been civilized in their beliefs and actions. But it is simply the changing rationales for persecution and violence obscure a certain consistency of ideas and valuations across the centuries. It should also be noted how much money, in the form of collected taxes from the world’s people, is currently spent by leaders on organized systems of “security” and war that are turned against the paying citizenry. In 2012 the world’s governments spent a total of $1.75 trillion on military budgets; this does not include domestic military, intelligence, and police expenditures (Pollard).
One of the important characteristics of many writers featured in this book is that they directly stood up to their own government and social institutions for not acknowledging and protecting the humanity of each individual. If legal systems are to protect us, they should be able to protect us from themselves, as well as from interpersonal violence. And yet history shows that populations in fact need to be shielded from the violent actions of the very institutions created to control and maintain order. In effect, we must still find a way to protect ourselves from ourselves—possibly the oldest social problem there is. The question may be, not how or why do we have social systems, but why do we persist in flouting all the rules we set for ourselves, allowing the continued existence of violent and dehumanizing government and social practices? This problem, in one form or another, lies at the center of each of the books discussed in this collection.
Bencivenga, Jim. “PRISONS; The American Prison: From the Beginning … A Pictorial History. Executive director/editor-in-chief, Anthony P. Travisono. American Correctional Association.” Review. The Christian Science Monitor, 14 Mar. 1984. Web. 28 July 2014.
Eisner, Manuel. “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime.” Crime and Justice 30.30 (2003): 87. Print.
Kurshan, Nancy. Introduction. Out of Control: A 15-year Battle against Control Unit Prisons. San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2013. 1. Print.
Morris, Norval, and David J. Rothman. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
Pollard, Niklas. “World Military Spending Dips in 2012, First Fall since 1998.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, 14 Apr. 2013. Web. 28 July 2014.
Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print.
Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” Bringing the State Back In by Peter B. Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 169–86. Print.